workflow to restore images after folder corruption

[Jorge del Valle]

I've lost my main image collection folder due to data corruption, so I have to restore it from a backup. I backup once a week, and unfortunately the last backup I made does not include about 3 days of work that I did on a several hundreds of images from a trip to China. My lightroom catalog file is fine, so I want to try to link the restored images to their catalog metadata and save myself from having to redo those 3 days of work.

One complication is that some of the China images were taken with the camera set to the wrong time zone. Since I name images based on date taken, as Peter suggests in The DAM Book, those images were initially named based on the wrong date. After doing an initial backup I worked on them and corrected the EXIF date and renamed accordingly. So now there's a name & date mismatch between the lightroom catalog and the images I have in the backup.

What I imagine I need to do is this:

1. Restore images to an alternate location.
2. Fix EXIF date/time on the ones that have it wrong.
3. Rename according to corrected date.
4. Copy images to the locations they are supposed to hold in the database, run Lightroom and they should get "seen" and re-linked to their metadata.

One thing I'm not sure about is whether the EXIF date/time in the database will override the one in the image when I sync. In which case I could in theory just rename the images without having to change the date/time and let Lightroom write the corrected EXIF data to the image. Would that work?

Does anyone have any comments or suggestions on this workflow? Anything you think I should be doing differently?

Thanks.

Jorge

[johnbeardy]

Jorge

I think that will work. Lightroom will match up based on the filename, and you could then use Read Metadata to bring in the corrected Exif. Maybe test on a few items first?

John

[Jorge del Valle]

Sounds good John, although I assume you mean using "Save Metadata to Files" instead of "Read Metadata" since my most up-to-date metadata is now in the catalog and not the images. Or are you referring to something else when you say that?

Anyway, none of the recovering software I've tried has worked at this point. So it looks like tonight is "Backup Restoring & Metadata Reattaching Night" at Jorge's (ladies come in free till 11). It'll be a wild one!

Thanks for the help. I'll let you know how it goes.

Jorge