This is totally a LIFE SAVER!!! I had photos I took at a funeral reception, I ended up being the only one who took pictures, everyone wanted them, then I stupidly used the setting “Import from Disk”….. which means, the moment I used my camera to erase the photos from the card, “poof” the images were gone forever… except for the cached photos… THANK YOU FOR WRITING THIS CODE!!!!!!!!!!

I’m glad it could be of help, but “Import from Disk” can make copies as it goes… are you sure they’re not on your hard disk somewhere? Also, even if you’ve formatted the card, you might be able to recover the originals, with PhotoRec. Good luck! —Jeffrey

godblessyou!!!

Thanks ever so much for this Jeffrey, you’re a real life saver!

I had all my photos on a RAID5 array, unfortunately the logic board failed and I lost a lot of data (1Tb ish), thankfully I had the catalogue on my machine with some full renders. I now have at least some memories of the last 3 years of photos 🙂

One thing i did notice is that it exports by the original file name, which causes problems if you have multiple files in your library with the same original file name. So, My D200 is set to number them by card (DCS_0001 can occur multiple times) so the export overwrites the image when it next exports. If it could give you the option to to that, or just count from 1 and increment for each export that’d be great.

Thanks for this great plugin!

Dave

Oops, didn’t think about that. Will fix. Sorry to hear about your terabyte(!) —Jeffrey

I am writing from California and grateful for all of your wonderful plug-ins! I am having a bit of trouble figuring this one out. I am on a Mac, but when I go to export, it isn’t an option for images whose original file is missing. So if I go to File, Plug-In Extras, Extract Previews, the box opens up, asking for extraction location, which I enter, but at the bottom, I only have the option to select cancel, the begin extraction button is grayed out, not functioning???
Any help is much appreciated, THANKS AGAIN!

Hmmm, if the begin-extraction button is grayed out, I’d think that a message should be showing telling you why. I’m away from my build computer at the moment, but I’ll look into it and get back to you. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey, writing from Minneapolis. I did something dumb, and then something even dumber. In July I decided it was time to split up my catalogue into multiple catalogues to improve LR performance. Everything seemed to be going smoothly. I created different catalogues on external disks, verified that the photos were on the external disks, and then deleted them from my internal drive. 2007 – Fine. 2008 – No problem. 2009 I was going to keep on my internal drive. But I somehow erased all of my 2009 photos and emptied the trash. It was a week before I realized what had happened.
Then I discovered your plugin. I tested it and it worked beautifully to recover a sample of my photos and I thought I would do the rest overnight. Then I upgraded to Lightroom 2. In LR2, at first the previews were visible, then they weren’t. I did something, I don’t know what, and they came back again, and then shortly afterwards they disappeared again. Since then I haven’t even seen the previews, just grey boxes with question marks. I do have the original preview lrdata files, one with 4.7gbs of info in it, and one with 1.55gbs of data. But somehow in upgraded and moving catalogs around, the catalogs don’t seem to be linking to these files.
Your beautiful plug-in only works through an active catalog with visible previews. How can I re-link a catalog to a preview file so I can use your plugin?
I lost 10,000 pictures and feel like 7 months of my life are missing! And the worse thing is I did it to myself!

Sorry to hear about your woes! Check out LrViewer… I think it can work with whatever previews you aim it at. If it can recover your stuff, please consider sending the guy a gift consummate with the level of life you got returned….. and consider a better backup plan! (I’ve heard good things about Backblaze.com.) —Jeffrey

Jeffrey, just wanted to say a huge thank you for this plugin. I’m normally a judicious storer and backuper, but as I was migrating my LR catalogue to a new computer I realized that a couple of years ago (on an overseas field shoot and juggling several storage media) a batch of great photos had apparently gone missing. No idea where, just poof . LR still thinks they’re there, but no dice on the HD. Searched for them high and low, and even with 3 backup hard drives they are nowhere to be found. Anyways I mercifully found your plugin (I already had your Smugmug plugin which I love) and ran the previews through it. Lo and behold I now have a batch of decent size Jpegs. Not my NEF’s, but still better than the swift kick in the pants I had before! THANK YOU for putting out great freeware like this.

John – Ottawa, Canada.

