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Lightroom App Update Wipes Users' Photos and Presets, Adobe Says they are 'Not Recoverable' (petapixel.com) 205

An anonymous reader shares a report: This morning, multiple readers wrote in to alert us to a major Adobe gaff. It seems the latest update to the Lightroom app for iPhone and iPad inadvertently wiped users' photos and presets that were not already synced to the cloud. Adobe has confirmed that there is no way to get them back. The issue first cropped up on the Photoshop feedback forums two days ago, when the Lightroom app on iOS was updated to version 5.4. A user named Mohamad Alif Eqnur posted asking why all of his photos, presets, and watermark data had been removed after updating to the most recent version through the iOS app store. This was followed by replies from other users saying that the same thing happened to them, whether or not they were subscription based or free. One user posted to Reddit's r/Lightroom subreddit saying that they had lost "2+ years of edits" after the update.

"I've talked with customer service for 4+ hours over the past 2 days and just a minute ago they told me that the issue has no fix and that these lost photos are unrecoverable," wrote the user. "Adobe is unbelievable some times. All I got was a 'we're sincerely sorry' and nothing else. 2+ years of photo edits just gone because of Adobe and all they give is a sorry, lmao." esterday afternoon, at 4:30pm Eastern Time, Adobe officially confirmed the issue, explaining that customers who updated to Lightroom 5.4 on iPhone and iPad "may be missing photos and presets," that those photos and presets are "not recoverable," and that they "sincerely apologize" to users who have been affected by the issue. Version 5.4.1 has already been released, fixing the issue, but it can do nothing about the lost data.

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Lightroom App Update Wipes Users' Photos and Presets, Adobe Says they are 'Not Recoverable'

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  • Backups ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CaptainDork ( 3678879 ) on Thursday August 20, 2020 @02:21PM (#60423243)

    ... what photographer doesn't backup?

    • Re:Backups ... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by lunchlady55 ( 471982 ) on Thursday August 20, 2020 @02:37PM (#60423327)

      iPhotographers

      • Re:Backups ... (Score:5, Informative)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Thursday August 20, 2020 @05:33PM (#60424113) Homepage Journal

        ... what photographer doesn't backup?

        iPhotographers

        Actually, that's not far from the truth. Almost a decade back, when Apple first added support for over-the-air backups on iOS, everybody asked why they didn't support Time Machine. But Apple stuck to their guns and here we are a decade later with that half-a**ed iCloud backup solution as the only real way to fully back up an iOS device. (Well, you can manually back up to a computer using iTunes, but that's such a pain that nobody does it more than occasionally.)

        The real problem with backups on iOS is that Apple forgot the first rule of backups:

        If you have only one backup, you have no backup. If you have two backups, you have one backup. And so on.

        The fatal flaw that makes iCloud nearly useless as a backup solution is that it does not keep prior backups. As soon as you make a new backup, your old one is gone. And your phone is backing itself up to iCloud daily, in a manner that is outside the user's control. What this means is that as soon as something goes wrong, you have to IMMEDIATELY stop everything you're doing and wipe your device and restore the whole device from the last backup, or your data is GONE.

        And of course, there's no way to partially restore a backup, either, again because iCloud backups were designed almost exclusively as a solution for the physical loss of a device, rather than as a solution for data recovery when things go wrong. So if you've been doing other things on the device since the last backup, you get to choose between what you lost and everything you have created since that backup.

        I guess the iOS team assumed that somebody would eventually add a local backup option, and that iCloud Backup was good enough for emergencies in the interim, but then nobody ever got around to it. I don't know. Either that or they were really greedy and knew they could make more money on cloud storage than by selling Time Capsules. Hard to say which.

        Either way, Apple completely screwed up the backup story on iOS to the point that no non-jailbroken iOS device can ever POSSIBLY be considered a serious tool for anything other than media consumption. It is absolutely NOT suitable for professional use as a content creation tool, because the backup story is a complete joke. So although I may mock Adobe for their poor quality control, I have to really wonder why anyone would trust an iOS device as their only copy of anything.

        iOS is for playing around. And if you're doing editing of photos in Lightroom, the intent is that your main copy is on your computer, and the metadata changes are getting synced back to your computer. The iOS device is little more than a smarter VNC client. If you're using the tool it any other way, you're doing it wrong, and Lightroom should really prevent it from even being POSSIBLE to do that, because properly backing up iOS devices is so completely unrealistic that users are just setting themselves up for data loss.

