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Adobe's recent 5.4 update for the Lightroom for iOS app had a major bug in it that deleted user photos and presets, eradicating all content that had not been synced to the Adobe cloud service.

lightroom.jpg

As noted by PetaPixel, complaints surfaced on the Photoshop forums on Monday, shortly after the update was released, followed by similar reports on Reddit and Twitter.

Affected users lost photos, presets, edits, watermarks, and more. One user on Reddit said that he lost two years of edits, and there are dozens of similar complaints from people who lost important data. The problem affected users who were using local storage without having uploaded that content to Adobe's cloud storage service.

Many of those affected were using Adobe's free service, which has limited cloud storage, but some paid users were also impacted and lost thousands of photos.

Adobe on Wednesday released a 5.4.1 update to prevent the bug from affecting additional users, and confirmed at that time that none of the data that was lost is in any way recoverable. From Adobe:
We are aware that some customers who updated to Lightroom 5.4.0 on iPhone and iPad may be missing photos and presets that were not synced to the Lightroom cloud.

A new version of Lightroom mobile (5.4.1) for iOS and iPadOS has now been released that prevents this issue from affecting additional customers.

Installing version 5.4.1 will not restore missing photos or presets for customers affected by the problem introduced in 5.4.0.

We know that some customers have photos and presets that are not recoverable. We sincerely apologize to any customers who have been affected by this issue.
Adobe has recommended that affected users try to restore an iCloud backup that might have the lost content, but there's no solution on Adobe's end to address the loss and no fix if there's no iCloud backup.

Article Link: Adobe's Recent Lightroom iOS App Update Deleted User Photos and Lost Data is Unrecoverable
 
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Bring back Aperture apples app
I've had Apple Photos kill lots of pix on me too. It was related to their iCloud service, early on. After that, I avoided iCloud for years. Only recently have I gone back to iCloud.

I didn't have a problem with Aperture but I didn't have as much stuff in Aperture.


And that is why you don't put all your eggs in only one basket.

I have OneDrive and still do backups to my SSD external drives about every month or so.

(I use iCloud only for my iPhone and iPad).
Yup. In addition to that, I've actually taken to making local copies of my important files on a hard drive and putting them in a safety deposit box at the bank.
 
Uh oh...
Thankfully? I don’t use Adobe iOS app on my iPad Pro. Desktop version does the recovery just fine.

And? Don’t click on app updates just because there is one? I think past iOS 14 beta I’d better hold off iOS update for as long as possible in the future.
 
This is crazy. Fortunately I’m not at all creative with photo or video design so I’ve never really used Adobe besides the occasional photo touch up, but I imagine this affected a lot of people.
 
This is just one reason why I transitioned from Aperture to Mylio. All my photos and edits sync across all my devices and I can edit and catalogue on my iPad or iPhone. But I control where my photos are stored and sync to both cloud and physical storage and backups.
 
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