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04-19-2012, 05:07 AM   #1
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Importing into lightroom ends in tears

In the months after my son was born mid last year the hordes of family visiting from interstate got to have pictures taken by a decidedly average in-house photographer. People posed, I shot, there was general merriment.
I have been using lightroom for a while now and I would download photos from the memory card onto my hard drive and then import them into lightroom. Now is when this story goes pear shaped,during this period I selected the new photos and imported into lightroom from the card looked and decided there were some good shots and that was all, never transferred the files to the computer. I then purchased a new laptop and copied the entire hard drive into a folder on an external hdd and continued on my merry little way.
Well since then my father in law passed away, we bought a new house and the general family stuff I had never got around to going through the squillion photos I had taken after the little guy was born. However at some stage my memory card filled up, so thinking I had imported the photos into lightroom, the photos would be in a folder somewhere on the external hard drive I very casually deleted all the photos and started again.

Then the wife decided to start a photo book of the first year. This day did not go well for me. Firstly in her search for the photos she discovered I had forgotten to mention I had purchased a K5 to keep my K7 company (they look the same, she will never notice right?), but more so that she could not find the photos, I looked through external hard drive before realising what I had done...........(yes she cried) I made her sad and disappointed as there can never be a reshoot.
Thankfully I had edited and uploaded to smugmug all the initial photos of our parents in the hospital and the photo session we has once back at home. Sadly all the ones of the rest of the family are history.

I have since this fateful day implemented RAID 1 external storage for photos and documents to couple with the existing time machine setup. I have also totally revised my photography workflow to incorporate local and net based storage (for the really good ones).
I have since then done a very considerable amount of playing around in lightroom and have discovered a lot of really cool features and a lot of basics I am not sure how I missed to begin with.

Hopefully this story will save some one from either making the totally moronic mistake I did, or will encouraging better backups as the same outcome could have happened with a hdd failure.

p.s. I took a few ripper shots of the little guy the other night and all is forgiven
p.p.s. sorry if this is in the wrong section mods.

04-19-2012, 05:12 AM   #2
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Sorry to hear about your loosing such irreplaceable pics. I can see how you did it as I too thought that LR was actually transferring them not merely indexing them at first.
04-19-2012, 05:20 AM   #3
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Sad story. Too late to use recovery software?
04-19-2012, 05:47 AM   #4
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QuoteOriginally posted by JohnX Quote
Sad story. Too late to use recovery software?
I definitely would get some recovery software and see if some of the photos are still on the hard drive -- you would be surprised what you can dredge up if it hasn't been too long...

04-19-2012, 05:57 AM   #5
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Recovery software can get the images back VERY easy if you just formated the drive and kept the same OS. Recovery software is so good, that when I buy a camera, and if it comes with any memory cards, I run the software against them, and low and behold, I see pics from the previous owner!!!! It's kinda funny what other people take pictures of!!!

Note to self - NEVER sell used memory cards to anyone.
04-19-2012, 06:58 AM   #6
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QuoteOriginally posted by wjt Quote
imported into lightroom from the card looked and decided there were some good shots and that was all, never transferred the files to the computer.
I am sure you checked but, 'importing' into Lightroom usually means the files got copied onto the harddrive somewhere. 'Adding' to Lightroom just adds them to the catalog without copying. So if you did indeed 'import' I would search that hard drive extensively. Not sure where LR puts them if you do not designate a folder.

And I second the above posts, use recovery software on that card, ASAP. It is amazing how much can be recovered. Definitely worth a shot.
04-19-2012, 08:04 AM   #7
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I've used this software before (it's free too) and it's worked very well. Free memory card recovery software after delete & format - Free card recovery software.

04-19-2012, 01:00 PM   #8
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I've used free recovery software called "recuva" with some success.

Recuva - Undelete, Unerase, File and Disk Recovery - Free Download
04-19-2012, 08:41 PM   #9
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QuoteOriginally posted by Docrwm Quote
Sorry to hear about your loosing such irreplaceable pics. I can see how you did it as I too thought that LR was actually transferring them not merely indexing them at first.
Yes, the distinction between add copy and move is an important one.
04-20-2012, 02:51 AM   #10
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QuoteOriginally posted by LaurenOE Quote
I see pics from the previous owner!!!! It's kinda funny what other people take pictures of!!!
Devious

thanks for the ideas on recovery guys, I had not thought of trying that on a memory card tbh. Tried a few different ones today with no joy. They did find a some I had deleted a not too long ago but nothing I wanted. I was worth a shot though.
04-20-2012, 03:15 AM   #11
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That's one of my gripes with Lightroom. I like to have my files on my computer. I don't like them buried somewhere in a program. (I'm probably ignorant of some basics here.)
04-20-2012, 04:27 AM   #12
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When photos are imported into Lightroom they are also imported onto your computer hard-drive.To find if they are still on your hard-drive find the Lightroom folder (usually in document library or photo library for Windows) it will have back-ups of Lightroom catologs, just go to the catolog that predates your disaster and open it in Lightroom. The thumb-nails will appear for all the photos in your catolog at that time, any that are no longer on your hard drive will be question marked.
04-20-2012, 04:32 AM   #13
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I think it's pity Lightroom can't just browse the hardrive, without having to import and build catalogs.
04-20-2012, 09:38 AM   #14
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QuoteOriginally posted by Clavius Quote
That's one of my gripes with Lightroom. I like to have my files on my computer. I don't like them buried somewhere in a program. (I'm probably ignorant of some basics here.)
I think you are missing out on Lightroom functionality. Lightroom COULD be set up to just create a catalog but I sure do not use it that way. I have it set on import to 'copy' which means it copies the files to your hard drive and adds them to the catalog. You can decide where to copy to. I have mine set to copy to a file server on the network. There is also an option to make a backup copy. I always want to know where a program saves my files, not just into some program determned directory somewhere.

So if setup properly Lightroom will copy the files to your computer (to a directory of your choice) and then make a backup (to an external drive perhaps) and add the files to the catalog. It also applies some default processing, adds default keywords and copyright information. This is how I have it set up and all of that is in a preset so all I do is put the card in the reader and click 'import'. Files copied and backed up, defaults applied, done.

The real functionality of Lightroom is in the presets and getting those set up correctly for you. Once that is done your workflow just goes so much easier.

And the file server backs up nightly to another external drive, so 24 hours after importing I have 3 separate copies of the files. One on the server, one on the local external drive which never gets touched, and the server backup.

So the question to the OP is when you imported did you use 'copy or 'add'? If you used copy then the files are on your hard drive, somewhere...
04-20-2012, 09:46 PM   #15
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I only have one external HD at the moment and am saving up to get another, I have Lightroom set to copy my files to the external hard drive and I leave NOTHING on my laptop, not even the catalogue back up files, those are also on the external hard drive. If my computer crashes then all I have to do is grab another computer, install LR on it and just go to> open> catalogue > findt the back up file and just just click on it, lightroom takes care of the rest and it works like it never happened in the first place. I learned this in one of Scott Kelby tutorial books, He suggests that you should import your photos to an external HD and have it make copies to an additional HD as well.
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