Lost Photos....Help!

[itskels]

My dog killed my memory card (it's in pieces ). I opened the photos in LR before the SD card broke and can see the preview in LR now. The problem I have is that the images have a small exclamation point in the right corner. I click them and there's a message on the image that reads "Folder could not be located." Because of that, there is no export option.

I know that I should have backed the files up immediately, but I'm currently researching external hard drives so thought it could wait until I got one of those.  Is there any hope??

[dj_paige · Accepted solution]

I can think of two possible scenarios

1. After you successfully imported the photos to your hard disk using the COPY option in the Import dialog box, the photos or folders got moved or renamed somehow. Use your operating system's search feature to search all hard disks for these photos, by file name.
2. You successfully imported the photos using the ADD option, and now the only copy available is on the destroyed camera card. There is no way to get the original back, but you could extract the smaller size previews from your hard disk if you want by using this plugin: Jeffrey Friedl's Blog » Jeffrey’s “Extract Cached Image Previews” Lightroom Plugin​. In the future, when importing from a camera card, please make sure you are using the COPY option.