How do I restore the keyword list in Lightroom 4?

[Peter Jason]

By mistake I deleted a keyword in Lightroom4 from
the Keyword List.

How do I restore this list from the once-a-week
catalogue backups?

Peter

[Savageduck]

Post by Peter Jason
By mistake I deleted a keyword in Lightroom4 from
the Keyword List.
How do I restore this list from the once-a-week
catalogue backups?
Peter

I am making the assumption you are running LR4 on a Windows machine. I
use a Mac, but the principles are the same.

With LR closed go to the LR backup folder. Locate the "Lightroom 4
Catalog.lrcat" file in your latest backup, or whichever date you want
to go to.
NOTE: don't open the "Lightroom 4 Catalog.lrcat" file in the primary
Lightroom folder, as this will just bring you to the current state with
the lost data.

Double click to open it.
LR4 should open and the catalog meta data should reflect the state at
the time of that backup.

If worse comes to worse, call Adobe and the support folks will be more
than happy to hand hold you through it.

[Tony Cooper]

Post by Peter Jason
By mistake I deleted a keyword in Lightroom4 from
the Keyword List.
How do I restore this list from the once-a-week
catalogue backups?
Peter

You can restore the catalog to the former state, but it might be
easier just to add the one missing keyword and then go to
Collections>Without Keywords and this will bring up all the images
that have not been assigned a keyword. Control A and add the keyword
to these images.

This will not work if you have multiple keywords assigned to the
photos.

Restoring the catalog from the backup will not include other changes
you've made since the last backup.

[Savageduck]

Post by Tony Cooper

Post by Peter Jason
By mistake I deleted a keyword in Lightroom4 from
the Keyword List.
How do I restore this list from the once-a-week
catalogue backups?
Peter

You can restore the catalog to the former state, but it might be
easier just to add the one missing keyword and then go to
Collections>Without Keywords and this will bring up all the images
that have not been assigned a keyword. Control A and add the keyword
to these images.

I agree that it might be simpler, but perhaps a tad more tedious to
just add the missing keyword to the list and retag the appropriate
images. Then there is the case of multiple keywords, so the "without
Keywords" filter might not get to the images which need fixing. So a
date range might be a better search. The other problem comes if the one
particular missing keyword ha been stripped from earlier shots.

Post by Tony Cooper
This will not work if you have multiple keywords assigned to the
photos.
Restoring the catalog from the backup will not include other changes
you've made since the last backup.

Yup! but better to have some degree of restoration with fewer fixes to make.

In the backup folder you will find multiple dated folders, one for each
backup. In that folder you will find the "Lightroom 4 Catalog.lrcat"
file associated with the backup on that date.

For example, I have multiple folders in my backup folder, this one
labeled "2013-03-03 2339" another "2013-03-15 0951" the 4 digit number
is the time of the backup. So he can certainly go to his last backup ,
restore and reimport and the fix the effected batch.

[Peter Jason]

On Thu, 13 Jun 2013 20:16:12 -0700, Savageduck

Post by Savageduck

Post by Tony Cooper

Post by Peter Jason
By mistake I deleted a keyword in Lightroom4 from
the Keyword List.
How do I restore this list from the once-a-week
catalogue backups?
Peter

You can restore the catalog to the former state, but it might be
easier just to add the one missing keyword and then go to
Collections>Without Keywords and this will bring up all the images
that have not been assigned a keyword. Control A and add the keyword
to these images.

I agree that it might be simpler, but perhaps a tad more tedious to
just add the missing keyword to the list and retag the appropriate
images. Then there is the case of multiple keywords, so the "without
Keywords" filter might not get to the images which need fixing. So a
date range might be a better search. The other problem comes if the one
particular missing keyword ha been stripped from earlier shots.

Post by Tony Cooper
This will not work if you have multiple keywords assigned to the
photos.
Restoring the catalog from the backup will not include other changes
you've made since the last backup.

Yup! but better to have some degree of restoration with fewer fixes to make.
In the backup folder you will find multiple dated folders, one for each
backup. In that folder you will find the "Lightroom 4 Catalog.lrcat"
file associated with the backup on that date.
For example, I have multiple folders in my backup folder, this one
labeled "2013-03-03 2339" another "2013-03-15 0951" the 4 digit number
is the time of the backup. So he can certainly go to his last backup ,
restore and reimport and the fix the effected batch.

Many thanks. I was installing and cruzing through
Lightroom 5 when I deleted the keyword by mistake.

I went to File/Open Recent and "re launched" the
Lightroom4 catalogue into LR5 and this did the
trick. I have to redo a few photos but that's
all. I have the LR5 up & running but there are
no obvious changes, like the colour and contrast
of the Grid View can't be changed which is
annoying because the Ctrl-click shows only a
slight change in the background. I tend to tag by
Ctrl-click and then tick the keyword boxes.

Peter