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The images should have their edits if:
- The Lightroom Classic catalog that contains their edits is opened (not a different or new catalog)
- Image file paths in that catalog were updated so that they now point to the backup drive.
What you describe sounds like it’s working as expected…because re-importing never preserves edits (except for the exception* below).
Edits are stored with the catalog that was open when the edits were made. This means at least two things:
- If an image is edited in one catalog and imported into a different or new catalog, it won’t have the edits that were made in the first catalog, because the first catalog’s edits are stored in the first catalog.
- It’s possible for an image to have two or more different sets of edits if it was imported into two or more catalogs and edited differently in each.
There is a difference between re-linking and re-importing:
- Re-linking means, as said above, to update the recorded folder paths to each image so that the catalog entries now point to the folder where the images are now stored.
- Re-importing (or any importing) means to bring an image in as a new catalog entry. If that image had been in the catalog before, this new entry doesn’t connect at all to it, so no previous edits or organization applies to this new catalog entry for that same image.
Re-importing does not re-link.
Synchronizing a folder does not re-link; if it picks up any additional images those are imported.
The best practice in this situation is to actually re-link:
1. Hopefully the backup drive is an exact copy of the original drive, meaning the folder hierarchy and all filenames are exactly the same as the original drive. This will allow re-linking without errors.
2. Open the same catalog that was previously used to edit the images (or, open a restoration of that catalog from a backup).
3. In the Library module, Folders panel, locate the topmost folder of the hierarchy that has a question mark icon on it (missing folder), right-click it, and choose Find Missing Folder. (If right-click is not enabled on your Mac, Control-click that topmost folder instead.)
4. All files cataloged in that folder, and all of its subfolders, should now re-link, reconnecting the catalog entries with the original images they refer to.
*The only way edits can be restored without the catalog that contains them is if the edits had already been written as metadata outside the catalog, by using the command Metadata > Save Metadata to File, or the preference settings Automatically Write Changes into XMP, and (if they’re raw files) those XMP files are present in the same folders as the image backups. This is unlikely because the default is to write edits into the open catalog.
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