Export a file location list from Lightroom?

[michaelt69475700]

Unfortunately, my photography hard drive file system became corrupt. Lightroom still remembers the old locations of all the files that have effectively gone missing since the drive crashed. Is there a way to export a simple text list of the various locations of all the files in a lightroom catalog? I have the drive at a data recovery center, but they say sending a list of known file paths could help them rebuild the drive. Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

[KR Seals]

You could make a screen capture of the folder list on the left side of LR in the folder module. Like this:

You might have to make several if your folders list is more than one screen long.

[michaelt69475700]

Such a simple solution! Hadn't even crossed my mind! I'm sure that will already help a ton. I'll send it to the data recovery center and see if that will suffice. Really appreciate it!

[Rob_Cullen]

Data Recovery very often returns your camera files with very strange filenames.

A screen-clip of the folder panel will show folders, but not any of the enclosed files.

Plugins (like List View) do not often replicate what you are asking in your question.

You are going to have a monstrous difficult task of trying to re-link restored photo files, if it was at all possible (probably not!!!)

If you had a backup of the original files in the same folder tree on another working hard-drive, this would be your preferred method of restoration.

[KR Seals]

That agrees with my experience with file recovery programs. It's not too bad if you are looking for a few files, but for large quantities of photos files it would be a nightmare.

[michaelt69475700]

Yeah. Unfortunately, I had backed up some but not all. Luckily all my client work is backed up or already out to the customer. It's just my own family photos that I've been lax with backing up. Learned a tough lesson, but now have a RAID NAS device and an off site back up. Even if it is a mess, if I can at least salvage a chunk of the family photos I'll be happy. Thanks for taking the time to respond to my question!

[Rob_Cullen]

If you do not have backups of photo files, there is two things you might try-(in desperate times)

1. Create JPGs from the Previews in the Catalog library. (Presuming you can still see previews in the catalog)

Jeffrey Friedl's Blog » Jeffrey’s “Extract Cached Image Previews” Lightroom Plugin

2. If you have ever made Smart Previews of images in Lr, these Smart previews can be rescued as images.