# How to "undo" a "delete from disk"



## Nina Miller (Jul 22, 2011)

I meant to delete just one image from a folder but deleted all of them by mistake. My filters were set on 3 stars, red images so those were the images I lost. I have retrieved the deleted photos from my external drive but can't figure out how to import them back into Lightroom while keeping all the adjustments I had made in Lightroom (filters plus sliding bar adjustments). 

The "Lightroom Queen says: 
"Lightroom’s integral backup simply takes a copy of your catalog and places it in dated subfolder, so restoring is a simple matter of opening that backup file."

http://www.lightroomqueen.com/2009/01/23/how-do-i-restore-a-lightroom-backup/

But, of course, I want to not only restore the catalog, but the images, too.

Any information would be greatly appreciated.


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## clee01l (Jul 22, 2011)

Nina Welcome to the forum.  If you have a back up of a recent catalog and have your master image back where they were before your "oops", then you can use that backup catalog by replacing the origimal master catalog with it. You will lose all adjustments made to images and all references to images that you made to the master catalog after that backup was done.  If  that is only a few images, then this is probably your best recovery option.  If (like me) you only back up once a week, it could be significant number of images affected.  If that is the situation, you need to decide which catalog will require less rebuilding. 

Another option requires both catalogs

The master catalog contains all of the adjustments and images EXCEPT those affected by the "Oops".
The backup catalog contains the adjustments of the images that were deleted and the adjustment state of the other images at the time of the backup
What you will want to do in this case is extract from the Backup catalog the adjustments made to the images that were deleted. 

Open the the backup catalog
Select from it all the images that were in the deletion (3 stars, red images)
With those image selected Choose "Export as Catalog..."
Make sure "Export Selected photos only" is checked and "export negative files" is unchecked.
Import this export catalog into your master catalog.
This should restore your master catalog adjustments to the images that had been accidently deleted  (but were copied back to their original folder location).


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