Retrieving albums

[Patrick WOO]

I back up processed photo albums to an external hard drive and then remove them from Lightroom.
Due to an oversight, an album has been removed without backing up. How do I retrieve it? Thank you.

 

[clee01l]

OK, there is some confusion over your terminology. What are you calling an "Album". Lightroom does not have a container called an Album. Lightroom has Collections and LR has a Publish Service module that also contains collections the may be called albums when published on some social service websites.
When you say an Album has been removed, what are you referring to? Lightroom contains two parts. One is the LR Catalog that contains metadata about image files (the second part). You can delete the metadata from the catalog without deleting the original image files. Is this what you have done? If you delete the original images files from the computer too, you will only be able to recover them from a system backup of all of your critical user data. A System backup is something that an app like TimeMachine should be doing for you on a regular basis.

If you can be more specific about what happened in LR and what your workflow might be that causes these thing called "albums" to be backed up to an external hard drive and then removed from Lightroom. I think we can help you sort through your issue.

 

[Patrick WOO]

Thank you very much for the prompt response.

By albums, I meant "folders" in LR terminology. I have actually removed the folder from LR and, unfortunately, also emptied the "trash" in my Mac where I dumped the folder in question.

Appreciate your further assistance.

 

[Johan Elzenga]

Well, those aren't folders in 'Lightroom terminology', those are real folders on your hard disk. If you remove a folder from Lightroom, you normally only remove it from the Lightroom catalog, not from the disk. So, unless you also trashed in the Finder, that folder should still be there. You can simply import it in Lightroom again, but it does mean you've lost all your edits on those images.

 

[Patrick WOO]

Thanks for the clarification.
The bad dream has come true...the retrieving from LR is a dead end!

 

[clee01l]

To further what Johan has said, the Folder panel shows you the location of the image files in the filesystem. The LR process of removing a folder from the folder panel does not delete the folder in the filesystem. Have you checked Finder to see if the folder is still present? Or did you use Finder to move the folder to the trash?

You still have several options:

1. If you did remove the folder from the folder panel and the LR catalog and not move the folder to trash using Finder, then you can recover what was in LR by selecting one of the recent catalog backups that LR makes on your exit schedule.
2. If you did remove the folder from the folder panel and moved the folder to trash using Finder, then emptied trash, you can use the system backup (Time Machine or what ever you use) to recover those deleted image files.
3. If you don't have a system backup, then did you use the "Make a second copy to..." option on import? The "Make a second copy to..." option provides a temporary source of the original image file so that you can safely reformat the SD card before the system backup makes a permanent back up of the imported image files.

So, do you have any of those avenues open to your for recovery or did you burn all bridges to the past?