How to re-use old setting on re-imported pictures?

[jojoDUB]

Hey guys!

This is my first post and I really hope I can get an answer here!

So I spent a really long time editing HDR images that I had exported out of Photoshop in Lightroom. I thought I wouldn't need these exports again so I deleted them a while ago without thinking about the consequences.

Well now I do need them again so I re-exported them out of PS and re-imported them in LR since I still had the .psd files. Sadly when I loaded them in Lightroom they were imported as new files, but when I looked at the old previews I saw that there was some weird icon on them, so I pressed that. A menu opened up and told me that I had changed the picture in an other application and asked me wether I want to overwrite these changes or use the ones from the disk. I clicked on use the ones from the disk because I thought that would be the way to get the edits I made in Lightroom previously back.

It obviously wasn't and I should have chosen "overwrite" to get those edits back. I'm really angry with myself, beacuse I was so close to fixing my mistake of deleting those files and then I made it even worse.

Now I want to ask if there is a way to open that menu up again manually or if I'm forever screwed. Maybe there is a way to get a backup manually ( I do them pretty much every time)?

I appreciate every little bit of help!

Best regards,

Jo

[Geoff the kiwi]

Do you have a back up catalog you could use to update the files as you want? Then you could import from the back up into the working catalog. (Importing only the applicable files)

[richardplondon · Accepted solution]

if you have a suitable backup of your Catalog (from before you over-wrote good with bad), then you can open that up. It may be necessary to "un-zip" this backup first. The prior adjustments will once again be seen, against those images. If those images are once again present on disk, then everything should be back as it was.

However. You might have done OTHER things since that prior backup, within your main latest Catalog, which you don't want to lose.

So within this older version of the catalog, you could "write metadata to file" to save LR adjustments, into the metadata area of selected files on disk.

Then you can open up your latest Catalog again. Finding one of these images there, you can now "read metadata from file" and this will fetch that processing in.

In effect, this uses the file metadata to transfer processing settings of a given image, out of one Catalog (the backup), and into the other.

A different way to do this would be to "Export as Catalog" a batch of images from a backup catalog, and then "Import from Catalog" to merge them all into your main current Catalog. Wherever there is a question of two different sets of processing against the same file, LR should once again present you with choices - including (similarly to before) an option to prefer the incoming processing and discard the current processing.