New Old Plugin: my Preview-Extraction Plugin Now Works in Lr4
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Back in Lightroom 2 days I had a plugin to extract JPGs from a Lightroom catalog's preview cache, something really useful when trying to recover something if you had somehow lost the master images. It wasn't my most popular plugin, obviously, because folks would use it only when trying to recover from the double disaster of losing their images and having no backups.

It was a lot of work and helped perhaps at best a few dozen people, but well worth the effort to help folks trying to recover years worth of memories. It was my only plugin to have no registration hangups to get in the way of a panicked user.

Unfortunately, changes under the hood in Lightroom 3 caused it to stop working, so the plugin hadn't received a meaningful update since 2009, and faded into uselessness as folks migrated to Lr3 and Lr4.

But with a little under-the-hood help from Adobe, I've been able to get it to work for Lightroom 4. Lightroom 3 is still (and will always be) unsupported, but in theory you should be able to upgrade an Lr3 catalog to Lr4, then use this plugin extract the previews.

I hope you never need it, but if you do:

Jeffrey's “Extract Cached Image Previews” Lightroom Plugin

For Lr4 it now also extracts video thumbnail frames (which are quite tiny so probably of no practical use) if they exist.


One comment so far...

Hi from Munich, Germany.

This little plugin is much more useful than you think, Jeffrey. I have most of my archive on a network server and all I have on the road is the LR preview cache. So, your little plugin allows me to extract the relevant preview images of my offline archive when I need to communicate, update blogs etc. While on the road. Before I discovered your plugin, taking screenshots was the only practical way to access the preview cache. Fortunately, the screenshots lack the “missing” stamp 😉

This actually doubles the value of LR for my work because in combination with your plugin, it provides a lightweigt copy of my archive when abroad.

Thanks,
Falk

— comment by Falk Lumo on February 11th, 2013 at 11:31pm JST (11 years, 8 months ago) comment permalink
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