What Happened To My Image Files?

This device saved my missing images. (click to enlarge)

A few weeks ago while I was editing my image files from my long wildlife weekend, I suddenly realized that some landscape images I had made on day two, a very foggy morning, were not among the images I imported into Lightroom.  I went through the entire collection of images I made, over 1650, and didn't find them?  What?  Oh No!

Let me backtrack a bit and tell you how I handle my image files when I travel.  My typical image file handling process when I travel is to back up my images daily—in two phases.  In one case I back up my images more than once daily.  I'll explain.  

With cameras that have dual memory cards, I always set the second card as a backup.  With cameras that have only one memory card, such as my Nikon Z7, I will back up the images during the shooting day, which is easy and quick, using my Western Digital My Passport Pro Wireless Portable Hard Drive.  This device is battery powered, has an SD card slot as well as a USB 3.0 connection (into which you can insert a card reader) as well as can connect wirelessly to another device such as a tablet or phone for transferring files or streaming music or video.  That is phase one of my backup strategy—second memory card and/or incremental backup of cameras with only one memory card.

At the end of the day back at my hotel room, I import all of the day's images into Lightroom Classic in my laptop's primary drive.   At the same time, Lightroom sends a copy to a USB 3.0 SSD portable hard drive.  Then—for extra insurance every image file is in multiple places, I plug all memory cards (both the XQD and/or SDXC) into the WD Passport also, so I have all of the day's images now in three places which leaves me free to reformat the memory cards if necessary.  The laptop and backup drive will stay in my hotel room while the WD drive goes with me in the car whenever I leave the hotel room.  That gives some extra protection from theft if my hotel room was burglarized.

Since the WD Passport Pro only backs up files incrementally, my Nikon Z7 files are fully backed up during the day and just the remainder are backed up in the hotel room.  It makes for a fast, expedient experience.

When I return home, I export "as a catalog" my Lightroom image files from the laptop to the SSD drive, then import them "as a catalog" into my master catalog in Lightroom into my desktop computer.

Back to the missing image files.

So...I had followed my routine and, as I said above, I realized several days after returning home, that somehow some of my image files did not make it into my master Lightroom catalog.  I still don't understand how this happened as they were just a small part of one day's shooting on one camera.  The other files from the same camera and the same day's shooting made it to my catalog.  In the day or two after returning, thinking all was well, I had reformatted all of my memory cards when cleaning and resetting my cameras.  No images would remain easily recoverable from them.

However, there was no reason to panic.  With my strategy, especially having all contents of each memory card on the WD Passport Pro, the images should be there.  Even though the images were not in Lightroom or on the backup drive (which tells me they never got imported for some reason), my habit of completely backing up all memory cards to the Western Digital Passport Pro had the images safely on it.  My other habit of not formatting that drive until I need it again guaranteed all of the images I made during the entire trip were still on the drive.

Things happen that can't be easily explained.  Sometimes you miss things.  Protect your work by creating and following a system that makes sense to you and your way of working to have multiple copies of your images so you don't find yourself missing some files or even finding corrupted and unreadable files.  In my case, this is now the second time this Kind of thing has happened.  Both times, my backup strategy saved the day!

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Thanks for looking. Enjoy! 

Dennis A. Mook 

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