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Tob-pixels
Participant
February 6, 2019
Answered

Extracting jpg's from a catalog

  • February 6, 2019
  • 3 replies
  • 476 views

I still have a catalog of old photos that disappeared when a hard disk crashed before I could back it up.  Is there any way of extracting the jpgs from that catalog?

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Correct answer Todd Shaner

granp0p  wrote

I still have a catalog of old photos that disappeared when a hard disk crashed before I could back it up.  Is there any way of extracting the jpgs from that catalog?

In addition to Smart Previews if you have a copy of the Lightroom Catalog Previews.lrdata folder containing the preview files it is possible to recover them as JPEG files using a script. Lacking those or a backup of the original image files on a different drive you are out of luck!

Script to extract previews of lost or deleted photos

Going forward I suggest keeping a backup of both the original image files and LR catalog(s) on a separate drive dedicated for backup purposes only. Windows and OS X have backup utilities that can be for this purpose.

3 replies

TheDigitalDog
TheDigitalDog
Inspiring
February 7, 2019

IF you had DNG's (and used the command to update previews and JPEG), you can indeed extract a JPEG from them.

Author “Color Management for Photographers" & "Photoshop CC Color Management/pluralsight"
Todd Shaner
Todd ShanerCorrect answer
Legend
February 6, 2019

granp0p  wrote

I still have a catalog of old photos that disappeared when a hard disk crashed before I could back it up.  Is there any way of extracting the jpgs from that catalog?

In addition to Smart Previews if you have a copy of the Lightroom Catalog Previews.lrdata folder containing the preview files it is possible to recover them as JPEG files using a script. Lacking those or a backup of the original image files on a different drive you are out of luck!

Script to extract previews of lost or deleted photos

Going forward I suggest keeping a backup of both the original image files and LR catalog(s) on a separate drive dedicated for backup purposes only. Windows and OS X have backup utilities that can be for this purpose.

    Sahil.Chawla
    Adobe Employee
    Sahil.Chawla
    Adobe Employee
    February 6, 2019

    Hi there,

    If there are smart previews in the catalog then you can simply export the images as jpeg files. However, if the images are missing from Lightroom and you see ! mark on the images, then it's not possible to export them as jpegs unfortunately.

    Regards,
    Sahil

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