Lightroom app update wipes users' photos and presets, Adobe says not recoverable

In another story, I needed Lightroom for about a week to do some photo work. I started with their subscription for the month and I wanted to let go if I&#x27;m done in the first month.<p>While trying to cancel my subscription, I realize I can only do that after paying for the remaining 11 months (rough calculation).<p>With no other option, I paid my penalty and left Adobe for good. I have deleted my 15+ year old Adobe account.<p>Alternatives and to serve nostalgic attachments, I bought the whole suite of Affinity[1] Products. I&#x27;ve also bought Darkroom[2] for photo editing on iPad.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;affinity.serif.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;affinity.serif.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;</a><p>2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;darkroom.co" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;darkroom.co</a><p>P.S. (edit&#x2F;addition) I ended a 25+ year relationship with Adobe. I paid myself through my school and college with PageMaker, and other softwares (both open source, free, and paid).

When things like this happen, is it any wonder an increasing number of users are viewing any sort of &quot;updates&quot; with extreme apprehension? &quot;It was working fine just before, and now I&#x27;ve lost everything. Why should I have even updated!?!?&quot;<p>I still remember when the general advice was &quot;do not upgrade&#x2F;change what works, unless you need something in a later version&quot;, which then changed to &quot;updates are recommended&quot;, followed by &quot;updates are <i>strongly</i> recommended&quot;, and more recently, &quot;updates are mandatory&quot;.<p>Adobe isn&#x27;t alone, Microsoft had done worse not long ago --- with a <i>forced</i> update too:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18148376" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18148376</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18189139" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18189139</a><p>(On the flip side, at least you&#x27;re able to run file recovery programs on a PC.)

Slight sidebar: it&#x27;s so frustrating that Adobe made the new Lightroom some cloud based monstrosity. For photographers with serious workflows involving local disks, we&#x27;re now relegated to &quot;Lightroom Classic&quot; which makes me feel like I&#x27;ll be discontinued in N years from now. I hope they change course and drop this whole cloud thing, the yearly subscription model is bad enough.

Well, this is as good a time as any then to try out Darktable [1]!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.darktable.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.darktable.org&#x2F;</a>

Does anybody know a good photo management software that&#x27;s not Lightroom? I don&#x27;t actually need to do edits to my photos - I need to manage my photo library. Lightroom is not great at it but is passable - is there anything else? What I&#x27;m looking for is software that:<p>- Is fast<p>- Is capable of leaving photos where they are (&quot;import-in-place&quot;).<p>- imports photos from card to NAS, organized by time ( year&#x2F;month&#x2F;day)<p>- allows me to make selections &amp; export e.g. to Google Photos (exporting to a different local folder is good enough, I can setup google photos to sync, it&#x27;s only slightly inconvenient).<p>- Ideally has good features for finding image duplicates, and maybe for searching.<p>- Keeps my photos locally&#x2F; doesn&#x27;t insist on a cloud location.

I&#x27;d wish for every disgruntled Adobe client who now switches to another tool that satisfies their requirements, saving a few (or considerably more) bucks in the process, to donate a small part of that to the FOSS, libre alternatives for much of Adobe&#x27;s product portfolio:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gimp.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gimp.org&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;inkscape.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;inkscape.org&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;darktable.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;darktable.org&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;krita.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;krita.org&#x2F;</a><p>...<p>You could do so much good with relatively little! :) Thanks everyone who considers donating!

&gt; This is also a great reminder for photographers that you should always back up your images, in multiple places, so you’re never subject to a single point of failure. Mistakes like this happen, even at some of the world’s largest companies<p>For a long time, I’ve been thinking that for all the value that Adobe provides in some of its products, it’s still quite a bad deal for the users. <i>The single point of failure for people who use Adobe is Adobe.</i> Those who have realized this sooner (around the time it went full-on into subscriptions) and made changes to take more control over their workflow would be better off without being controlled and swayed in every which direction because the company just wants to make more money.<p>While I feel pained at the loss that the Lightroom app users are going through (any kind of data loss is quite painful), I hope that for their own sake, many more users start looking at alternatives that aren’t premised on holding them hostage.

Yet another tick on the list of &quot;ways mobile devices are not real computers&quot;. If something erases my files I ought to be able to run a recovery scan and get them back in minutes, assuming they haven&#x27;t been overwritten with new data.

I have recently migrated off Lightroom to Rawtherapee, and would recommend it to photographers serious about raw development. I don’t see myself going back, really.<p>Open-source, plain-text profile format, works everywhere. Like Lightroom, it handles DNGs natively, but allows more control as you create your image from raw scene-referred data.<p>Its GUI is somewhat laggier, but if you do a lot of batch processing you may be able to more than offset that by writing a simple script that delegates processing to your own cloud compute (it has a CLI tool, something Lightroom is unlikely to offer). Profile once, apply without having to launch the GUI.