Jeffrey, Thank you very much for this plugin. I’m sorry you were sick and all when you made it, but it is very helpful and a lifesaver to some. I’ve been re-organzing and cleaning up old files from the past few years and apparently, accidentally deleted my RAW original file. It’s still in lightroom, so at least I’ll have the JPG from it. Thank you!

Jim

Jeffrey,
Thank you so much for this great plugin. You helped me to recover all of my photos (about 8000) in full quality (I’m so glad I used 1-1 previews) when my external drive failed while I was transferring everything to a new computer.
Thanks again!

Darshan (London).

Hi Jeffrey,

Thanks for this great tool! (although I have not used it yet)

My begin-extraction button is grayed out also… using LR2.2. My hard disk unfortunately crashed after 1 year, to the point beyond recovery, so desperately needs to extract the photos. Tried LRViewer, it’s good but does not give me 1:1 previews. Hopefully this bug can be fixed asap… will definitely recommend my friends and donate to your blog!

Why on earth are you using Lr2.2 when Lr2.7 is out? Sorry to hear about your crash, but I doubt this plugin will be able to extract anything that LRViewer does not. The previews don’t necessarily include 1:1 previews. Be sure to enter a valid folder in the “Extract to” box… if the “select an extraction destination” message doesn’t go away, pick another location. —Jeffrey

Does this work on LR 2.7? I have downloaded and installed as per normal for plug-ins and the plug-in manager tells me it is installed and running, but I cannot find it anywhere. Not in the presets, not in export—where can I find it?

Not sure why I didn’t mentioned it on this page before, but I’ve added the note about how to invoke it that should have been there from the start. —Jeffrey

Thank you so much – recovered pictures of Mum’s 60th birthday party that would otherwise have been lost to the ether.

Hey Jeff, will you marry me? You seriously saved my ass(for the second time… 2 weddings, 1 big back up mishap!). I’ve attempted to use LRviewer a few times and it never opens properly for me. Your plug-in is fantastic. Lots of good karma for you! Keep up the great life saving!

Hi Jeffery, I have had a fatal disk crash and am desperately trying to find out how to export the cache previews from Lightroom 3.2. I have tried using LRviewer but it says tha database is locked. Can you help in nany way?

Thanks, Josh

You’d have to ask LrViewer’s author, but perhaps there’s a lock file lying around that you can delete to let you have access? I have no experience with it myself, so best to ask LrViewer’s author. —Jeffrey

Hola Jeffrey,
After arveling 10000 miles from Venezuela I visited my son in Jerusalem, and I dropped down his hard disk and lost his pictures (no backup, even I told him a thousand times).
He’s using LR3,. Is it possible he loads his catalog in LR2 and then use your plugin?
Speak to me, I can’t even sleep.

Gracias

I’m sorry, no, the catalog data is completely different. For Lr3, use the LrViewer program linked above. If the disk is physically able to run, even if the data is corrupt, you can probably recover everything using a low-level scan such as with PhotoRec or the like. Good luck! —Jeffrey

I can’t seem to get lr view or other programs to work… yours appears easy to use and install… but I have LR3… will you support lr3 soon?

No, never. As I’ve said in comments above, what I did with this plugin simply can’t be done in Lr3. —Jeffrey

Thank you for this plugin!

Even though I have a backup, it does not include the latest 200 pictures. Now I at least have them as JPEGs. Will try to retrieve the remaining pictures from the CF Card.

I’m glad that at least I will have the pictures in JPEG format, even if I cannot retrieve anything from the CF Card.

I was using LR trial. I uploaded some images, and I accidentally deleted the images from my laptop. My question is, if I were to purchase LR will the images I uploaded during my trial be available once I enter my serial number?? I am hoping they are so I can use your plug in to retrieve my images :/ Please any information will be greatly appreciated!!

