help recovering lost images

[vivians49588145]

I purchased a new external drive and moved the LR6 images to the drive (about 13,000 images) that were DNG files. I planned on doing a backup the following morning, but found that the external drive failed, and i could not access it (Best Buy Geek squad confirmed it totally failed).

The cost to recover the data is in excess of $800.

I have the images on my hard drive in JPG, but LR6 will not display them, because the LRCAT is looking for DNG files. When I imported the JPEG images into LR6, it has two photos for each image, the original and the edited one. Is there a way to import the JPEG images into LR6, and not have two images.

[JP Hess]

You say that you have the original image and the edited image. What file formats are they?

[vivians49588145]

JPEG files

[JP Hess]

Referring to the edited JPEG images, where they edited in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements or some other image editor? Do they have the word "edit" as part of their filename? Sorry, I'm just trying to understand why you would have a JPEG plus an edited JPEG.

[vivians49588145]

I thought I had explained that in the post, but it must not be that clear, so i will explain again here.

The camera files were imported into Lightroom 6 over the course of a year. Some were imported as JPEG files and others as raw files, and most were converted to DNG files and saved out on the Mac HD. I then transferred the files to the external as stated before and they were lost due to the drive having hardware issues.

I have files on the Mac HD that exactly match the files shown in the LRCAT files on Lightroom 6, but the files i have are JPEG, and the catalog doesn't recognize them since it is looking for DNG images.

So when I import the JPEG files, I get two images of the same picture. One is DSC-0001 for example and the other is DSC-0001-2. I am guessing that one is the original file and the other is the edited file, but am not 100% sure.

My question is can I recover these files through lightroom 6 using the find file feature  in some way, or is there a way to import them without Lightroom 6 importing them as two files, which takes the images from 13,000 images to 26,000.

I don't know any other way to explain what has happened, so I hope this answers your questions.

I do appreciate your help, but maybe am not as technical as I should be. Plan on calling Adobe Monday when i can talk to someone.

[dj_paige]

vivians49588145 wrote:

I have files on the Mac HD that exactly match the files shown in the LRCAT files on Lightroom 6, but the files i have are JPEG, and the catalog doesn't recognize them since it is looking for DNG images.

As far as I know, you cannot have Lightroom recognize the JPGs where it is looking for DNGs. If you don't have the RAW or DNG somewhere else, you are out of luck, all you have are the JPGs.

My question is can I recover these files through lightroom 6 using the find file feature  in some way,

Lightroom does not have the ability to recover files. Either you have the RAW or DNG files on your computer or external drives somewhere, or you don't. If you have them, you can reconnect them in Lightroom ... however ... I assume from your writing that you don't. (Please correct me if that is not the case).

[ManiacJoe]

When you converted the original files to DNG, did you keep the original files? If yes, then you can just convert them to DNG again.

Otherwise, importing a second time is always the wrong answer as LR knows these new files are not the old files.