Exported edits on hard drive disappeared

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
June 7, 2023
2 replies
529 views

Hi all, this is something new to me that has happened. I export all my lightroom edited photos on to an external hard-drive in a new folder within the RAW images.

I have just come to upload some of the edited photo folders to another external hard drive but they have all gone.

I deleted photos out of my lightroom library and now the only edited items on the external hardrive are the ones that still remain in the lightroom library.

How has this happened? Can I get them back? How do I stop this happening in future?

Many thanks 😊

macOS

S

Schoey11

Participant

I am experiencing this problem. I have the RAW files stored on an external hard drive. I have exported the processed files. Now when I open Lightroom I get the message that the 'files cannot be found.' I have not deleted the original RAW files but they have disappeared from my external hard drive. This has happened on several occasions.

I would be grateful for any help with this.

dj_paige

Legend

Lightroom (Lr icon) or Lightroom Classic (LrC icon)?

What does this mean: "I have just come to upload some of the edited photo folders to another external hard drive but they have all gone. " Upload what to where? What does upload mean in this context? Do you mean all gone from the expected folder, or do you mean something else? Maybe you uploaded them (still not sure what uploaded means here) accidentally to a different folder.

How to prevent? Well, deleting photos from the Lightroom library is almost always not a good idea. If you also deleted the original RAW from your computer (either intentionally or by accident), that is also a poor practice which you should stop.

H

HanniF36Author

Participant

“Upload” - move a copy of a folder from one hard-drive to another.
No I haven’t already “uploaded” and not realised.
RAW images on the hard drive have not been affected just the exported edited photos.

Hannah Foreman

Per Berntsen

Community Expert

Assuming that you are using Lightroom Classic –

The edits are in the catalog, so if you still have your raw files, export them again.

LrC doesn't touch your exported files (unless you checked Add to this catalog in the Export dialog), so there is no way LrC could have anything to do with the missing files. If you did check Add to this catalog, LrC would only delete them if you explicitly told it to do so.

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