    • Re:Backups ... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Thursday August 20, 2020 @02:40PM (#60423341) Journal
      Especially on a portable device. What if you drop your phone in a champagne cooler? What if that iPad is stolen from your bag? It sucks to lose a couple of hours or days of work because of a stolen device or because Adobe messed up, but there's no excuse to entrust 2+ years worth of work to a single device, but to entrust it to a mobile device is beyond stupid.
      • by Kohath ( 38547 ) on Thursday August 20, 2020 @02:51PM (#60423385)

        What if you drop your phone in a champagne cooler?

        What if you're being chased by midgets in tuxedos and you slip and your iPhone slides under the wheels of a cannon being used in a Napoleonic war reenactment?

        • Actually did that once. Drop it in a champagne cooler I mean, not the other thing with the tuxedo and war reenactment.
          • by Kohath ( 38547 ) on Thursday August 20, 2020 @03:23PM (#60423553)

            Actually did that once. Drop it in a champagne cooler I mean, not the other thing with the tuxedo and war reenactment.

            My friend had pictures of the Napoleonic war incident but then she upgraded her Adobe Lightroom.

            • by Sebby ( 238625 )

              Actually did that once. Drop it in a champagne cooler I mean, not the other thing with the tuxedo and war reenactment.

              My friend had pictures of the Napoleonic war incident but then she upgraded her Adobe Lightroom.

              " Pics or it never happened! "

          • by sjames ( 1099 )

            Too bad, the other one would have been so much more interesting.

      • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Especially on a portable device. What if you drop your phone in a champagne cooler? What if that iPad is stolen from your bag? It sucks to lose a couple of hours or days of work because of a stolen device or because Adobe messed up, but there's no excuse to entrust 2+ years worth of work to a single device, but to entrust it to a mobile device is beyond stupid.

        There are robust backups on iOS - you can backup to iCloud, or iTunes, or encrypted iTunes. (Encrypted iTunes is best as it saves everything, includi

        • by MeNeXT ( 200840 )

          So there is a backup but you can't access it? When you leave important stuff to automation it's always a good idea to verify how it works and it actually does what it says it does. As far as am I concerned there is no backup unless I test and can recover.

      • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        I agree with you, but for the record, dropping your idevice into water means that it's about 90-95% recoverable, even though apple will tell you it's not, and tell you that everyone who tells you it is are scammers.

        You need to go to your local specialist non-apple certified repair/data recovery shop to do it however.

        Some of them even have youtube channels that showcase the process. I've seen some serious shit on those channels, like phones recovered from oceans, and even phone which was filled with blood of

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      As this is for pictures "not already synced to the cloud", my take is that this is only for pictures that are pretty new. As in a few hours.

      • Re:Backups ... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Thursday August 20, 2020 @02:54PM (#60423407)

        I am not a professional photographer - but I've done my best to always follow one rule: I keep my photos on my camera's memory card until they've been copied to my computer and that computer's photo directory has been backed up externally.

        There is a second rule I've been trying to follow for the past several years, as well: Find and use non-Adobe software whenever possible.

        • I am not a professional photographer - but I've done my best to always follow one rule: I keep my photos on my camera's memory card until they've been copied to my computer and that computer's photo directory has been backed up externally.

          There is a second rule I've been trying to follow for the past several years, as well: Find and use non-Adobe software whenever possible.

          I am in the same situation and feel the same way. To follow the first rule I have three memory chips for my camera. At the end of a photo session I upload the contents of the chip to my workstation, put the chip at the back of the queue, place the chip at the front of the queue in my camera and erase it. My workstation is regularly backed up onto normally-offline storage.

          To follow the second rule I use The Gimp, Imagemagick and Darktable.

        • There is a second rule I've been trying to follow for the past several years, as well: Find and use non-Adobe software whenever possible.

          THIS....so much this!!!

          And the good thing is that now, there are very viable alternatives to most all Adobe products, for professional work, that are NOT on the rental model like all of Adobe CC is.

          Examples:

          Affinity Photo [serif.com]

          Affinity Designer [serif.com]

          Affinity Publisher [serif.com]

          On1 RAW [on1.com]

          Capture One [captureone.com]

          Davinci Resolve [blackmagicdesign.com]

          (Davinci Resolve has video editing, color grading (best in business) a

        • I keep my photos on my camera's memory card until they've been copied to my computer and that computer's photo directory has been backed up externally.

          I reckon the proportion of people who do that is roughly the same as the proportion who post on slashdot

        • Make this rule -1:
          Never ever update any software unless there is a new feature you want, a bug you want fixed, or a security hole you want patched.

          Make this rule 0:
          Whenever an update is released, wait as long as you can stand to apply the update, at least as long as it takes someone else to update and report they have no troubles.

