So...hokay.

I am a dumbass, first and foremost (Please note that I said it first so when you say, "Wow...what a dumbass" later, you'll know I concur)

I turned off Time Machine my Mac on August 6th for some stupid reason. I don't know why. I remember doing it, but the point is...I never turned it back on.

Come to today. A drive which luckily had photos which were of three events (plays I shot for local companies) and some photos of my dog had not been backed up and is now with data recovery. It could take a week, a day or never be recovered. In the meanwhile, those people want those photos. What to do?

I normally use Lightroom to edit and process for the webpages I put up pretty quickly, so there are previews embedded in a file next to the catalogue. I found out that you can RIght-Click and "Show Content" and drag those folders into a program called "File Juicer" ($17.95) which goes in and extracts ALL of the jpgs (or other files if you should care) and puts them into a folder for you. They are unsorted and the naming is all mess up, but they are there.

Here's the other trick: you have to have the catalogue stored on a disk separate from your photos so you can call it up if it crashes. This also serves to speed up Lightroom by separating storage and processing.

Anyhoo...just thought I would plant this seed so when someone using lightroom (and I would imagien Aperture) has a disaster, there are some options.

This program extracts the Lightroom 1:1 preview JPGs, too :

http://basepath.com/ImageIngester/LRViewer-info.php

and it's FREEEEEEEEE! And it WORKS GREAT!!!

Sorry about your hard drive

Oh! Awesome! I panicked and didn't look around. I saw something like this for Windows, but not Mac. I am so using 1:1 previews from now on.

Thanks Sarah.