Can Lightroom undo a mass “Delete from Disk” and restore the edits?
Asked 9/4/2014
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2 answers
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I accidentally deleted a large set of photos from within Lightroom after using Select All. I restored the files from the Recycle Bin, but they did not reappear in the Lightroom library, and I ultimately had to start editing again.
Is there any way in Lightroom to undo an accidental mass “Delete from Disk” so that both the image files and the Lightroom edits are restored? I’m not asking about general file-recovery tools; I want to know whether Lightroom can recover the catalog entries and edits after this kind of mistake.
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
11y ago
2 Answers
1
I don't think there's a way to do this. Whether you delete the files from the disk or not, if you delete them in the Lightroom catalog, you've deleted the edits from the database. Restoring the database might work, if you'd backed it up, but as you say, since this was all in the same session between backups, there's nothing to back up from.
As a sidenote, the Lightroom catalog .lrcat file is simply a SQLite database. Make a copy, rename it with a .SQLite suffix, and using the GUI of your choice, you can go to town and look at all the data directly.
Originally by user27440. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user27440
11y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
Usually no. If you delete photos from within Lightroom and remove them from the catalog, Lightroom also removes the edit/history data stored in that catalog entry. Restoring the image files from the Recycle Bin does not automatically restore their catalog records or edits.
The only practical way to get the edits back is from a Lightroom catalog backup made before the deletion. Without that backup, Lightroom generally has nothing to reconnect to the restored files.
In theory, advanced manual recovery from the catalog database might be possible before Lightroom purges the related metadata, but that is not a normal Lightroom feature and is not an easy or reliable solution.
So the short answer is: Lightroom cannot normally undo a mass “Delete from Disk” and restore edits unless you have a prior catalog backup.
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