Participant

Question

Replacing Corrupted Photos in LR

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
February 20, 2018
2 replies
2739 views

Hi All,

So, unfortunately, my HDD which contained my LR library became corrupted (and my image of this hdd also failed, lucky me). I managed to copy some of my library to my new HDD, in addition, I had a catalog file backup that was fine.

My current situation is a lightroom library with some images missing: https://i.imgur.com/AWKiCDv.png

And others corrupted: https://i.imgur.com/qHCnuUb.jpg

Some good news is I have low-resolution versions of all my images and videos saved on onedrive or google photos.

What I need is a way to:

1. List all the missing/corrupt photos so i have file names which i can search and download from onedrive one-by-one.

2. A way to replace the image within the existing lightroom library folder structure (eg. Lightroom Library > 2014 > 2014-01-02> Pic.jpg)

My thoughts so far:

- If I individually go to each corrupted photo, find the file in windows explorer, then delete it. Then within lightroom (library > find all missing photos) This will at least give me a collection of all photos that need replacement. I'm not sure if i can then extra names as a text list??

- For problem #2 I have no idea how i'd go about doing this. I have all my photos sorted into collections which I would ideally want to keep. And if I clicked a missing photo, pointed LR to the new location, it would just keep looking for it there instead of copying it into the library.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I seem to have a similar problem to this bloke, however, he had a whole backup available. https://www.lightroomforums.net/threads/how-to-replace-a-mass-of-corrupted-photos.30110/

Cheers,

Nick

This topic has been closed for replies.

Just Shoot Me

Legend

So you replaced the file with one that was NOT a direct backup of the image.

You need to start making Direct Backups of your images. Hard drive space is cheap these days and there is no reason not to have at least one backup copy of your original images.

Personally I have 3 backups on 3 completely different drives. 2 external drives and one internal drive.

So I have 4 copies of every image I have ever taken and want.

dj_paige

Legend

If you have backups of your original photographs, all you have to do is copy (not move) the backups to the same folder locations as the originals.

if the low resolution images are JPGs while the originals are not JPGs, I don't think there's any way to make use of them to somehow "fix" your Lightroom Library problems, as JPGs cannot be used in place of RAW or TIF files. Even if they are JPGs, they are edited while LR expects the unedited original photo, so it's hard to see how to use them as well.

It seems to me (this is my initial thought) that there's no way to make use of these low resolution JPGs. You'd probably want to import these into a new catalog, that's the best I can think of. Maybe someone else has a better idea.

nikhilr38066534Author

Participant

Thanks dj_paige,

Both original and backup are JPGs (just smartphone photos, but i like keeping them organised regardless).

dj_paige wrote
If you have backups of your original photographs, all you have to do is copy (not move) the backups to the same folder locations as the originals.

I just tried with one corrupted photo, replaced the existing image with one from my backup, and voila! LR recognises it as the old image (even though file properties are different).

Only problem is, my folder structure has a new folder per date, and going through every day for 5 years will take a while. (Lightroom Library > 2014 > 2014-01-02> Pic1.jpg)

What may work (but isnt ideal if i want to maintain my folder structure) is to place all the downloaded backups in an a single folder within my library as "Lightroom Library > CorruptedFixed" or similar and then point lightroom to find the missing photos there and it'll hopefully search through the entire folder and find all available files.

What i'm missing is a list of all file names in a collection. Seems like a lot of solutions out there for OSX but not windows.

Edit: Found a way to export file names as a text file thanks to a guy on stackexchange:

Select photos that you want to get the filenames of.
Menu "Export with Preset" -> "For Email (Hard Drive)"
Select Somefolder for Export
After Export you can see "The file could not be found"
click "Save As..." button and type Filename

Just Shoot Me

Legend

If you "REPLACED" the corrupted file with one of the exact same image that wasn't corrupted there shouldn't be any New File Structure.

Did you just COPY over the new file to the same Folder the corrupted file was in or did you do something else?

That is what you should do. If both files are the exact same file name and same extension there isn't anything else you need to do.

If I take X number of images from my backup drives and place those images in the folder the Working files are in, Overwriting the original working file, LR won't know the different. The backup copy just Replaces the original Working copy in the exact same folder LR already knows about.

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