For those of you who watch me on Twitter or have been around me the last few days you know I’ve been rather frustrated due to some file system errors that corrupted my hard drive and left me without a Lightroom catalog (The catalog stores all the adjustments and edits to your images). Unfortunately for me the last catalog I had was from before my visit back home in around early December, so essentially I had lost all the edits, ratings, tags, etc… to the last 2 months of pictures, which is a task I would not want to repeat and had been putting off for about the last week. Fortunately I didn’t lose any of the image files themselves, so those were still there so I could go and re-import them into the backup catalog, but it was still a daunting task to go back and re-edit. There are times when I enjoy going back and changing settings or adjustments on pictures, but to do it on ones I had so recently finished editing… I was so in a hole, or so I thought. I finally decided to take the time a few hours ago to go and re-import the photos and edit the ones I needed and just let most of it slide by. As the photos were importing I noticed something unexpected, the photos had ratings… and the little icons in the corner that indicated edits had been made on the pictures… as I watched in incredulation I realized that DNG’s have the capability to store program specific information such as edits, ratings, tags, etc… For once my practice of always downloading and converting the raw files my camera produces into DNG’s paid off and the edits and ratings FOR EVERY SINGLE PICTURE was preserved!!! Now, that being said, it doesn’t keep the history of edits made to the picture, (I could still reset all the sliders and get essentially the same thing however) but that it stored the edits is a wonderful amazing lifesaver.
Yes… I know, backup, backup, backup.
I’ve had my share of issues in the past, and granted, this one could have been MUCH MUCH worse, I’m so thankful I took the time to convert all the photos on import into DNG, and you should to for reasons like this.
Paul Rohde
DiskWarrior saved me from losing almost 10 months of work once. However it did so after 3 months of booting off an external. Turns out holding down the option key while trying to do a file system rebuild makes it go into crazy all out mode. . .and it worked. Good to know about the DNGs, I’ll have to remember that one.