          The way to do it is to have a dev box that is not the same as your prod box.

    • by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Thursday August 20, 2020 @03:00PM (#60423427)

      what photographer doesn't backup?

      Lots of people are somewhat careful about backing up photos.

      I could see people getting a false sense of security that working with Adobe, the photos would be safe.. also Lightroom Cloud, and Lightroom for mobile are all advertised as a means to keep your photos safe since they sync up to the cloud... so by using this product, they actually though they were backing up!

      What is less clear to me, is are edits to photos, and Lightroom configuration itself also not synced to the cloud? It sure seems like they would be, especially since part of the appeal I think is you are supposed to be able to edit on an iPad and then carry on editing on a desktop... so it seems like most data would have been synced?

      I actually have a subscription to Adobe but I never wanted to use the cloud part, so I've really just used it for Photoshop and Lightroom Classic - thus I've no experience with the actual mechanics of Adobe sync to judge how much might have been lost by the average user.

      • Lots of people are somewhat careful about backing up photos.

        Being careful is backing them up. Easy as hell to turn on Google Photos/iOS Photos/Dropbox/OneDrive photo backups and it works close to immediately. That's being careful.

    • Those who use Adobe products which decided to make it cloud based for no real good technical reason. Other than a high monthly fee to use the product.

    • by fermion ( 181285 )
      Here is the problem. Adobe advertises and charges as a pro level tool. Yes, we should have backups. But also we don't expect our pro level tools to the reason we need backups.

      Adobe went into the subscription business to make profits, yet it really has not done that well. The subscription model is disjointed. The subscriptions for cloud space are separate from the software subscriptions. The subscriptions for tablets are different from the subscriptions for general use. The lightroom software in gen

  • News flash (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kohath ( 38547 ) on Thursday August 20, 2020 @02:22PM (#60423251)

    If you don't have backups, you will eventually lose your data. If Adobe isn't the cause, it will be something else.

    • Re:News flash (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Thursday August 20, 2020 @02:29PM (#60423285)

      Doesn't mean forgive and forget though. I foresee legitimate lawsuits against Adobe here, especially if this due to a rush to get the update out with minimal QA (Agile!).

      • Re:News flash (Score:4, Insightful)

        by TheReaperD ( 937405 ) on Thursday August 20, 2020 @02:42PM (#60423351)

        The problem with lawsuits is you have to be able to prove damages. When all the evidence has been erased with no method of recovery, damages could be awfully hard to prove. And, if you can recover the data via some other means, then obviously, the damages are negligible. No matter which way, you're screwed.

        • by Luthair ( 847766 )
          Adobe owns a lot of analytics companies, they probably know what was on your device and was lost.
        • Re:News flash (Score:5, Informative)

          by ebonum ( 830686 ) on Thursday August 20, 2020 @03:37PM (#60423617)

          Actually, to win a lawsuit, you have to prove two things. Damages and liability. Photos have a non-zero value. Add it up, there are your damages. Liability isn't going to happen. The license agreement spells out that they have no liability for anything - forever. There are no laws that make software companies liable for software bugs. If there were such laws, some or all the "no liability" clauses in the license agreement might be unenforceable.

          • by bws111 ( 1216812 )

            What, exactly, is the non-zero value of photos? There is no intrinsic value to a photo.

            • What, exactly, is the non-zero value of photos? There is no intrinsic value to a photo.

              Well, if you are a pro photog...and sell your images, they can have a LOT of value.

              If these were images for a contract you are working on, well that's value you can add up quickly.

              If you sell your images for thousands of dollars that's value I should think you could show, etc.

          • Liability disclaimers do not necessarily hold up in court.

          • I think the OP has missed the point. You cannot claim damages when the evidence has been erased.

            M'lud, I wish to sue Adobe for billions of $$$ for all my photos wot they lost.
            Adobe: what photos?

        • If you have multiple customers with the same complaint, and there are news reports of this bug, the judge and jury won't be doubting this and assuming it's just a conspiracy.

          Damages can be punitive as well. Get a class action together and Adobe is going to feel the pain (especially if they can't even afford decent testers in the first place).

          In short, Adobe is not immune, and no one should be apologizing on Adobe's behalf or celebrating them for screwing up their customers.

    • by Shimbo ( 100005 )

      I don't often feel sorry for Adobe but "I spent 4 hours on the phone and the deleted files didn't magically come back." OK, maybe I just feel sorry for the customer service person who had to deal with all that crap.

