Successfully ran "extract previews script" Standard size previews missing

[dan.redd]

I am trying to assist a fellow Photographer in recovering photos from his computer. this is the scenario.

He is using Lightroom 4.4 on a windows 7 pc.

Shot a wedding a couple of months ago.

Added the photos to Lightroom and processed them.

Photos were on an external USB HardDrive.

Catalog is on the C: drive in the user folder.

Hard drive was dropped and no longer functions (There is no backup of the photos. The cards he shot on have already been formatted and written over and He is sending the drive to a Recovery company, so this is not relevant to this discussion).

I successfully ran the "extract previews script" from Adobe and it did extract the previews, however they are all 360px by 240px. I was expecting to get 1440px previews as this is what he has set for his preview size in preferences. I cannot find any other preview folders anywhere on the pc. There are no smart previews and nothing in recycle bin.

Does anybody have any suggestions on how or where we might find larger preview sizes?

[Rob_Cullen · Accepted solution]

Here is an extract from the posts at Jeffrey Friedl's  site. The creator of the “Extract Cached Image Previews” utility-

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

(Could this be the same Dan?)

And I think the answer for DAN.REDD  is in Jeffrey's reply below.

Hi Jeffrey, (Question from Dan)

I had my photos saved on a 1TB external hard drive. The drive failed a few weeks ago. Sadly, it was the only place I had them backed up. A data recovery company was unable to recover ANY data. I found the script to extract previews from Lightroom. I installed this and extracted 2000+ images (it couldn’t extract 48). My question is this: almost every photo is terribly low quality. None are over 400 KB. Is there any way to recover high-quality jpgs of my photos. In researching, I have seen “1:1 Preview” as important. I knew nothing about this before this catastrophe happened, so prior to the drive crash, I had not had 1:1 preview enabled. “Minimal” was under the “file handling” dropbox. Is there ANYTHING I can do? I hope to hear from you as I am just desperate now.

Thank you so much in advance for any advice,

(Reply to) Dan-
Unfortunately I can’t think of anything else, except maybe trying to recover a few images from your memory cards. The plugin would have extracted the biggest previews it could find. Sorry for your loss… it’s a bitter way to learn a lesson. )-: —Jeffrey