Over a month ago now my external hard drive failed and I lost all unsaved work that hadn't been backed up to a second or third location. It was a truly terrible time and having to tell people I'd lost their images was an experience I don't want to have to re-live, ever. One of the things that was lost was the collection of images from my grandparents 40th wedding anniversary. People kindly offered to try and help, the drive was sent off and attempts were made for the files to be retrieved, all to no avail. The drive was well and truly dead. Once I got the news that all hope was lost on salvaging the original files I was ready to put the whole thing behind me.
As I was in the process of backing up everything I had to a new external drive and burning to DVDs, I went through my Lightroom catalog to see if there were files missing that I hadn't yet realized. While doing this I opened the folder for my Grandparents 40th and started viewing the images from the day contained in my Lightroom library. I wondered if perhaps there was any way of salvaging the preview images to at least get some sort of useable files. I opened up each file in the develop module and did a screen grab of the image, then renamed and saved the new copy to my hard drive. After cropping back to the original aspect ratio I ended up with a file, though small, was still at least useable in some capacity.
I was so excited about my discovery that I wanted to immediately tell everyone, but I didn't. I was afraid that there would be some unforeseen complication and the images would be lost a second time over. Rather than getting hopes up for no reason I waited until I'd salvaged whatever images I had imported to Lightroom from the shoot and they were all safely stored in three different places. Now I'm pleased to say that I've put a selection of those images together into a slideshow and I'm ready to share them with my family. I'm so thankful that you allowed me to photograph your special day and I'm sorry that it's taken so long for you to finally see your images. Enjoy.
As I was in the process of backing up everything I had to a new external drive and burning to DVDs, I went through my Lightroom catalog to see if there were files missing that I hadn't yet realized. While doing this I opened the folder for my Grandparents 40th and started viewing the images from the day contained in my Lightroom library. I wondered if perhaps there was any way of salvaging the preview images to at least get some sort of useable files. I opened up each file in the develop module and did a screen grab of the image, then renamed and saved the new copy to my hard drive. After cropping back to the original aspect ratio I ended up with a file, though small, was still at least useable in some capacity.
I was so excited about my discovery that I wanted to immediately tell everyone, but I didn't. I was afraid that there would be some unforeseen complication and the images would be lost a second time over. Rather than getting hopes up for no reason I waited until I'd salvaged whatever images I had imported to Lightroom from the shoot and they were all safely stored in three different places. Now I'm pleased to say that I've put a selection of those images together into a slideshow and I'm ready to share them with my family. I'm so thankful that you allowed me to photograph your special day and I'm sorry that it's taken so long for you to finally see your images. Enjoy.
To see more images from this event please click here to view the slideshow.
