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pimperia
pimperia
Participant
May 9, 2026
Question

Files within a specific collection deleted from hard drive

  • May 9, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 65 views

About 1 year ago I created a collection of about 200 of my favorite photos for the purpose of choosing 25-30 for a print project. The collection was synced with LR. These were all photos from my LRC catalogue, residing on my local hard drive. Last week I started to export some of my photos for printing, and discovered that about 50 files were missing, although the smart preview and xmp files were still present. I tried to locate them in the parent folder and could not see them. When I tried to locate the files with the LRC finder I was directed to the Mobile downloads lr folder, which they were not in. I tried to manually locate these files in their original folders on my hard drive and searched my entire computer with the help of an IT person and could not find them anywhere. I use a cloud based backup (dropbox) and searched with the help of a representative and could not locate them in any deleted files folder. The vase majority of these files were photos I had brought into PS and saved back into LRC as TIFF files. Not all TIFF files in the collection were missing, although the majority were. I also searched my LR program and could not locate them there. 

So, I am at the point of hiring a recovery service to try to salvage them from my hard drive. Curious if anyone has heard of this, any help or guidance would be appreciated. Thanks. 

    2 replies

    A
    Community Expert
    AxelMattCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    May 11, 2026

    It seems that you accidentally deleted the photos—however that happened.

    Do you have a backup or a second copy on a external hard drive? If yes, then you can restore your images easily. 

    BTW: Regular backups are essential. This is the only way you can recover your data in the event of an emergency. You should definitely create duplicate backups of any data that is particularly important to you!

     

     

    So, I am at the point of hiring a recovery service to try to salvage them from my hard drive. 

     

    Such data recovery services are very expensive. Furthermore, recovering data becomes problematic if the deletion occurred some time ago; in some cases, parts of the data may have already been overwritten.
    If you wish—or need—to undo a deletion, no further write operations should be performed on the affected drive following the deletion.

     

     

    My System: Intel i7-8700K - 64GB RAM - NVidia Geforce RTX 3060 - Windows 11 Pro 25H2 -- LR-Classic 15 - Photoshop 27 - Nik Collection 9 - PureRAW 6 - Topaz Photo AI
    pimperia
    pimperiaAuthor
    Participant
    May 11, 2026

    Thanks AxelMatt. I do have a backup hard drive, but everything is synced so the files were deleted from the backup as well. Going forward I am going to backup files to a hard drive not connected to and synced with my computer. I know the services are expensive. One good thing is that the one I am going to use does not charge anything unless they recover the files (Disc Savers). 

    Rob_Cullen
    Community Expert
    Rob_CullenCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    May 9, 2026

    Not unheard of, but unlikely to be caused by LrC as XMP files still exist but that is strange because TIFF files normally do not have XMP sidecar files (Metadata is written inside TIFF files) and Deleting in LrC would also delete any companion xmp files.

    You cannot find ‘originals’ on hard-drive, or Dropbox, and not visible in Lightroom - have you looked in Recycle Bin? If they went missing some time ago recovery may be fruitless as a high chance they have been over-written. Could you have made backups to another hard-drive?

    You won’t recover full-size from Lightroom (even if you could see them there- which you can’t.) as LrC only sends Smart-Previews up to the Cloud.

    In the event that you have no hope of recovering the original files you might try workarounds for smaller file recovery as a last resort.

    ~ Truly SMART-Previews?, You can Export from Smart Previews as DNG with files that have a long edge of 2048 pixels- still reasonable quality to re-edit and print small. (The Smart-Previews also exist in a Smart Previews folder as DNG files with cryptic file names.)

    ~Only 1:1 and Standard Previews? AND you see the images in the Library- you can install a plugin that can create JPGs from the previews.  Extract JPGs from Previews Plugin

    ~ Lowest quality would be screen-clipping the previews in LrC.

    Hopefully you find a solution.

     

     

    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 .
      pimperia
      pimperiaAuthor
      Participant
      May 9, 2026

      Hi Rob, thanks for the response. I did not realize that tiff files do not have xmp files, what I was seeing was the xmp file for the original raw file, thanks for the correction. I did check the recycle bin, but I occasionally empty it (never again) so I may have permanantly deleted the files there myself. I think making a backup on a seperate hard drive is a great idea for the future. Thanks for the work around ideas for recovering smaller files, unfortunately I want to print large so those would be too small. Cheers. 

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