Happy with that cloud based software yet? There is nothing more frustrating than to see all these software packages that have been turned into eternal cashcows by forcibly grafting on a service that absolutely nobody needs.<p>Then to top it off they lose your data. Fantastic.

Affinity Photo or Pixelmator Pro are great replacements for Photoshop. Resolve and Final Cut are much better than Premiere.<p>I&#x27;m still looking for a replacement for After Effects and Illustrator though.<p>I&#x27;ve heard Affinity Publisher is a great InDesign replacement although I&#x27;ve never used it.

Top reasons I prefer Darktable over Lightroom:<p>1. It runs on all platforms<p>2. It is not cloud based<p>3. It does not delete your photos

There&#x27;s one winner here: the law firm that puts together the class action.

OK, seriously now...first Canon, now Adobe?<p>Am I missing something here, what&#x27;s going on?!

At least, this time Adobe only deleted their own files, unlike in 2016 where they on MacOS deleted files owned by others: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-35577498" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-35577498</a>

Obviously this is a screw up on Adobe&#x27;s part, but this is a good time to remind everyone that if you&#x27;re not backing up your data, then it must not be very important to you.<p>Back up your stuff! You never know when something unexpected will cause you to lose it!

This is another example of deeply yet inadvertent hostile behavior by a tech company towards artists and creativity.<p>It is hard to overstate how much this matters, and is overlooked.<p>I am constantly grateful that I live in a time where I have all these magical creative tools.<p>At the same time, tech companies have a tendency to internalize ignorance about what artists and musicians actually need, and what is nurturing or destructive to creativity.<p>I think the best example of this is the YouTube algorithms that favor frequent uploads for discovery. Probably nothing could be more hostile to human creativity, and I’m not sure it’s purely profit seeking. I think it is actually just ignorance.<p>—edit—<p>Apple has not made it obvious how to back up all the content from your apps, nor has Adobe, nor has either of them made it easy to do it in a non-proprietary fashion. This is anti-artistic. It makes me not have true control over my creations, and this is discouraging and damaging to creativity.<p>—edit2–<p>I believe almost any artist would say: “having control of the durability of my art is extremely important, the latest Lightroom feature is largely insignificant.”

&gt; 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.<p>“Not already synced to the cloud”. Whatever you think about Lightroom, this headline makes it sound much worse. Photos on the device that haven’t previously synced are lost, not all your photos in your library.

This is a common mistake when it comes to cloud synchronization with an equally simple fix. When you compare a set of items A on the user device against a set of items B on the cloud you should FIRST check (either through file name, hash or creation&#x2F;modification timestamp) that:<p>- An item in A is not present in B before uploading it to B. - An item in A is present in B and has changed on A before updating it on B. - An item in A is present in B and has changed on B before updating it on A. - An item in B was present on A but it&#x27;s no longer there before deleting it from B. - An item in A was present on B but it&#x27;s no longer there before deleting it from A.<p>Seriously, this is the ABC of cloud sync. Many free products also got it right. There&#x27;s no excuse for the engineers at Adobe not to get it right in their overpriced products.

It may be coincidence, but just earlier today, I had to use a photo for display pic and default crop won&#x27;t let you keep the whole photo in original aspect ratio, so I installed Lightroom to do resize but filling a blur. I believe this was my first time installing the app from play store, I signed in through Google login, I was surprised to find some 40 to 50 photos of absolute stranger synced to my email! I don&#x27;t know who that person is, I assumed they may have put in my gmail instead of theirs, but it&#x27;s stupid that they would start associating backups without verifying the email! Adobe has lost any respect it had. I will never trust them with my data.

My wife tells me to never update apps on phones. The updates are never worth it, they are just mucking around, no real progress is made on these apps, and worse, sometimes the updates introduce ads. The red circles beckon me anyway, all the time. I can&#x27;t stop myself. I just disabled my updates, and I&#x27;m finally going to listen to her.<p>Beyond this major disaster, I updated my phone about a month ago. Ever since Chrome just randomly freezes now. I have to switch apps, and switch back to get it flowing again.

It was amazing that Lightroom came with free upgrades, year after year. I would probably have happily paid $99 each time there was a major version number increase, even if that meant paying effectively $99 a year.<p>That’s not far off the subscription price. Something about the subscription model feels so arrogant though, on Adobe’s part, that I just can’t stomach it. Is it because it feels like rent?<p>May Lightroom 6, and the hours and hours of face and location tagging I’ve sunk into it, last forever.

