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sloth2slow
sloth2slow
Participant
March 3, 2018
Question

Reconstructing an old Lightroom catalog

  • March 3, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 268 views

I previously lost my Lightroom catalog and restored it from my last backup (which was far too long ago). I have just the images in my catalog up until that date with all of the changes to my photos. But I want all of the photos I took after that backup date to be in the catalog as well. How can I add the folders of photos back into the catalog that I added after that backup? And doing so without duplicating the existing ones?

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1 reply

JP Hess
JP Hess
Inspiring
March 3, 2018

They will have to be imported and edited again. Essentially, they have never been in the catalog, at least, not in the backup catalog you are using. So it seems that your only option is to start the process over again.

sloth2slow
sloth2slowAuthor
Participant
March 3, 2018

I am aware of that step its just getting the other photos into the catalog with the old stuff.

JP Hess
JP Hess
Inspiring
March 3, 2018

I guess I don't understand the question. Photos are not "in" the catalog. Your photos are simply in folders on your computer. The import process is a process of showing Lightroom where the images are located on your computer, and adding an entry for those images into the catalog which is a database. That catalog or database simply contains a record of all the work that has been done to the image, but does not contain the image itself. Since you have restored backup catalog from before images were imported, the only way you can work on those "other" images is to import them to get them added to the catalog so that you can go to work on them.

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