For the past two days, photographers have been posting in a panic across Twitter, Reddit, and the Photoshop feedback forums. They’d downloaded Adobe’s latest update for Lightroom’s iOS app, and suddenly their photos and presets were gone. Adobe has now confirmed the issue, and it’s also said that the data is gone for good.
“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,” complained one Reddit user, who says they’ve lost over two years’ worth of photo edits. The complaints were spotted by PetaPixel.
“This is literally the worst,” tweeted another customer, who said they’d lost not only 800 pictures but hundreds of dollars worth of paid presets.
Adobe representative Rikk Flohr acknowledged and apologized for the snafu in a forum post yesterday. Per Flohr, the company has released another update “to prevent this issue from impacting additional customers.” However, the photos can’t be recovered, according to Flohr. The update won’t help anyone who’s already been impacted.
“We sincerely apologize to any customers who have been affected by this issue,” Flohr wrote.
Adobe has since released a statement, which largely repeats Flohr’s comments. The statement clarifies that the issue specifically affected Lightroom mobile users without an Adobe cloud subscription, as well as subscribers with photos and presets that hadn’t been synced to the Adobe cloud at the time of the update. The company also noted that some customers might be able to recover their data from iPhone or iPad backups.
“We know how frustrating and upsetting this will be to people affected and we sincerely apologize,” the company said.
This isn’t the first time that company mistakes have caused user photos to go missing. Canon took down its “image.canon” platform earlier this month after a storage issue resulted in the loss of some photo and video files. It should serve as a reminder to everyone: back up your stuff.
Update August 20th, 5:36PM ET: Added details from Adobe’s official statement.