The cached previews might be available… they might be full size, or might be much smaller, or might not be there. No way to tell without looking. If Lightroom no longer works because you exceeded the 30-day trial, you’ll have to buy it in order to launch the plugin, but the plugin page lists other methods that might allow you to recover previews from outside Lightroom. —Jeffrey

Hi champ I have just trashed and then clears trash of over 5000 photos and now have a tech working on recovering them for me which they are confident of doing but just on case can this plug in help me. The photos are in Lightroom just not accessible due to the original file missing. I haven’t slept or eaten for 2 days I’m in serious trouble if I can not resolve this problem and would love some advice. I’m using LR4 thanks for your time I’m in Australia mate

Sorry to hear about your accident. The plugin should recover the previews from Lightroom, if it had any (it likely did), but I would recommend not using the disk where the images were until you have exhausted all recovery techniques. If you haven’t done much with the disk, I expect you could recover them all with PhotoRec or the like (as I did once from a corrupt memory card). The plugin works with both Windows and OSX. —Jeffrey

Hello Jeffrey,

This plugin is really great in retrieving most of the data from LR. I have a small problem though, the extracted images seem to stay in the wrong color space (sRVB) instead of AdobeRGB. Of course I checked “reinject metadata and colorspace” but it doesn’t seem to work, nor for colorspace nor for metadata (although the metadata is showing correctly in LR 4.4).

The other (small) issue is that the extraction will crash if video files are selected (this one I could workaround with the LR metadata filter).

Manu (Montreal, Canada)

It seems to be working for me in both respects, so I guess I’ll need more info (such as a log after a crash). —Jeffrey

GAH! You have saved my life! Accidently deleted a folder containing undelivered client photos.

And this is why I wrote the plugin. Most people will never need it, but it’s got high meaning for folks that do. 🙂 —Jeffrey

OH MY GOD! You must be sent from heaven! I accidently throw my external hard drive on the ground and all my photos of 1,5 year were gone forever!!!
With this tool I can at least get my jpg back!! THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THAT!!! You can’t imagine how happy I am now!

Ahhhhhhhhhh any clue why there is only thumbs on some images and not others? Is there a way to make them larger w/o ruining image quality? It’s 85% of this wedding album…..I’m in such deep water

It depends on what kind of previews were generated when the images were available. I doubt they can be made much bigger, but you can load it into Photoshop to try. If you still have access to the camera memory cards, perhaps try to recover from them. —Jeffrey

Thank you so much. I am forever grateful to you for having made it possible to at least preserve some very precious memories based on lightroom previews. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you! 🙂

Thanks Jeffrey – this saved my life. I lost 2y of personal photo history but fortunately still had good previews. Thanks again!

Thank you. Your script was easy to use and made my wife very happy to have the photos “back”.

Just a heads up, while you can get all the photos in various directories, all of my photos then went back into a single directory. I ended up duplicating my subdirectories and then running the script multiple times to copy each to the appropriate area.

Also note, you cannot get back video files with this. I’m not saying it was ever implied you could, I’m just letting people know to burst any optimism before it swells 🙂

Hi, Jeffrey, first of all I would like to thank you for this plugin, then, I’ve got a problem, when I select some pictures to export the previews, and I run your plugin, a window come up with the plugin logo on the left and this message on the right: “Access to undefined global: gpsAltitude”

What can I do with that? It just extract the first preview of the selected pictures, but not the others because I assume it stop working after this message.

Thanks, Enrico.

Sorry for the delay… I’ve (finally) fixed this. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey,
First of all, thanks for your great work !

I’m considering using this plugin for a fast way to export photos to a web gallery;
I’m just stuck on the lack of the IPTC ‘ObjectName’, which Lightroom (and others) use as ‘Image title’
Ok, I could use IPTC ‘Headline’ (which you export), but I have no easy way to retrospectively duplicate these entries…
A good idea would be to export the items currently present in the Lightroom metadata panel !
(or, still better, use a selected set of another excellent plugin named ‘JF Metadata Wrangler’, if inter-plugin communication is possible);
Additionally, the charset encoding of IPTC data is ISO-8859-1, whereas Exif data are UTF-8, which is a bit annoying as I live in France, where résumé looks better than rÈsumÈ (or r�sum�)… (but perhaps this is an exiftool issue ?) – at least I can recover this in my gallery, thanks to php mb_detect_encoding and utf8_encode functions.
Thanks

This plugin is intended to help recover something from catastrophic data loss. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey,

Thanks for you fantastic and generous work with this plug-in!
Unfortunately my situation doesn´t quite seem to match up with what this is designed for and I was wondering if you would have any suggestions?

