Participant

Question

Bridge didn't respond - all changes lost!

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
June 19, 2022
1 reply
542 views

For about 1,5 hours I was editing Canon raw files (cr3) and besides corrections in brightness, white balance etc. I also applied automatic masks to edit the sky. So far so good. Suddenly I couldn't do anything in Bridge: neither switching to other photos, nor going back from the raw fil editing to the thumbnail preview, nor eciting the application. All I could do was to termintate the program via process explorer.

Then I recognized that all my changes I made to hundreds of photos were lost: neither the xmp files, nor the acr files were saved.

Is there a place on the hard drive where copies of theses files are saved so I can restore my changes?

This topic has been closed for replies.

gary_sc

Community Expert

Hi Thomas,

Before I can start to focus on what might help, I need to back up on a few items in your description.

Bridge, by itself, cannot do anything to any file. It has NO pixel-changing capability whatsoever.

However, Bride is a "bridge" no pun intended) to Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), which can adjust how pixels are viewed. (You cannot change a pixel with ACR, only how the image is interpreted by observers.

Now, since you state you were working on CR3 files and had to be using ACR, the XMP files are normally created during the processing. There is NO WAY for Bridge to lose, drop, remove, or delete these files. Therefore, there must have been some other action that initiated their loss.

At this point, I have four questions:

First, what is your OS (and what release)?

What version of Bridge and ACR are you using (and what release)?

Where were the images located?

Did you have all of these images loaded into ACR simultaneously, or were you shuffling back and forth between Bridge and ACR?

Oh, a few more questions: How much RAM do you have?

Were you expecting to see the XMP files in the Bridge window?

Did you look for the XMP files in the Explorer folder?

Going out on a limb here; since you have the name of your images, did you search for the XMP file with that name? (That is if your image was "myphoto.CR3," have you looked for "my photo.xmp?"

And to answer one of your questions: no, XMP (aka sidecar files) are always kept in the same folder as the original files.

T

Thomas23009712xbelAuthor

Participant

Hi Gary, first of all, thanks for your time and your reply! I really appreciate this!

Sorry, you're absolutely right, it wasn't Bridge where I was editing the photos: in Bridge I started Camera RAW.
Some information about my environment:

- MacBook Pro 2017 (16 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD, 3,1 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7) with MacOS Monterey (12.4 with all updates)
- Latest version of Camera Raw (v 14.4)
- Latest version of Bridge (v 12.0.2)

- The files are located locally, on the internal SSD

- All files were loaded in Camera RAW (773 photos)

What I did previously: I had round about 1200 photos loaded in ACR and applied some basic editing. Then I closed ACR and selected the first 400 photos, loaded them again in ACR, did some refinements, closed ACR and converted them to JPG with Bridge by using the image processor menu, which uses Photoshop (what worked as expected). Then I moved these 400 files with Bridge to another folder.

In the next step I loaded the remaining 773 files into ACR, edited ~300 photos and suddenly ACR wasn't responding anymore. Since the ACR UI didn't respond to anything I did, like selecting other photos for editing or closing ACR, I decided to use the process explorer to see, if the system is hanging, but I couldn't see any problems, so I terminated ACR ~15 minutes later. When I realized that the thumbnails in Bridge weren't updated in terms of the applied changes, I took a look into the Finder to see, if ACR created .acr files (sidecar files) for the edited photos. What I saw: neither the existing .xmp files were updated (in the same folder as the .cr3 files), nor were .acr files created.

So in the end, all my editings were lost.

gary_sc

Community Expert

Hi Thomas,

Wow, that's testing the limits. I've not heard of anyone shoving that many images into ACR. The most I've ever done is around 30, usually, it's less than 6 when doing multiples.

My guess, and I really do not know, I'm only guessing here, is that at some point you stretched ACR's access to RAM out too far and that RAM never recovered. That caused the lockup and loss of data.

Do you do that often? Hopefully not so much after this event.

What kind of shoot was this? Was it 1200 shots of a model or very varied images such as shots on a holiday? I'm just trying to get a better handle on what the dynamics of your shooting are so that I can better understand why loading 1200 shots into ACR seems like a good idea.

Are you aware that in Bridge, you can copy an ACR setting and paste that into 1200 images?

(Screenshot of right-clicking on an image in Bridge's Content Panel)

One other option might be to use Lightroom Classic. (If you're in any of the Photographic Plans, you already have access to LRC.) It can handle 1200 images with no issue (but Bridge can also easily handle that if you're using the Copy/Paste Settings I just mentioned.))

But, in the end, I do (sadly) think you are correct, you've lost your edits. And, in the end, I think it was just a limitation of ACR and RAM access, and major stress on the plugin and your computer.

Very sorry.

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