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Adobe's Recent Lightroom iOS App Update Deleted User Photos and Lost Data is Unrecoverable

Wow, felt sorry for those who lost years worth of photos.
This is a wake up call for those photographers, to review if their workflow includes redundancy. Hope that they at least have an iCloud backup.

I think now for an iPad workflow, it’s better to use editors that properly use iOS’ own extension, so your photos are within the Photos app/icloud library, not in the apps’ own storage that can get deleted when the app has issues similar to this. Or maybe I’m mistaken.
 
Like others have said...I feel SO badly for those who have lost photos and edits. I know how it feels and it's an emotional heartache. The worst part is your mind continues to try and remember what you might have lost. I've learned the hard (drive) way and tried to always have several separate backups for everything I create. Even then, there are moments where I was too trusting and realized I needed more levels of backups.

I've used Adobe products for almost 30 years. Our creative team has a 5 member Creative Cloud "all apps" subscription. We stay positive regarding Adobe products--they have enhanced our creativity greatly.

However, if anyone has had an issue with Adobe software and tried to solve it with them, it is horrible. They overstep and try to fix more serious issues before looking at the potentially much smaller specific problem. They want you to go into core system folders and trash preference files and change other fundamental items, killing your presets and plug-ins with no regard to your personal workflow. They request to log into your machine remotely and they bounce around, renaming and killing files, opening Activity Monitor and making changes without requesting. Your original issue is NEVER fixed, and things are much worse. Ultimately, Adobe tech support has no idea how to solve most issues.

In this case, sorry isn't enough. Adobe is a "software" company, that's what they do, it's their core business. As complex as their software gets--working on multiple platforms and systems--they HAVE to get the software right. I update my iOS apps automatically. You can't blame users for that type of software error.
 
this thread really made me anxious. Time Machine only makes a backup of your pictures in Photos if you downloaded all of them and the optimize storage option isn't enabled right? ...asking for a friend 🙊
 
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EugW said:
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.



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.
Click to expand...

Safety deposit box here, too!
 
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A mere apology isn’t enough and would certainly cause me to look elsewhere rather than wait for them to have something like this happen again. How on earth did this get through the testing process?
 
That is a major black eye for Adobe. They should do better for those harmed.
 
ActionableMango said:
...However, it is mind-boggling to me that someone lost "two years" worth of work. How do you have two years worth of work with no backup?
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Yeah, there's always one. Every time something like this happens, there's somebody who lost "years worth of work." It's hard to feel sorry for that guy.

Nevertheless, Adobe really screwed the pooch on this one.
 
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Seriously sucks for those that don't know better, but I have to wonder.. If you know enough about photography to use a third party prosumer app like this, then you should know better.

Have a decent backup strategy and test it. If you don't test the backup strat you don't have one.

I don't have _tons_ of data, but keep reasonable of backups. I have ****/code/photos/etc. going back a couple of decades. 3 backups on-prem. 2 in RAID arrays, so those are redundant, then 1 time machine backup per computer. Those each sync with each of Azure, CGP, and AWS. weekly dumped into Glacier. Then whatever Apple's iCloud strat is.

Each week after a snapshot the TrashCan will just pull the most recent copy from a cloud provider at random and restore the TM backup. I verify around the next day. Maybe a little bit more than what you'd want for a home install, but not by much.
 
Honestly, there needs to be a lawsuit around this. This isn't some Instagram filter app. This is supposed to be a professional level app that wedding photographers and others use.

This is a total lost of faith in Adobe. I've cancelled my subscription with them and will be moving my photo work else where.

As others have said, "we sincerely apologize" is not good enough in this situation.

This would be a great time for Apple to step back into the market and win ex-Adobe customers like myself and show off the power of their Apple Silicon.
 
btrach144 said:
Honestly, there needs to be a lawsuit around this.
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From the Adobe Lightroom ToS (emphasis theirs):

Second 8.2

Indemnification. You will indemnify us and our subsidiaries, affiliates, officers, agents, employees, partners, and licensors from any claim, demand, loss, or damage, including reasonable attorneys’ fees, arising out of or related to your Content, Creative Cloud Customer Fonts, your use of the Services or Software (as applicable), or your violation of the Terms. We have the right to control the defense of any claim, action, or matter subject to indemnification by you with counsel of our own choosing. You will fully cooperate with us in the defense of any such claim, action, or matter.

