Yup, so I know they've always said that there are people who have HAD hard drive crashes, and people who WILL have hard drive crashes... I've just graduated from one to another. I had every intention of always beeing a good little girl, and backing everything up meticulously, but I had a crazy month where I was doing all sorts of shoots AND moving both the HOUSE AND THE STUDIO all at the same time. Not an excuse, I know.

Anyway, the prob is this: I was able to pretty much recover if not the RAW's, then at least the jpg proofs of all my shoots...except one. Thank goodness it was an engagement and not a wedding. But, it was like one of the best shoots I've ever done!!! I'm so bummed.

Anyway, I was wondering about the images that I can still see in lightroom. Does it store even super small jpg previews somewhere? At LEAST something to make a slideshow out of, or print like 4x6's? I know I'm grasping at straws, but I'm just wondering if there is anything I can do? It was such an awesome shoot! (And I have to tell the girl tomorrow at lunch that I lost all the files. I feel like I'm just waiting to be crucified...)

Any ideas/suggestions?

And yes, I've sent it off trying to recover the files. Apparently when you have a main head crash, there is nothing else that can be done. UNLESS SOMEONE ELSE OUT THERE KNOWS WHERE I CAN SEND IT FOR A MIRACLE!!!!

so don't take my word as gospel but I am pretty sure that the lightroom pictures that you are seeing is just the information about the changes you made to the picture, and not the picture itself. This might not work, but as a last last ditch effort, maybe you could make an image HUGE on your screen, then print screen. Take that image into photoshop, then crop it. Take that image and up it by 10% a couple times (this makes your image bigger without making it look weird). If I didn't confuse you, its worth a shot if nothing else works. Good luck.

First about the LR catalog. All the previews are stored in the Catalog. Their size might be in the 1000px range, or they might be full size previews depending on how your settings were. If you get get the LR catalog open you can see what you have for previews. I've done slideshows from nothing more than the previews because they were high res.

Now on to that drive. What do you mean it crashed? Unless the drive is physically damaged (ie not even spinning) there's a good chance you can get it back. Don't write it off just yet.

If you need some more help you can contact me directly. There's a direct contact form on my seimeffects.com site.

Gav

Ditto!

As far as I know, if you're trying to make a web gallery from offline photos (previews are in the LR catalog but the RAWs are missing, like on an external drive), LR *could* use the previews to make the gallery... It did for me, but it was an earlier version or LR, I hope it still does...

So try to make a web gallery, it *could* "export" the previews you have... If I'm right, you'll get a warning that previews have been used since the photos are offline...

Don't forget to adjust the size of the gallery photos ;-)
Next you'll have to find the photos in the folders created by LR for the gallery.

BTW, the process is super fast, much faster than when photos are online... like 20x faster !

I hope it will do the trick !

Bye
Chris

PS: Despite all the backups and the strict workflow, I'm still frightened to lose images... I'm with you !