Participating Frequently

Question

Photo Edits have disappeared

Forum|Forum|4 days ago
June 19, 2026
3 replies
65 views

Hello,

My photo edits over multiple project folders have gone missing after doing a reinstall of lightroom.

I do have backups of the catalog but non of them seem to recover my photo edits, it only seems to retain the my custom presets.

Please let me know if there is a way to recover my photo edits.

Your help is much appreciated.

Lightroom version 15.4

dj_paige

Legend

Hello, @youknowans

It would seem that (according to Victoria Bampton, the Lightroom Queen) there is a problem with Lightroom Classic 15.4 that results in data loss. It could be this is what happened to you (or perhaps you may have a different problem). Anyway, Adobe is looking at it.

dj_paige

Legend

No edits have been made on this photo. Lightroom Classic does not delete your edits on its own.

Please show us a screen capture of the entire Library Module screen after you apply my 4 step search process.

youknowansAuthor

Participating Frequently

Hi,

I have attached a video to show the process as you have suggested.

When I reinstalled Lightroom I assumed it would read the edits from my backups that I normally do. (not sure how this works). Then went through the import a folder process and that's when I noticed all the edits previously made were not there anymore.

Recording.mp4

dj_paige

Legend

Ok, thank you. You did the four step process properly, and it only found one copy. The photo has no edits.

Where are the edits? Perhaps you accidentally have two catalogs and the edits is in the other catalog. Please search for other catalog files. Believe it or not, this does happen sometimes, here is a thread where the user thought LrC had lost his edits and he was sure he had only one catalog, but after searching, he did have two catalogs.

dj_paige

Legend

So when you say edits are missing/disappeared, did you look in the History Panel in the Develop Module? Are the edits not present there? Please show us a screen capture of the History Panel for one such photo.

What do you mean catalog backups don’t have edits? Is this because you have looked in the history panel in the backup catalog? What do you see in the history panel?

Your symptoms could be caused by importing these photos twice, into 2 different folders, and now one folder has no edits (because you never made the edits to photos in this folder) and one folder has the edits. Believe it or not, people have done this in the past without realizing they have done this, and the solution is simple. You need to look for duplicates of these photos in the LrC Library Module. You need to find these photos in Lightroom Classic. Please follow all four of these steps in the Lightroom Classic Library Module, in order. Let us know what you find.

1. Click on All Photographs (its on the left under Catalog)
2. Turn off all filters (Ctrl-L once or twice)
3. Expand All Stacks (Photo->Stacking->Expand All Stacks)
4. In the Filter Bar, search for one of these photos by File name

youknowansAuthor

Participating Frequently

This is what it shows on the develop tab

Nothing comes up from following your instructions.

Victoria Bampton LR Queen

Community Expert

That shows that you imported that photo yesterday. Did you import the photos because you couldn’t find them? If so, that would explain why there are no edits. When you say you have backups but they don’t have the edits, can you tell us more please?

Victoria - The Lightroom Queen

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