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michaelt69475700
michaelt69475700
New Participant
November 8, 2018
Question

Export a file location list from Lightroom?

  • November 8, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 522 views

Unfortunately, my photography hard drive file system became corrupt. Lightroom still remembers the old locations of all the files that have effectively gone missing since the drive crashed. Is there a way to export a simple text list of the various locations of all the files in a lightroom catalog? I have the drive at a data recovery center, but they say sending a list of known file paths could help them rebuild the drive. Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

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    1 reply

    KR Seals
    KR Seals
    Community Expert
    November 8, 2018

    You could make a screen capture of the folder list on the left side of LR in the folder module. Like this:

    You might have to make several if your folders list is more than one screen long.

    Ken Seals - Nikon Z 9, Z 8, 14mm-800mm. Computer Win 11 Pro, I7-14700K, 64GB, RTX3070TI. Travel machine: 2021 MacBook Pro M1 MAX 64GB. All Adobe apps.
    michaelt69475700
    michaelt69475700Author
    New Participant
    November 8, 2018

    Such a simple solution! Hadn't even crossed my mind! I'm sure that will already help a ton. I'll send it to the data recovery center and see if that will suffice. Really appreciate it!

    Rob_Cullen
    Rob_Cullen
    Community Expert
    November 8, 2018

    Yeah. Unfortunately, I had backed up some but not all. Luckily all my client work is backed up or already out to the customer. It's just my own family photos that I've been lax with backing up. Learned a tough lesson, but now have a RAID NAS device and an off site back up. Even if it is a mess, if I can at least salvage a chunk of the family photos I'll be happy. Thanks for taking the time to respond to my question!


    If you do not have backups of photo files, there is two things you might try-(in desperate times)

    1. Create JPGs from the Previews in the Catalog library. (Presuming you can still see previews in the catalog)

    Jeffrey Friedl's Blog » Jeffrey’s “Extract Cached Image Previews” Lightroom Plugin

    2. If you have ever made Smart Previews of images in Lr, these Smart previews can be rescued as images.

    Regards. My System: Windows-11, Lightroom-Classic 15.0, Photoshop 27.0, ACR 18.0, Lightroom 9.0, Lr-iOS 10.4.0, Bridge 16.0 .
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