I´m trying to recover (what ever I can) for images that I have deleted from within Lightroom 5 (hence the previews are no longer showing up). They are not backed up, and I haven´t been able to recover them from the original disk (which was encrypted) where they were stored using a disc scan or recovery etc.

So My last hope is that the preview information might still exist in the preview cache file because I do have a backup that I made of the Entire LR Catalogue Package, immediately after I´d closed lightroom, after deleting the pictures.
I´ve read that sometimes LR doesn´t actually clear the preview cache when you delete a photo from within the programme, but instead may hold onto that information in the preview cache until you
next open the catalouge (or at some other point?) when that information is finaly cleared out?

So my question is – is it possible to read that Preview Cache without restarting lightroom itself? or is there anyway to view those previews that don´t show up in Lightroom Catalouge but might still exist in the preview cache (before they are cleared)?

I´m running OS 10.10.2 and LR5.

Many thanks for your efforts (and apologies for the length of the question)
Regards
Dave
(Note: unfortunately – LRViewer doesn´t seem to Work with LR5 )

The best that I can suggest is this: Make another copy of the whole thing, then start Lightroom and let it sit for a while… hopefully it’ll clean up stuff. Don’t edit any pixels. Exit Lightroom, then compare the list of files in the preview to what was there before… if some files are now gone, they might be your previews. To check, make a new catalog with one image and create its preview, then delete the master image so that Lightroom can show only the preview. Exit Lightroom, then copy the preview file you identified earlier as potentially of interest… copy it over the preview file in the new catalog. Then start Lightroom and you should see the image that was there. Lots of work, but it’s one way to check. —Jeffrey

sorry, i was able to figure it out.. however, after the thumbnails are extracted. will they be of use after? or only of thumbnail size? please advise.

sorry never experienced this issue before

First, perhaps try to recover images from the card, even if you’ve shot with it since… see this post for how I’ve done it in the past. If you shot with it since and filled it to capacity then you’re out of luck, but otherwise you may find some in there. Second, upon import, Lightroom brings in the images much more quickly than it can build previews, so they should be in your library. Something else must have happened that you didn’t mention for them not to be there. Finally, the plugin extracts everything it can; if a thumbnail is all that’s there, well, it’s probably not going to be of much use, sorry. —Jeffrey

Thank you for your extraction plug-in…I do sports photography for a local high school and university, when my external WD passport with my RAW unprocessed photos fell off the counter to the wood floor…no more masters of the photos. Some, however, have the preview in Lightroom. When I use this extraction tool and another type, a very few of the previews come up with full-size jpg and most of them with a mini version…why does this happen, when all of the previews are 1:1 raito previews? Can I change anything to get a full-size jpg in the extraction? Thank you for your help!

The plugin does its best to extract what it can… if you’re not seeing full-sized JPGs, I suspect that the 1:1 previews are just not there. On the other hand, it could be a bug with the plugin, but the only way to tell would be for you to send the zipped up catalog and preview tree. If you can do that, I can take a look. The zip would be huge, but perhaps you can send via Dropbox, Copy, etc… —Jeffrey

Great Work, Jeffrey!!!

I am writing from Portugal, Porto, my home town.

I need your help, please….

I have Lightroom 6, both in Mac and Windows, and I downloaded your Extraction Plugin, because, unfortunately, I lost all my photos from my trip to the Caribbean…..

When I open LR, I see exactly the number of photos I took, I see their metadata, but, all the thumbnails are grey…

When I try to use your Plugin, LR gives me your Logo in PNG format!!!! It does not open the Plugin…

Can you help me here, please?

Thank you.

Kind regards.

Amelia

It sounds like you’re trying to import images from the plugin, instead of adding the plugin to Lightroom as a plugin. Please see the plugin install instructions. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey, great plugin, thanks. Question for you, I’m looking to extract an entire catalog and I’m wondering if there’s a way to maintain the folder structure during export?

There is, as of version 20160319.54, which I just released. —Jeffrey

That just saved me a lot of time. Thanks for creating and maintaining this – I’ve sent a modest donation.

Hi Jeffrey! Thank you so much! It works perfectly! You saved my life!
David

BANG!!!

Wow, you are great!
Thank you sooooo much! I tried it, and it works perfect! So this will help to save a lot of disk space in the future!

