LR import of "home" folder by accident / How to manage moved items?

[5omeone]

Dear mr community,

Unfortunately, my wife accidentally imported not only the desired images from our hard disk to Lightroom Classic yesterday, but also many other images, e.g. PNGs from programs. The "Include subfolders" function was activated and we suspect that she imported the "Home" folder (but we do not know for sure). Now multiple pictures e.g. from apps etc. have been moved to the LR catalogue folder.

We do have a backup of our Mac, but we don't want to completely rebuild the system.

Is there any way to retrace this movement or reverse it in any other way? Or do you have any ideas on the best way to deal with this? That would be great.

Thank you and best regards

 

[mollyc]

Did she add them or move them? If she only added them, you can delete them from LR and just make sure to tell LR not to move them to trash, but only to delete them from the catalog.

If she used the Move command, there is no way to undo that.

 

[Ray2]

Sort by added date. Then above comment.

 

[mollyc]

You don't have to sort by added date, just go to Previous Import. If you can't tell the folder structure your wife put them in, right click on one of the files and then choose either Show in Finder or Show in Library. Library will show you the folder structure within Lightroom and Show in Finder obviously shows you directly in Finder (substitute Explorer if you are on Windows).

 

[Ben J.]

You could also restore the folder containing the Lightroom Catalogue and its associated files and folders.

Restore items backed up with Time Machine on Mac

On your Mac, use a Time Machine backup to retrieve lost items or recover older versions of files.

support.apple.com

Hopefully you can locate the folder that your catalogue resides in, together with its associated files and folders, like:
Lightroom katalog-3-v13.lrcat
Lightroom katalog-3-v13-3.lrcat
Lightroom katalog-3-v13-3 Helper.lrdata
Lightroom katalog-3-v13-3 Previews.lrdata
Lightroom katalog-3-v13-3 Sync.lrdata
and maybe a backups folder, etc.

Restore this whole folder to the state it was in before the incident. You might restore it to a different location, like your desktop, first. Then launch LR and select the restored catalogue to open and to check if it shows the correct images. Then you could replace the 'damaged' LR folder with the restored one.