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chelseak2048072
chelseak2048072
Participant
February 12, 2020
Question

Lightroom ldata

  • February 12, 2020
  • 3 replies
  • 450 views

I recently dropped my external hard drive which had years worth of photos on it. On my computer's hard drive is 10s of thousands of ldata files...am I able to use these files to recover the photos? Am I able to make that data a photo file again? I've tried to open them and have had no success.

This topic has been closed for replies.

3 replies

Bob Somrak
Bob Somrak
Legend
February 12, 2020

I think .LRPREV files are the preview files and the .LRDATA folders contain these .LRPREV files, at least on my MAC.  I dont know how the OP got tens of thousands of LRDATA files.

M4 Pro Mac Mini. 48GB
TheDigitalDog
TheDigitalDog
Inspiring
February 12, 2020

LRDATA are indeed holding the previews and I agree, just regenerate them if desired. 

And a lesson learned for the OP: BACK UP all files you can never afford to lose. In multiple locations! If you had lost your only lrcat document or actual images, you’d be very, very SOL. 

Author “Color Management for Photographers" & "Photoshop CC Color Management/pluralsight"
chelseak2048072
chelseak2048072Author
Participant
February 12, 2020

how do i regenerate them?

dj_paige
dj_paige
Legend
February 12, 2020

.LRDATA files are the previews that Lightroom uses. They are not your photos, they are small sized JPGs of your photos.

 

Really, you need to restore the photos from your backups.

Bob Somrak
Bob Somrak
Legend
February 12, 2020

No backups?  

 

If not and the catalog in on your internal drive you can use a couple programs to extract the previews.

 

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

 

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

 

 

M4 Pro Mac Mini. 48GB
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