Lightroom Tips

Fstoppers: Hidden Lightroom Script to Recover Lost Photos

Alright, this is one of those posts that you should bookmark and tuck away in your “I hope I don’t ever need, but I’m going to save anyway” folder. I just read an article over on the Fstoppers website by Gary Martin that looked pretty cool. The idea is that if you build full size previews for your image in Lightroom, that preview is stored somewhere. Well, what happens if you ever accidentally lose/delete a photo or your hard drive crashes or something along those lines – but your Lightroom catalog is still intact. Well, that photo is gone but Lightroom may still have the preview it built and this script he wrote about can help you extract it. It won’t be the actual raw photo but it’ll be a darn close replacement for it as opposed to nothing.

Here’s a link to the article over on Fstoppers.com. The only thing I’d add is that he recommends to build 1:1 previews for everything. But for me, I usually build standard previews, and any image I work on (and zoom in to), will get a 1:1 preview built automatically by zooming in to it. So I wouldn’t necessarily build 1:1 for everything – just my selects or really important images. But still, it’s definitely something to keep tucked away in case you need it. Thanks Gary! 🙂

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