# Rescue of preview renderings in lightroom 4.3



## drolo61 (Feb 11, 2013)

Call me stupid, but I lost a couple of files while restructuring my hard drives. 1:1 preview in variuos lightroom catalouges still exist. Is there any known method of rescuing at least those images?
Thanks for any advice...


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## tron (Feb 11, 2013)

No worries about naming...

The goal is to rescue some pictures if possible.

1. How did you restructure your hard drives?

I mean did you format them (and if so was it fast or full), did you repartition them? did you defragment them (although this is not supposed to be destructive)

2. If there are deleted files then maybe a utility can find them. Search for undelete programs.

3. I have not used Lightroom but judging from bridge I would search the directory location for its cache.
There is one for bridge and Photoshop so I assume there is one for Lightroom too.

If the names found in that location are meaningless I would try to rename them by adding valid photo suffixes like .jpg etc...

I do hope you will save some pictures...


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## drolo61 (Feb 11, 2013)

First of all, thanks for the quick reply..
The restructuring tokk place over a year ago, but I figured that files where missing just recently.
So I will go searching for general recovery tools and I will try to locate the preview folder inside the lightroom file structure. I will keep you posted on potential success.


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## tron (Feb 11, 2013)

Just keep in mind that the previews do not have to be at your Lightroom file structure only. There are more probably at a user specific directory.

For example for the Windows XP which I use the default Bridge Cache is at:

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\Adobe\Bridge CS6\Cache


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## wtlloyd (Feb 11, 2013)

Very easy to re-generate them. Select all the photos in the catalog, go up to 'Library' select 'Previews' select 'render 1:1 previews'.

If you have 10's of thousands of photos, just do it during computer down time and let it grind away.

Fresh previews directly linked to the source image with all the develop pipeline changes you've made in a place Lightroom knows how to find automatically - Seriously, I think it is far better to create new.

You will likely want to find the old previews and delete them, however, as they usually are a very large space hog.


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## tron (Feb 11, 2013)

wtlloyd said:


> Very easy to re-generate them. Select all the photos in the catalog, go up to 'Library' select 'Previews' select 'render 1:1 previews'.
> 
> If you have 10's of thousands of photos, just do it during computer down time and let it grind away.
> 
> ...


OP said that some images are lost . So I do not think safe to delete all old previews ....

How can previews be generated if images are lost?

The goal is to recreate some images from previews and not some previews from the images...

Now if lost means not found in LR this is a totally different matter and you are correct.

But I think that lost refers to the original image files unfortunately...


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## Rex Canon Shooter (Feb 11, 2013)

I have used this and it WORKS. Unfortunately they are just jpegs so no originals and the final size will depend on the preview size. However it is worth it to recover precious memories. http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/preview-extraction

Best of Luck


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## Mt Spokane Photography (Feb 11, 2013)

Rex Canon Shooter said:


> I have used this and it WORKS. Unfortunately they are just jpegs so no originals and the final size will depend on the preview size. However it is worth it to recover precious memories. http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/preview-extraction
> 
> Best of Luck


Yes, I've used it too, and it worked well for me. It extracts the jpeg image from the preview in Lightroom.
Jeffrey Friedl has many excellent utilities for Lightroom.


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## wtlloyd (Feb 11, 2013)

sorry, I completely misunderstood.

good luck, I've had to make do with jpeg previews when the raws got corrupted, it's a bummer.


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## drolo61 (Feb 12, 2013)

Rex, thanks a million for that link and sharing positive experience. I will explore that opportunity.
This forum is great resource - thanks all for being helpful


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## drolo61 (Mar 3, 2013)

Just a short update - the plugin works magic!


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