Very Useful Lightroom Script Can Help You Recover Lost Photos When All Else Fails
Have you ever accidentally deleted or lost a folder full of master images in Lightroom? If you have a backup you should be okay, but even backups fail, and what then? Are you really out of luck? Are those images gone forever? Maybe not.
The process is a tiny bit complicated, but if you want to protect yourself against the possibility that you might lose your images for good, the effort will be worth it. Here’s a quick step-by-step breakdown of what you’ll have to do, complete with links to Adobe’s Help pages for further explanation:
- Make sure you’re building 1:1 previews on import by selecting ‘1:1’ in the ‘Build Previews’ dropdown menu under ‘File Handling.’ This is located in the top right corner when you’re importing photos (see image above)
- Go to ‘Catalog Settings’ under the Lightroom menu, click over to the ‘File Handling’ tab and make sure ‘Automatically Discard 1:1 Previews’ is set to ‘Never’ (see image below)
- Click here to access the Adobe Help page on Extracting Previews and download the .zip file linked there.
- Follow the step-by-step instructions on that page to insert the script into a new Scripts folder you create within the Lightroom Presets folder.
- Restart Lightroom. You should now have a scripts menu (looks like a scroll) located to the right of your Help menu, and in that menu will be the option ‘Extract Presets’
That’s it. I did this myself (every step described above) and it took only a few minutes to do the whole thing. Now, when I have Lightroom open and I look to the right of my Help menu, I see this:
It’s a quick and easy install, with the only real downside being that you’re going to take up a lot more hard-drive space creating and keeping 1:1 previews. But a little HDD space is a small price to pay for another fail-safe backup that’ll help you recover photos when ALL of your other backups have failed.
