My edits are gone after allowing Lightroom permissions...

Question

Hi all. Hoping that someone here can help me restore my edits... I've been going through my travel photos and about 400 (.DNG) edits seem to be reverted.

I recently downloaded Lightroom (9.1) on my Macbook Pro with the intention of going through and editing my ~1000 photos from a recent trip.

The way I had been accessing my photos up until today had been going through this painful process of attempting to navigate to the folder (of which there are 6 in one larger umbrella folder), and often it would tell me that I didn't have permission to open it, and sometimes it would let me in. Every time that it would let me in, all my edits would be there. Every time I open the app, it starts with nothing open. Working off Local drive, not cloud.

Now today I decided that I would fix this problem. With some internet searching I figured out how to give Lightroom all the access and permissions that it wanted. Who would have thought that this would fuck everything up?

Now when I open the program, I can see all my files and folders on the left sidebar (which was very empty looking previously), but ALL my photos have reverted.

My God. Can somebody please tell me that the information is saved somewhere? I'm quite new to navigating Lightroom and am not certain about a backup or how that works. The last time I've used this program was ~10 years ago and I wasn't fluent then.

Rob_Cullen · Answer

“~10 years ago” - Then you may not be using the same app today. v9.1 is the newer ‘Cloud’ app that was introduced April 2015. Had you been using a Lightroom version 1 to 6 then then v15.2 is the current version and now known as Lightroom-CLASSIC. COMPARE LIGHTROOM & LIGHTROOM-CLASSIC FEATURES

Lightroom v9.1 was originally designed to operate with images stored in the Adobe Cloud. The ‘Local’ option was added more recently (October 2024?) and shows your local files in a simple browser fashion.

If you are using the ‘Local’ option then Lightroom is looking directly at your image files internally in your computer. If your images are a proprietary RAW file-type the edits made in ‘Local’ mode would be stored with the files as sidecar XMP files . With DNG files the edits will be written to and stored within the DNG file metadata.

If you have problems with folder permissions then maybe the edits were not being written to the DNGs.

More information and screen-clips may help get you an answer.

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