This is exactly why I do manual updates for pretty much all my software. Any time I mention it, people hound me with &quot;what about security issues!&quot;<p>uh oh yeah thats a concern, but I will take that risk over shit like this where personal files are just getting wiped. Most users <i>dont</i> need bleeding edge software. You can run months behind and be fine in most cases.<p>I read release notes. When an update comes out, unless some big feature that I need is introduced, I skip it.

You think Abode is bad, try cancelling any recurring billing from Google, even when fraudulent. A CC of mine was compromised and a YouTube premium account was made. I&#x27;ve changed my card number three times, yet somehow Visa let&#x27;s them keep billing me. Finally had to cancel the CC account, Google kept trying to bill it for 90 days even after multiple chargebacks and the account being frozen from all charges.

It&#x27;s not the first time Adobe would have deleted stuff. I remember the Backblaze fiasco from a few years ago.<p>Also, App Store Review didn&#x27;t protect users from this.

Reason 23,541 why I refuse to use any &quot;cloud&quot; based service. There is no &quot;cloud&quot; - its just stored on someone else&#x27;s hardware.

CaptureOne is a great product if anyone is looking for alternatives at this time. No BS subscriptions, just a license.

I switched to Phase One&#x27;s Capture One a long time ago -- it&#x27;s light years ahead of anything Lightroom has to offer.<p>The biggest improvement is performance, due to C1&#x27;s use of Sessions, which are basically folders where you store your RAW files, edits&#x2F;history, trash, and exports per shoot.<p>While C1 does support the antiquated method of using a Library, there&#x27;s more safety and manageability in using Sessions, and most professional photographers use this for good reason.<p>And regarding presets, C1 stores all (incl. user) presets in a standard directory in your home folder, so it&#x27;s trivial to keep them automatically backed up.

Slightly OT but does anyone else here just not update key software anymore? I haven&#x27;t updated my Mac because the last time I did it, it caused a major startup error and I lost documents.

This is clearly not ideal and reflects poorly on Adobe&#x27;s QA process but this is about items that are not backed up. Of course most of these users probably had their iOS device &quot;backed up&quot; to Apple&#x27;s servers but this backup is just replication. It helps if you lose your phone, but it doesn&#x27;t help if an app has a bug or you make a mistake.<p>It would be very cool of Apple or Google device backups supported a point-in-time restore. (Ideally a per-app point-in-time restore).

Are they saying they deleted the photos from your phone&#x2F;tablet or just the adjustments in Lightroom?<p>If they&#x27;re just talking about Lightroom data, then although that&#x27;s pretty crappy, it&#x27;s what I expect out of apps. I remember the Apple Pages used to do this too. If you deleted or upgraded, the data was erased. That&#x27;s all changed since they enabled cloud, but still was a horrible design.

Good thing I went with Capture One.

But but... I thought Apple&#x27;s excuse for their 30% tax was that their App Review process and locked down OS etc is supposed to prevent apps from doing such malicious things on iOS? To keep us and our data &quot;safe&quot;? Err... right?

From what I gather, this only affects the new Lightroom app, and primarily the iOS apps.

For many years now I&#x27;ve been a proponent of &quot;never update unless you absolutely need to&quot;. I just updated my old Macbook Pro to Catalina and now it gets ridiculously hot watching even simple YT videos.

And that is why I use Lightroom classic with a hard drive local and an Amazon cloud drive backup. Still can&#x27;t trust the cloud as your only backup

Honestly, from all the posts only actionable I could figure out, is to have multiple backups of important files, preferably real-time.<p>Whole thread is about repeated tropes of why they hate subscription&#x2F;Adobe&#x2F;MS etc. All these comments on alternative s&#x2F;w for Desktops are funny and typical HN as the issue is with mobile apps and none of the comments showed any pattern with Adobe of poor QA. Assuming, none of the alternatives will ever have a catastrophic bug is also ¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯ .

When the stock drops tomorrow I’ll pick it up because at the end of the day Adobe has whole industries by the balls.

The title of this should be &quot;Lightroom <i>iOS</i> app update...&quot; and save some panic for a desktop user.

I&#x27;ve just deleted every Adobe app from my phone and tablet.<p>I&#x27;m not going to trust this corporation.

The cloud, nor one computer should ever be your only backup

I think we can just chalk this up to a competition between Canon and Adobe on who can delete the most photos from the world.

just pirate it

* They&#x27;re

Ah yes, the cloud! Trust in the cloud folks! How about adobe stops treating their pockets as my personal storage space, and keeps my files secure on my own device instead of deleting everything they didn&#x27;t have a copy of. This is why I don&#x27;t buy software that comes with a subscription and a deal with the devil.

Darktable is great by the way; nothing&#x27;s perfect, but its indexing and navigation is faster than Lightroom and the filters are basically what you use. I&#x27;ve also heard good things about RawTherapee.

Apple&#x27;s 30% pays for strict reviews that should have prevented this...

This is why apps should be built on blockchains