I reset all edits on all photos! Need to find photos that had edits so I can undo this.

[TJAsher]

Hello!

Sometime in the past couple months I reset all edits on nearly my entire library of 200,000 photos without realizing it! Apparently there is a shortcut keystroke to reset settings or something and I must have selected all (or nearly all) somehow and hit that keystroke.

I need to find all photos that have "Reset Settings" applied to them.

I tried using search and tried filters but nothing seems to find this "Reset Settings" edit.

How can I find all photos that have been reset? I've lost a huge amount of work and I'm hoping to not have to go through each photo one by one since only about 95% have been affected by this.

I'd prefer to find ones that actually had edits and were reset if possible.

Any help is appreciated!

Cheers!

TJ

[dj_paige]

Check to see if any of your catalog backups contain the edits (in other words, were made before you made this mistake). If so, restore that catalog file.

[richardplondon]

If you do revert to an older Catalog backup: this will put back the edits of all photos present in the Catalog, as each one was at the time of backup. But this will not show any subsequent edits, or even the presence of photos that you've imported since. If you can distinguish which the latter are, their edits can be saved out, and then merged brought back into the reverted Catalog.

Two ways:

one is to write these newer photos' edits out to file, from your current working Catalog, and then to import them afresh into the reverted Catalog. That import will bring with it the editing state that had been written to file for each. This does not include various Catalog-specific stuff such as History steps, Collection membership, virtual copies though.

The other way is to Export as Catalog selectively, having highlighted just these photos, and then to use Import from Another Catalog to merge them wholesale into the reverted Catalog. So that will both achieve their import, and transfer in full info including their History, additional virtual copies, Collection membership etc. So, not only the latest editing state and not only for the master copy.

[TJAsher]

To be clear, the edits still exist in Lightroom. They were just reset and that reset shows in the edit history as the top item now.

I can go photo by photo through 200K photos and manually undo that.

The restore from catalog is a good idea but my backup strategy turns out to be not so great and I have no explicit backup from prior to this screw-up with the current LR version. I can go back 8 months to the prior version but that has photos all in the wrong spot as I reorganized my entire folder structure.

[TJAsher]

Adobe support did show me how to sort by edit time, which I never knew about, and I was able to determine the 5 day period in which it happened as photos after a certain date were not reset. But my backup is from before the reset happend so I'm out of luck and may have to revert to an old version backup and re-ingest everything for the last 8 months. I can probably export a catalog with the current photos and edits from that time and import that catalog.

Sigh, a mountain of work no matter how I slice it.