The only thing is:
I’m sure, other people are also interested in this feature, but the term “preview cache” is a little confusing. Maybe you should call it “delete previews” or “delete standard previews”

Superduper nice work man!

Thanx a lot!

The phrase has to differentiate what’s deleted from Smart Previews. I can’t use “standard previews” because that’s only a subset of what’s deleted (“1:1 previews” are also deleted; I can’t separate them out.) Maybe “Library previews”? —Jeffrey

Hi, I’m doing charity work in Sierra L:eone and love this plugin. Thank you!

I noticed that it was crashing when it encountered video files in my LR6 catalog on Mac. I used a filter to remove those from the selection and now it’s happily churning through my catalog. This works for me but in the off chance that you have some time eventually to debug it I thought I’d leave the note. Feel free to reach out if you want some testing.

From Virginia,

Hey! I love the plugin, but I got another problem. Many of the photo previews are being extracted very small. I don’t know all the technical lingual, but this is a big problem. I was able to recover many photos in a decent size, but many others are just so small. Any help would be appreciated!

The ones that are small are the best that the plugin can come up with, because almost certainly that’s all that’s available among the preview files. Sorry. )-: —Jeffrey

Just wanted to say a huge thank you for this plugin – I’ve just recovered some precious photos I thought I’d lost. Im awaiting the results of a full data recovery scan at present but am not holding my breath on the results, so knowing I at least have these previews is such a relief.

I also know that in the future I will *always* generate 1:1 previews, just in case I find myself in the same situation again in the future!

It’s ridiculous, as I do have backups, but this issue came about as a result of an attempt to remove a number of duplicate images. The duplicate finder must have collated different images with the same name as a single image, and although I checked a fair few of the results, I ended up saying s**** it, and trashing the lot. I didn’t notice until a few days ago, by which time my time machine backups had been overwritten due to limited space :/

More bacon saved! This is awesome! Thank you so much!

I’m re-organizing everything I’ve ever done professionally (long term project!). Lost all files from a shoot from 2010. I was pretty terrible then, but these recovered 1440×900-ish jpegs are plenty good enough for my memoirs!

This is just fantastic Jeffrey and just what I’ve been looking for after I for the first time ever by accident deleted from PC and formmattet an sd card fra my A7R2, which apparently was a low level format…

Jeffrey, Thank you so much for this plug-in. I recently visited Longwood Gardens and photographed their lily ponds. Simply amazing. Unfortunately, in my haste to free up space, I accidentally deleted the images from Picture folder. I tried this plug-in and it worked perfectly!

Hi Jeffrey,

Great plugin, just one question, What tool(s) do you use to develop lightoom plugins? I’m interested into developing one for increase own productivity. Thanks in advance for your time and attention.

I use a text editor to type the program code. —Jeffrey

Hi!

I am very grateful you published this plug-in!

As I found out today, last year I happened to erase ALL the pictures I had of my children from when they were born until two years ago when I started to use a new Lightroom catalogue.
The only thing that I have left is the Lightroom catalogue and – thank god – the preview library from which I now can extract all the pictures in an acceptable size. Most of them 1680 px and up.

I am always very cautious with my back-ups, but this was a big miss.
I am so happy that I now can save my files!
Thanks a lot!

Thank you so much 🙂

Hi Jeffrey, you are right it would be certainly better not need your great plug-in but if you need it is the the last resort!
Thank you so much and greetings from Germany!

Ulrich

I just wanted to say THANK YOU!

Lost a clients photos while moving them within folders somehow and this has saved me hours and hours of work being able to extract these cached images !

Really THANK YOU!

I downloaded the regex.info/blog/lightroom.goodies/preview.extraction to my desktop but don’t know how to make it work or how to open it and connect it to lightroom. Are there directions somewhere? I’m optimistic but stuck. Please help. Thanks

See “Installation Instructions” in the box at the upper right. —Jeffrey

Thank you SO MUCH. Much to my dismay, all the photos from my exchange semester were on an external drive that broke, the data recovery process after some consultation would be $$$ but realized I had the embedded lightroom previews. While not having the raws still sucks from a photography standpoint, having this once in a lifetime period of my life still documented has been priceless. Thank you for making the process of saving the preview jpegs headache-free!