Photo Imports Lost Lightroom 3

[Robbo7D]

I imported photos direct into LR from my camera & started working on them. I deleted the photos off my card/camera. lightroom crashed....is there any way of retrieving the photos from lightroom?? Or have I learnt a valuable lesson.....don't delete photos before exported from lightroom?

[Art Vandelay]

Lightroom doesn't actually store the photos, Try looking in the actual place on your computer where they get stored. i.e my pictures, my documents, or wherever. When you find them, re import them.

[ricktas]

As Art says, when you import photos using Lightroom they are just placed in a folder on your computer. You just need to know where that folder is.

[ameerat42]

Do a search on *.whatever-they-are within the "appropriate time frame".
Am.

[arthurking83]

The way I'm understanding the program is that there are a few ways in which you can 'import' photos via lightroom.
In the Import Photos dialogue area, up at the top of the window, are four options to import photos, which are: Copy as DNG, Copy, Move, and Add.
If you used the 'Add' option, it imports the images into the catalogue without downloading the images from the source destination.

This subsequently means that you have only imported the images into the catalogue, but not moved them to the PC's hard drive.
You've edited them whilst they were in the current location on the card, and because you deleted them from the card you have lost them.

You could try to recover them from the card with a file recovery program. I think Sandisk, amongst others have software to help with this.
I've used Piriform's Recuva software and it's worked very well for various file recovery problems. If you haven't already written to the card there is a good chance of recovery.

The other location you could try looking into for any 'backup files' is the cache file folder that LR is set to work from. If you haven't set in the the preferences, look into Edit->Preferences->File Handling, and down near the bottom of the window is the location of the cache.

[Robbo7D]

Thanks for all the help....finally found them & copied them to a folder on my desktop. Trawling through them now. Worried times in the household there for a moment. Day at the Melb. Zoo, 1st time shooting all in RAW & managed to get some goodies (even for me!). Thanks again

[Art Vandelay]

Thanks for all the help....finally found them & copied them to a folder on my desktop.

That's good. It's probably also a good time to go get an external hard drive to put a back up copy on, don't just trust your computer.