Adobe rep Rikk Flohr responded to the thread, saying Adobe is aware of the bug and that a new update, 5.4.1, will correct the issue. However, he did not have good news for customers who had already lost photos and presets. “We know some customers have photos and presets that cannot be recovered,” Flohr wrote. “We apologize to all customers affected by this issue.” It is unclear exactly how many users were affected. Flohr notes that the Lightroom cloud, and Lightroom mobile on Android, Lightroom desktop on macOS and Windows, as well as Lightroom Classic were not affected. This makes it sound as if only images that were not backed up to Adobe’s Cloud were deleted, although this is not a comfort for people who lose their photos.
Needless to say, users who just lost photos and presets were not happy. “Rich, we understand the announcement, however this is not the problem,” wrote Ewelina Wojtyczka. “People have lost months / years of their work. Apologies will not bring it back. ”
Adobe did not comment further on the bug outside Flohr’s post. Some users remarked that they luckily had a backup of their photos or stored them somewhere else – not a bad idea, seeing another large company, Canon, also lost images after an attack of ransomware. While Adobe should not be left out of the fray for this error, perhaps the importance of multiple backups is the hard lesson we can learn from it.
Update, 16:55 PM ET: Adobe has posted a few more details on a support page for Lightroom for mobile 5.4.0 for iPadOS and iOS. It reiterates that the bug “affected customers who use Lightroom mobile without a subscription to the Adobe cloud. It also affected Lightroom cloud clients with photos and presets that were not yet synced with the Adobe cloud. It also advises users to check their backups of iPad or iPhone system to see if they can return to a state before the update that the missing photos may have saved.
