Lost images-what file is the thumbnail referencing?

[leahw86790525]

While taking a family sabbatical to Europe, my camera bag as well as my hard drive was stolen. The last two months of photos that I had taken of our family were on that hard drive. I realize it was my own fault for not backing up online as I always do when I'm at home, but I'm looking for any other options for accessing the preview file. I'm wondering if there is any sort of file that can be used (even low res) to print from through Lightroom. It does show a preview of the image (with an image not found label), so it's has the file info in some sort of form. Can that be accessed??

[dj_paige · Accepted solution]

You can extract the low resolution previews and do whatever you want with them. I'm not sure that you will get a very good print, but it depends on a lot of things.

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

[leahw86790525]

Thank you so much! This is working for some of the images which is amazing. I'm wondering why some of the extracted previews are large and some are small.

[ManiacJoe]

The size of the preview is based on the previous needs of Lightroom. For example, if you never viewed a given image at 1:1 zoom, that preview size was never created.