Reimporting pictures dropped all my modifications

[frankw82439774]

Hi everybody.

I've been working for days on a set of pictures, when I notced that some of them were actually not imported (but were in my folder on disc).

So I was looking for a way to import them into my current workflow.

Lightroom could not see a part of it (my Fuji X100T raw files, while it could 2 weeks ago).

Some of the pictures were grayed out (could not be reimported), while they were actually not imported yet.

So, I unchecked the checkbox "Dont import doubles", to make them available for import.

Then import them and BAM, all my changes on like 50 pictures, hours of work, everything is gone, my entire catalog is reset ! (And I'm very happy I've created a separated cataolg for this set of pictures ! )

I can't figure out a way to restore all my changes, I'm afraid I've lost hours of work, it's really like it's a brand new catalog, but it sees my Nikon files, and still not my  Fuji's...

Does anybody know what happens ? if I did something wrong or if there is a way to restore my changes ? (kind of a global history of the catalog ?)

Many thanks in advance

Franklin

[JP Hess]

Do you have any recent backups that you can restore that have most of the work that was done before you reimported?

[frankw82439774]

Hi JimHess,

I don't know how, but I managed to get them back, the behavior wwas really weird, I don't know what happened, but everything is there, and LR sees my .RAF now, so I'll take a backup, update lightroom and get back to work

[dj_paige]

For anyone reading along, re-importing your photos will cause Lightroom to treat them as brand new photos that is has never seen before, and your edits will disappear (unless you specifically saved the edits to the file's metadata). Re-importing photos is never a good idea. Don't do it.

[frankw82439774]

Is there a safe way then to re-import pictures I've deleted from the Catalog ?

[john beardsworth]

Don't delete them. If you do so accidentally, you should be able to recover any work from a backup catalogue, so ensure you are backing up your catalogue.

Photos being greyed out in the Import dialog usually means that those photos are indeed in the catalogue. So do not reimport them and remove the duplicates check. Instead, cancel the import and find those photos in the catalogue.

[dj_paige]

frankw82439774  wrote

Is there a safe way then to re-import pictures I've deleted from the Catalog ?

No, there isn't.

Don't delete photos from your catalog.

[frankw82439774]

Ok, thank you very much

frankw82439774  wrote

Is there a safe way then to re-import pictures I've deleted from the Catalog ?

dj_paige wrote

No, there isn't

-> It looks a bit like a flaw in the software, it's a pity.

john beardsworth, I my situation, I could not restore a backup, since catalog backups are made when Lightroom shuts down, and it was my first working seance on this catalog, so no backup yet.

This said, LR takes a backup only when closing LR (best case), which is a big problem according to me, since I can work during hours on the software without restarting it, so I could potentially loose a lot of work. I don't get why LR does not take incremental backups in way that makes a bit more sense, such as every 15 or 30 minutes. This is a professional software, and time is money, so when you come to loose hours of work,...  I know : "then restart LR to take a backup.." 

But this is probably not the place to discuss this

Thanks to everybody for your feedback .

Franklin

[dj_paige]

frankw82439774  wrote

-> It looks a bit like a flaw in the software, it's a pity.

Certainly not a flaw, this is by design, and a very good feature.

[johnrellis · Accepted solution]

Is there a safe way then to re-import pictures I've deleted from the Catalog ?

If you set the option Catalog > Metadata > Automatically Write Changes Into XMP, then LR will write changes to a photo's metadata and develop settings from the catalog back into the photo's metadata on disk (into .xmp sidecars for camera raw files, directly into the files for DNG, JPEG, TIFF, PSD).    If you reimport the photo into the catalog, you'll recover the changes to metadata and develop settings.

Setting this option is not a substitute for frequent catalog backups, since there are many things in a catalog that don't get written to XMP (e.g. stacking, membership in collections, custom folder orders, books, publish service state, etc.).  But it does provide secondary protection against human error such as accidental deletion of a photo, backups that have failed for some reason (a common occurrence, more often due to human error than hardware or software failure), and catalog corruption due to software or hardware failure (a very rare occurrence).

For most users, there is no impact on interactive performance by setting this option. It does have a downside of modifying the photo file itself whenever you make a change to the metadata of a non-raw, so when you do large-scale batch changes to metadata, your photo backup will end up having back up all the changed photo files.

Personally, I keep that option set and I make sure my backups are working correctly.