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

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
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.

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Top Rated Comments

Kylo83 Avatar
67 months ago
Bring back Aperture apples app
Score: 55 Votes (Like | Disagree)
JackieTreehorn Avatar
67 months ago
Sincerely apologizing is not going to cut it, I think. Not for 10 USD per month...
Score: 39 Votes (Like | Disagree)
GeoStructural Avatar
67 months ago
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).
Score: 22 Votes (Like | Disagree)
MrGimper Avatar
67 months ago
Always do your own backups. And remember, there is no cloud, just someone else's servers.
Score: 21 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Cyprusian Avatar
67 months ago

Sincerely apologizing is not going to cut it, I think. Not for 10 USD per month...
Sorry doesn't cut it at any price - developers must bear full responsibility for sufficient testing of their products to prevent catastrophic non-recoverable failures such as this.
Score: 19 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Mick-Mac Avatar
67 months ago
Just Adobe's gentle way of saying you really also need to purchase their cloud storage service.
Score: 17 Votes (Like | Disagree)