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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · LR4 catalog just deleted. Not in trash. Can it be recovered? Mac is still on. | |
I was scrolling through about 4,000 pics, saw one I didn't like, selected it and deleted it.
It was odd that it took so long, then the spinning beach ball appeared.
I looked at the top left status bar, and LR4 was deleting the entire catalog of photos, as well as all my edits of the last three days.
LR4 backs up only when I close, but I've been working on this project almost 24/7 for 3 days straight. Now all that work is gone. Not the pics... those are in several places... but all the EDITING work.
What happened? Prior to seeing the photo I wanted to delete, I had selected all of the photos in thumbnail the Library module to make a global IPTC data field change. I then went back to individual file viewing, still in Library module, and in that mode there is no way to see that all of the pictures are still selected... due to viewing only one picture at a time. So when I deleted the bad image I saw, not only did all of the images get deleted, but all of the instruction sets for the previous images I had already invested the last 3 days editing.
I looked in the trash, and indeed saw all 4,600 images there. But Apple has eliminated the "Restore to original location" feature, and replaced it with a "Put Back" feature, which unfortunately is only availabe if the files were deleted with Finder. Otherwise, "Put Back" is greyed out and unavailable to use.
But far worse... there was NO .lrcat files in the trash at all. Only the pictures.
I have backed up the .lrcat files when prompted on shut down, but I haven't shut the computer down in 4 days now, so that dialog box has not appeared. Furthermore, even if I did know how to "backup" the .lrcat files without being presented with the opportunity, I still don't know how to recover those backed up .lrcat files in the event that I need them.
Like now. Only I doubt that the backups have the last 72 hours of work on them, because I have not been prompted to back them up, because I haven't shut down. And I'm still not shut down. Can anything be recovered?
I manually put the 4.600 images back in the files I originally copied them to on the Raid 5 Array, but even though the files are back, LR doesn't see them... I guess because they have to be re "imported", right? More hours lost.
I've searched, and most of the answers found are not good news. But some of the situations presented are more severe... such as the hard drive was wiped, or the files were overwritten, etc. But I haven't done any such thing. I command Z'd a few steps back, and LR4 actually REMEMBERS all of the rating and color sorting choices I made, on images LR no longer sees, from a catalog that LR not only trashed, but vaporized, because it isn't in the trash.
Is there anything I can do to get the last three days of my life back and recover those edits?
One more thing: I looked at the Catalog settings, and the box was checked where it says "Include Develop settings in metadata inside JPEG, TIFF, and PSD files." I shot in JPEG, and my develop settings were applied to JPEGS. I recovered those JPEGS from the trash. Does this mean that my Develop settings were embedded by LR into the metadata of the JPEGs that I edited? If so, in what field? I've never seen EXIF data that had an LR settings field. Some of my edits involved an estimated 100 adjustments per photo. I thought all of those instructions were stored in an .xmp sidecar file?
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