Recovering Lost Photos in Lightroom

[benjaminl314]

I want to start by saying I know I made multiple mistakes throughout this process and would do things very differently with what I know now.

Recently, my Macbook suffered water damage. I took it to a computer repair shop in town since the screen wouldn't work and the keyboard was non-responsive. After a few days, the guy was able to back up my laptop's harddrive. (This is where I should have said thank you and left)

I use the Lightroom desktop app, my originals are stored on an external harddrive, and I thought my edits were stored in the cloud. However, my cloud storage had been full for some time, but Lightroom allowed me to continue using the program and I never had any issues.

I bought a new MacBook, plugged in my external hard drive with the original photos, and was missing the majority of my photos in the Lightroom Desktop app. I went to my external hard drive and found the originals folder with 30,000+ images. So this meant I was just missing the edits. No problem, I thought, I'll just buy more cloud storage and have the computer repair guy open Lightroom on my old Macbook so all of the photos sync to the cloud and I can see them on my new Macbook.

Somehow, while the computer repair guy and someone from Adobe were working to sync the photos, almost all of my original photos were lost from the folder on my external hard drive. They are not in the cloud and they are nowhere on my computer or in the trash. 

Is there any way to recover these photos? Do I find a data recovery place to recover them from the hard drive? 

Sorry if this post is confusing, I'm just as confused as you. Any help is appreciated. 

[melissapiccone]

First - were you accessing your images in the cloud or locally? It sounds like you were accessing locally... 

Have you checked lightroom.adobe.com - what's there?

So - you stored originals on external - were you actually accessing them on the external through local in LR?? You plugged in your external to your new computer - but the files were missing - the ones in the cloud or on the external? the photos aren't actually in the app - they are either in the cloud or on your external drive - so it shouldn't have made any difference from which device you were using. Are you sure you didn't log into a different Adobe account?

How were they syncing the photos - why were they syncing photos? Were you using LRC and LR together??

More questions need to be answered!

[benjaminl314]

Ok I will do my best to answer all of the questions.

My originals were accessed through a 4TB hard drive and the edits were saved on my Computer's hard drive, however, this was all done under the "cloud" tab in Lightroom, not the local tab. My cloud storage was full and read "140 GBs of 100 used" or something to that extent. I had over 30,000 photos on my lightroom, all under the "cloud" tab, but I believe they were all actually saved locally.

When I go to my cloud or to the browser version of lightroom, I have about 3,000 photos. I don't believe I logged into a different account since I only pay for one subscription to Lightroom.

To my knowledge, they were somehow trying to sync the photos through the browser version of lightroom, apparently someone at Adobe support said something to the extent of "we need to delete the photos first so they will sync properly" which is where I about lost my mind when I heard that. In hindsight, I should have never gave them access to my lightroom or trusted them to sync it. 

My thought was if they could sync my library of 30,000 photos to the cloud from my old MacBook, I could access it on my new one. I only used LR, never LRC. 

If this isn't making sense to you, you're not alone. Nothing makes sense, the computer repair guy and the guy he worked with at abode clearly did something catastrophically wrong. Let me know if you have any more questions and I will try my best to clarify anything, but nothing about this makes sense to me. I just can't believe anyone thought that a "delete" button should ever be hit during this process. 

[melissapiccone]

Elliminating LRC from the equation helps. 

There is an option in LR to save copies locally so it's possible you had 30K uploaded in the cloud and copies on your hard drive as well, seperate files. 

They were trying to the sync the photos through the browser? what the what... yeah, I think this is where everything went wrong. Do you know how many files you had in the cloud before they started this process? 

100GB isn't much space and 30K images could easily take up 150GB. I have 22K files in the cloud and I'm using over 351GB of space. So I don't think they were all in the cloud to begin with. How they were trying to sync them is beyond me. 

Sounds like those 2 turkeys deleted your images from your external drive. You might try and get the repair guy to pay to try and recover the external drive. 

I'm sorry I don't have better news for you.