Can I access saved Catalog Preview images?

[stephaniej51563723]

Hello,

My worst nightmare came to pass when I dropped my harddrive and it died on me. I sent it in to be recovered, but the location of the scratch makes it impossible to recover. I sent it into two different companies and they both had the same response. So I went that route, now I am trying to see if there is any way to salvage some of these images.

I have important files to deliver on that drive and it's gone. I can see some of the previews in LR and I have screenshotted them so I can at least give them something, but I am wondering if there is a way to recover the preview file itself from the .lrdata folder.

Can anyone help me recover images from the .lrdata folder?

[Mohit Goyal · Accepted solution]

Hi stephaniej,

If you still have that catalog running on your machine and showing you the previews, then yes you can extract those previews as a jpeg.

You need to add a script in your Lightroom application to do that, refer: Script to extract previews of lost or deleted photos

Let us know if that helps.

Regards,

Mohit