You just had an external hard drive failure.

All your Lightroom Classic photos are on it. And you are not backed up. Oops.

Yeah, I know, you shoulda backed up when you had the chance. But that’s water under the bridge. I’ll save the lecture for later, okay?

All is not lost if you use Lightroom Classic. There is a little known script you can use to export your previews from the Adobe Lightroom Classic catalog. It won’t be your originals, but something is better than nothing in this case. Depending upon your Lightroom Classic previews setting, you can export some pretty decent images. The metadata will be gone. The develop settings are gone, too. But the recovered preview will be an image that represents the last know version you worked on.

Not bad, right?

Understanding the Situation

Lightroom Classic generates previews of your imported images. These previews are stored with the catalog and are independent of the original image files. When the original files are missing, Lightroom displays an exclamation mark on the thumbnails, indicating their absence. So, even when you see thumbnails of your photos, they can still be missing!

The previews remain however, and we can utilize a script provided by Adobe to extract them. Don’t worry, this isn’t that complicated!

Please note:

The extracted images will be the size of the previews generated by Lightroom. If you have set you catalog settings for small previews, the extracted images will be small, so expect some loss of detail and potential artifacts. If you had set your previews cache size to high quality and Auto, then expect decent quality extractions.

Watch my video and learn how to recover your previews as JPEGs.

Here is the link for the Lightroom Classic Script to recover your previews.

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/extract-previews-for-lost-images-lightroom.html

And, if your hard drive actually didn’t fail and you simply have lost your connection to your external hard drive, you can to relink your photos back to the catalog.  This older blog post and video may help you do this. Not much has changed when it comes to relinking missing photos.