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A
AceNemo
Participant
July 13, 2025
Answered

Recovery help

  • July 13, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 213 views

Hi, I need help recovering my Lightroom Classic edits. Here’s everything that happened:

 

I was originally using Lightroom Classic with everything stored on an external SSD (Extreme Pro) — including both my RAW images and my Lightroom catalog. I wanted to move my entire workflow to my Mac’s internal drive, so I wouldn’t be dependent on the SSD.

 

So I created a new folder on my Mac called “Hana Thailand Pics” and copied everything into it. This folder now contains:

 

  • FOR HANA — my main edited photos
  • LIKE (not EDIT) — unedited photos I moved over manually
  • catalog — the Lightroom catalog folder I copied from the SSD (which contains .lrcat and preview files)

 

 

I then opened that .lrcat catalog from the “catalog” folder on my Mac, thinking that was the correct catalog.

 

Once inside Lightroom, I moved all the photos from LIKE (not EDIT) into FOR HANA manually using Finder. Then, in Lightroom, I deleted the LIKE (not EDIT) folder to reduce clutter.

 

After that, we clicked “Synchronize Folder” on FOR HANA, hoping to reconnect everything. But that ended up importing many of the files as new RAWs with no edit history, and now the library is very messy.

 

Currently:

 

  • All my RAW images show up in FOR HANA, but only 48 photos have edits applied
  • I’m missing edits on over 170 photos that I know I worked on previously
  • Some photos still show lock icons in Lightroom, even though the folder has Read & Write permission in macOS
  • I never emptied the Trash — the original Lightroom catalog from the SSD might still be in there
  • I may have been using a different .lrcat file originally from the SSD before copying “catalog” to my Mac

 

 

Can someone please help me:

 

  • Identify if I’m in the correct catalog?
  • Recover the full set of edits I had before syncing and deleting the folder?
  • Safely reconnect all photos without making things worse?

 

I just want my edit history restored. I still have all the original RAW files and I believe the catalog is somewhere either on the Mac or in the Trash. Please help me fix this properly.

Correct answer dj_paige

Synchronize Folders is not part of the process. I would start over. The proper way is to copy (not MOVE) everything to the internal drive in your OS, keeping the folder hierarchy unchanged, keeping the folder names unchanged (except possibly for the parent folder) and then you can follow the instructions here, scroll down to Part 2 — Updating Folder Location, and reconnect the parent folder using the Update Folder Location command as instructed. If everything appears to be working then you can delete whatever is on the external drive, if you want. Do not Synchronize Folders

1 reply

dj_paige
dj_paigeCorrect answer
Legend
July 14, 2025

Synchronize Folders is not part of the process. I would start over. The proper way is to copy (not MOVE) everything to the internal drive in your OS, keeping the folder hierarchy unchanged, keeping the folder names unchanged (except possibly for the parent folder) and then you can follow the instructions here, scroll down to Part 2 — Updating Folder Location, and reconnect the parent folder using the Update Folder Location command as instructed. If everything appears to be working then you can delete whatever is on the external drive, if you want. Do not Synchronize Folders

A
AceNemoAuthor
Participant
July 14, 2025

Is there any way to un screw myself without starting over? 

dj_paige
dj_paige
Legend
July 14, 2025

Is there a way to do this without starting over ... possibly, and yet the starting over method is the simplest and will take the least amount of time and should guarantee correct results.

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