How to extract thumbnail photos from Lightroom 2 catalog?

Question

My Lightroom collection has previews and catalog on local hardrive and originals on external hardrive. I've lost external hardrive, what is the easiest way to extract preview images from local catalog?Clarification: I'm using MacOS

Answer 1

Do you have copies of the original image files available anywhere? If so, you can re-link them (let me know if you need instructions for that). Once your images in LR are re-linked to the original image files, you can rebuild previews, by selecting as many images as you want, and then go to Library (top menu), and select Previews: build previews (either standard or 1:1).

If your original image files are missing, I don't believe there is a way to "extract" previews, other than taking screenshots of each image: double-click on image to view it larger, then hit shift-command-4, and draw an outline of the image, which will create a .png image file of it.

Let us know if you have any further questions.

Jim