      • Re:News flash (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Mattcelt ( 454751 ) on Thursday August 20, 2020 @02:46PM (#60423365)

        You feel sorry for the $11 billion per year software development company that couldn't be buggered to do QA testing properly, destroyed years of their customers' data (costing them who knows how much revenue and lost work), and then couldn't muster anything more than an 'we're sorry' in response?

        That's seriously fucked up.

        • You feel sorry for the $11 billion per year software development company

          I don't feel sorry for them (the 11B company.) If it's not a bug, it's a feature -- and listed that way.

          Latest version notes:
          Fixed lots of problems.
          Frees up more space on phone than ever before.
          Completely changed the UI again since it's Tuesday.

      • I feel sorry for the Tech guy who has to say he cannot find the files, after giving management a rejected proposal to improve backups.
        We need more equipment upgrade these servers. Management, we will see if it will be in next years budget, no promises.
        A problem happens, they fire the Tech Guy because he is 1. Not a team player. 2. Possibly sabotage the process out of spite for not getting his way. 3. Lost the data 4. Failed to convince the management that is firing him, that they really needed the new equi

    • by DRJlaw ( 946416 )

      If you don't have backups, you will eventually lose your data. If Adobe isn't the cause, it will be something else.

      I bet a great number of those people have backups. It's called iCloud, and it'll back up your device so that in the event of theft, breakage, and plain old "it died" you have a relatively recent backup from the last time that you were connected to WiFi and locked.

      What it doesn't do is provide a set of historical backups from different times so that in the event that an application destroys its

      • A backup that stores just the most recent copy is no backup. A good majority of user errors are not recognized immediately,

        • by DRJlaw ( 946416 )

          A backup that stores just the most recent copy is no backup.

          It literally is. You're just moving the goalposts after being called on it.

        • If I'm professionally editing photos I'm saving the changes with fresh filenames. You always keep the proofs separate.
          • I'm professionally editing code, and I specifically do not save changes with fresh filenames. That's what version control is for.

          • Version control. Whether it is code, photos, documents or whatever. It is a many times more efficient mechanism to do this AUTOMATICALLY.
    • However you are paying Adobe a lot of money to manage your data.
      They are the ones that should be managing your backups. While a lot of photographers are good with computers, they are not and shouldn't be expected to be IT System Administrators. Especially if a big company says they will hold onto your data and keep it safe, for a rather large monthly fee.

       

      • by jythie ( 914043 )
        It sounds like in this case Adobe was not managing the data, anything that was synced was fine. Instead it wiped local storage of people who were not syncing.
    • Exactly this.
      Synching to a cloud or other storage is so bloody effortless now (IIRC if you have an android device, I think it DEFAULTS to clouding your pics/videos) there's really no excuse whatsoever.

      I can *absolutely* see "I'm pissed because I lost a week's work!" (with monster graphic files that hadn't finished uploading).
      I cannot feel much sympathy for "I lost 2+ YEARS worth of work".

  • Gaff (Score:5, Informative)

    by war4peace ( 1628283 ) on Thursday August 20, 2020 @02:24PM (#60423259)

    This morning, multiple readers wrote in to alert us to a major Adobe gaff.

    gaff
    noun
    a stick with a hook or barbed spear, for landing large fish.

    gaffe
    noun
    an unintentional act or remark causing embarrassment to its originator; a blunder.

    I guess what Adobe has done is... both?

  • If Adobe's products weren't so technically sophisticated on the backend, they would've gone out of business ages ago. Photoshop is a usability nightmare. Lightroom is vastly inferior to Apple's (now defunct) Aperture. Adobe makes garbage software, but they have some technical features that are basically impossible to live without if you're a certain sort of artist, and so they continue to do dumb garbage like this and just shrug. They simply do not care about your user experience for a single instant.

    • Lightroom is vastly inferior

      Thanks for the opinion. I switched from Aperture to Lightroom because my opinion is the exact opposite like yours. The reality is neither are "trash", you just have a preference that isn't being met.

      They simply do not care about your user experience for a single instant.

      No they don't care about *your* user experience. They clearly care about *mine* since Adobe invests very frigging heavily in UI development based on feedback from actual professionals working with their software, and the result is a UI that *I* find highly intuitive and incredibly easy to use.

  • by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Thursday August 20, 2020 @02:36PM (#60423317) Homepage
    Seriously.
    • by ObliviousGnat ( 6346278 ) on Thursday August 20, 2020 @02:48PM (#60423369)

      Maybe it's a race condition that wasn't caught by their testing.

      I think there's too much reliance on testing (and user feedback!) to find bugs, and not enough on good design to prevent them in the first place.

      "Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs." --Edsger W. Dijkstra, 1969

      • by kackle ( 910159 )

        Maybe it's a race condition that wasn't caught by their testing.

