Lightroom 4 help ‘if you Please..?

[ToxicImagery]

Hello All... (Thank You in advance!)

16+ years ago I had an external hard drive fail on me. As a result I lost close to to 19,000 photographs, videos, etc...

A family member recently passed and I thought I'd try to recover the drive that I was unsuccessful with back when it failed, for use in a memorial slideshow.    I found some software that I highly recommended. (ReCuva Pro).

 Subsequently the software although only some, recovered some of my photographs (3,000+).  However it did recover 213 Zipped Lightroom 4 Preview catolog files.  

I dug out my original Lightroom 4 disc and installed it successfully on my current system...  

Is there ANY possible way of recovering these files in my current installation of Lightroom 4..???

i would Truly Appreciate Any an All help...

 Thank You in Advance...

[kglad]

you have 30 days to use your lr 4.  otherwise,

in the future, to find the best place to post your message, use the list here, https://community.adobe.com/

p.s. i don't think the adobe website, and forums in particular, are easy to navigate, so don't spend a lot of time searching that forum list. do your best and we'll move the post (like this one has already been moved) if it helps you get responses.

<"moved from using the community">

[ToxicImagery]

I'm not sure what you mean by, I have 30 days to use my lr 4..?

[kglad]

is your lr 4 activated?

[Per Berntsen]

Lightroom 4 did not use activation.

If you entered your serial number, and it installed successfully, it should work indefinitely, or at least until a change in your operating system causes it to stop working.

Adobe has provided a script you can use to extract previews from the Previews.lrdata folder.

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/extract-previews-for-lost-images-lightroom.html

[Rob_Cullen]

Agreeing with @Per Berntsen   Yep, Lightroom v4  only needs the Serial Number to run indefinitely (I still have v4.7 on an old laptop 🙂 )

Backup catalogs won't be any use either (for preview extraction) unless there were accompanying backups of the Preview folder.

I believe the best you will get is simply the 3,000+ recovered photos- viewed in any way (File explorer, Bridge, etc)