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Participant
October 13, 2019
Question

Can I retrieve image from LR catalog?

  • October 13, 2019
  • 2 replies
  • 244 views

My external disk drive failed, and I've lost all my lightroom photos. However there are images in the catalog for many of the photos, that display well on my monitor. Is there a way to retrieve these images from the catalog and use them in lieu of the actual photos?

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    2 replies

    Tony_See
    Inspiring
    October 14, 2019

    Please clarify which Lightroom you are referring to? There are two current versions:

    Lightroom Classic for desktop/laptops, and Lightroom CC Web or the Cloud-based version.

    Rob_Cullen
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    October 13, 2019

    First, because all your photos were 'local' on a hard drive, I assume you are using Lightroom-Classic (and not Lightroom Cloud based)

    If you do not have any backups of you photos (and why not?) then only a plugin can extract small JPG versions of your photos from the Catalog library.

    This is a Plugin from Jeffrey Friedl-

    http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/preview-extraction

    or Adobe has a script here-

    https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/extract-previews-for-lost-images-lightroom.html

     

     

     

    Regards. My System: Windows-11, Lightroom-Classic 15.3, Photoshop 27.5, ACR 18.3, Lightroom 9.3, Lr-iOS 10.4.0, Bridge 16.0.3 .