Skip to main content
Participant
August 25, 2025
Question

Lost images, need help recovering

  • August 25, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 155 views

I was transferring 18,000 images from my lightroom catalog onto an external hard drive and 16,000 of them disappeared. I plugged in my external hard drive, dragged the catalog folder over into my external hard drive, shut down my computer, closed the computer, opened it back up, logged in, and they were gone. Is there any way to get them back?

1 reply

Rob_Cullen
Community Expert
Community Expert
August 25, 2025

Lightroom or Lightroom-Classic?

Version Number of the app?

Error messages?

 

Regards. My System: Windows-11, Lightroom-Classic 15.1.1, Photoshop 27.3.1, ACR 18.1.1, Lightroom 9.0, Lr-iOS 10.4.0, Bridge 16.0.2 .
MassC
Legend
August 26, 2025

Hi @24923109_0328, 

+1 to what @Rob_Cullen requested. You can find your App version by going to Help > System Info while in Lightroom. Can you also share a bit more about what you mean by transferring to your external drive? Share steps taken. These details will help us narrow down what happened. 

^CM

Participant
August 26, 2025

I plug in the external hard drive, access the Lightroom catalog file folder thing, drag it over into my hard drive, at this point I didn’t see any download status bar or anything and so I dragged the catalog folder on my computer into the trash, when I did this the folder in my hard drive also disappeared, so I went in the trash folder and recovered it, I then tried to access the folder which took me to the Lightroom app and showed that I had zero pictures in my Lightroom catalog, I shut down the computer and close it, and then I find like 4,000 photos in Lightroom(some of mine and some of my brother's) and about 2,500 in my folder of images in Lightroom. I then took my computer today to the IT department and they said there’s little they could do but they referred me to some adobe specialists through email. Then those people emailed me later today and asked if the .lrat file or something along those lines was in my Lightroom folder that was located in my user files or something. It was not. That’s all that has happened