Section 9 respectively.

9.2 We specifically disclaim all liability for any actions resulting from your use of any Services or Software. You may use and access the Services or Software at your own discretion and risk, and you are solely responsible for any damage to your computer system or loss of data that results from the use of and access to any Service or Software.

9.3 If you post your Content on our servers to publicly Share through the Services, we are not responsible for: (A) any loss, corruption, or damage to your Content; (B) the deletion of Content by anyone other than Adobe; or (C) the inclusion of your Content by third parties on other websites or in other media.

10. Limitation of Liability.

10.1 Unless stated in the Additional Terms, we are not liable to you or anyone else for any special, incidental, indirect, consequential, moral, exemplary or punitive damages whatsoever, regardless of cause, including losses and damages (A) resulting from loss of use, data, reputation, revenue, or profits; (B) based on any theory of liability, including breach of contract or warranty, negligence, or other tortious action; or (C) arising out of or in connection with your use of or access to the Services or Software. Nothing in the Terms limits or excludes our liability for gross negligence, intentional misconduct of Adobe or its employees, death, or personal injury.
 
As crappy as this is if your data is only in one place no matter what the place is it is not backed up. Hard lesson and your data is your job period.
 
Kylo83 said:
Bring back Aperture apples app
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Aperture fans can still run it using Retroactive. DPreview wrote an article about it. I have Aperture 3.6 running on macOS 10.15 Catalina using it.

Retroactive makes modifications to the Aperture application, to remove dependencies on 32-bit frameworks. There is a technical deep dive article if you want to know the details. Some functions no longer work (e.g. playing videos and exporting slideshows as video), but most of it still does.

Look on the bright side: Apple will never release an Aperture update with a bug that deletes your photos.

Retroactive, and instructions to use it, are available from the Retroactive repository on GitHub.
 
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I wonder what the terms and conditions say about this. Technically one could argue that Adobe deleting a user's files is something that can be taken legal action against. Any deletion of files from a user's file system should not be done without the user's permission. That's just basic CRUD. Just because the app has access to files, when a "delete" attempt is made, a popup should appear to the user, asking for their input. An update should never have to do anything with the user's files. This is just bad app architecture. One would expect that there is an app directory and an app data directory, the latter never being touched with any update. The only instance this would get deleted is when the user removes the app entirely.
 
zackkitzmiller said:
From the Adobe Lightroom ToS (emphasis theirs):

Second 8.2

Indemnification. You will indemnify us and our subsidiaries, affiliates, officers, agents, employees, partners, and licensors from any claim, demand, loss, or damage, including reasonable attorneys’ fees, arising out of or related to your Content, Creative Cloud Customer Fonts, your use of the Services or Software (as applicable), or your violation of the Terms. We have the right to control the defense of any claim, action, or matter subject to indemnification by you with counsel of our own choosing. You will fully cooperate with us in the defense of any such claim, action, or matter.

Section 9 respectively.

9.2 We specifically disclaim all liability for any actions resulting from your use of any Services or Software. You may use and access the Services or Software at your own discretion and risk, and you are solely responsible for any damage to your computer system or loss of data that results from the use of and access to any Service or Software.

9.3 If you post your Content on our servers to publicly Share through the Services, we are not responsible for: (A) any loss, corruption, or damage to your Content; (B) the deletion of Content by anyone other than Adobe; or (C) the inclusion of your Content by third parties on other websites or in other media.

10. Limitation of Liability.

10.1 Unless stated in the Additional Terms, we are not liable to you or anyone else for any special, incidental, indirect, consequential, moral, exemplary or punitive damages whatsoever, regardless of cause, including losses and damages (A) resulting from loss of use, data, reputation, revenue, or profits; (B) based on any theory of liability, including breach of contract or warranty, negligence, or other tortious action; or (C) arising out of or in connection with your use of or access to the Services or Software. Nothing in the Terms limits or excludes our liability for gross negligence, intentional misconduct of Adobe or its employees, death, or personal injury.
Click to expand...

Ahh yes. the good old ToS. However that will not protect Adobe if you can prove that Adobe was grossly negligent (as stated in 10.1.C). no ToS can prevent lawsuits for gross negligence and that may have a case here. No reputable application has any business deleting user files without express consent.
 
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