        Race to the bottom, perhaps. I remember reading some of Adobe's software's credits back when, and from one version to the next they went from random names in the credits to mostly east Indian names. Coincidentally I changed careers, so I didn't have to deal with it anymore. Then they went to cloudy/subscriptions after that. I suspect they have been focused on cutting costs (e.g., American salaries); perhaps they made a few too many cuts. My company is dealing with the train wreck resulting from its fi

    • If you have a test condition that can catch 100% of edge cases in all scenarios on all platforms taking into account all user unique characteristics then why are you posting on slashdot rather than lying in your mansion swimming in a pool of money for having solved one of the world's unsolvable problems! Don't waste your life here.

    • by jythie ( 914043 )
      I have nothing to base this on since I don't know their procedures, but I suspect they fell victim to only testing the most common (and supported) use-case and did not want a duplicate test plan to cover people who were using the application but not syncing to the cloud, esp as 'sync to the cloud' is their big marketing push.
  • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Thursday August 20, 2020 @02:42PM (#60423349)

    I remember a time when Adobe made really good software. That was a long time ago. These times, basically all their coding seems to be "cheaper than possible".

    • That was a long time ago - certainly not in this millenium. By 2000-ish, Adobe's main way of "competing" had completely switched over to "acquire competitors, then neglect and gradually bury their products".

  • These people are getting away with negligence and gross incompetence.

    Time to put up a fight against it

  • by northerner ( 651751 ) on Thursday August 20, 2020 @03:06PM (#60423471)

    Great software. Good prices.

    Affinity Photo (like Photoshop) - https://affinity.serif.com/en-... [serif.com]
    Affinity Designer (like Illustrator) - https://affinity.serif.com/en-... [serif.com]
    Affinity Publisher (like InDesign) - https://affinity.serif.com/en-... [serif.com]

    Available for for Mac and Windows, and some for IPad. Free trials available.

    There are also open-source alternatives (GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus).

  • Come on, folks! Between snapshotting filesystems, automated USB and network share backups, etc etc, there is no reason to still be losing data this way.

  • Adobe users shit a brick!

  • Always a good idea to Make manual copies to a backup drive using file system...
  • > All participants will be asked to complete questionnaires about their lives, work, and emotional state to see whether a basic income has had a significant impact.

    It was wonderful, thank you! I became CEO and married a supermodel! Now, please give me some more free money!
  • from Western Digital (portable external drive) for about $100.

    Now you have less of an excuse for not backing your crap up.

  • If you're storing your data on Adobe's apps or cloud, you're asking for trouble. They're not reliable. Their community forums are just full of incidences where user data was deleted and unrecoverable. There've also been many situations where a misunderstanding on how syncing works ends up making users find they're missing data and do not know how to recover it from an archive. Because of that, they end up having to redo a lot of work which they aren't able to replicate.

    2019:
    https://community.adobe.com/t [adobe.com]

  • by devslash0 ( 4203435 ) on Thursday August 20, 2020 @03:48PM (#60423665)
    Those who do backups and those who will do backups.
  • Obviously if this were capitalism, another company would come along that does things better than Adobe and take their business away.
  • by Miser ( 36591 ) on Thursday August 20, 2020 @04:09PM (#60423729)

    Live by the cloud, die by the cloud if you don't have backups.

  • "Adobe is unbelievable some times

    Says someone who hasn't heard that backup software exists, apparently.

    Nothing digital is safe until it's stored on at least three seperate storage devices in at least two seperate physical locations. Treat anything else as temporary data that can and eventually will get lost.

    Sure it sucks if a software update deletes your data. But if this goes to court, the defending lawyers first question should be: "Do you have backups?"

  • Every file starts at multiples of certain offsets defined by the filesystem.
    Each image files has a specific MIME at a designated offset in the header starting at it's file offset.
    You can scan the entire drive directly using /dev/sd* (Or similar)
    I assume that it doesn't actively overwrite the data.
  • But but but (Score:4, Informative)

    by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Thursday August 20, 2020 @05:06PM (#60423981) Journal

    But but but it's the cloud and everything is safe in the cloud. Nothing can ever be lost from the cloud!! Your data is always backed up in the cloud and it.....wait, what? It's all gone?

    LOL at Adobe for hosing their paying customers, and LOL at the dingdongs who didn't bother to back their important stuff because they thought Adobe had their back.

    Too funny, lol.

  • This is inexcusable from Adobe, but anyone with anything important will have a backup or they are complete morons as dropping your iphone or ipad or having it stolen or lost would have had the same effect.

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