OMG All my photos are gone!

As a digital photographer what is the worst thing you can think of that could happen to you. Excluding death or serious illness I would bet it would be going to look at your photographs and finding all the directories empty of files. All the photographs deleted.

This is what happened to me this afternoon. I fired up Adobe Bridge to take a look at my photos so I could locate some of the Christmas themed shots I did in the summer and start to ready them for Christmas. You can imagine my horror at seeing all the folders empty. All the images, RAW, JPG and PSD were gone but all the folders remained.

I went pale, I felt faint, I believe I uttered a few expletives.

I searched the drive, and found the photographs, and I found the culprit.

Adobe are about to release a new product called Lightroom. It supposed to be a new workflow program that makes your life easier by giving you lots of handy organisation and modification tools. I had installed it in order to see how well it worked. It worked very badly.

After installing I told it to index all my photographs and leave them where they were. There was a checkbox, something like “Index in place”.

It ran like a dog, I have around 8000 images in my system and it took hours to create the thumbnails. Well now I know why, it was moving all my photographs from one location on the hard drive to another.

So I found my pictures, I have put them back where they belong, and I have removed Lightroom.

You would think that it would not be rocket science for a company that releases two products that do almost the same thing, Bridge and Lightroom, for them to actually be able to coexist without one screwing with the others settings.

If you try Lightroom you may want to keep my experience in mind.

This is Lynx looking very seductive, and fortunatly, not lost.