Lightroom update deletes local images and settings

[plasticman]

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Have I missed another discussion about this?

https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/lost-my-pictures-and-presets-after-update-today-18th-august-2020

PetaPixel featured the story also:

https://petapixel.com/2020/08/20/lightroom-app-update-wipes-users-photos-and-presets-adobe-says-they-are-not-recoverable/

Edited August 21, 2020 by plasticman

[jaapv]

Once again - never update software for a few days and until you have read the Internet. And don't update without a compelling reason.

Sorry to be harsh, losing important images can be a minor personal disaster, but anybody who does not know by now that there are only three ways to prevent data loss: backup, backup and backup, has no real reason for complaint and only themselves to blame for the loss. Using Lightroom Mobile unsuscribed and without Cloud backup is a recipe for disaster. 
No matter how good the software company is, and how much checking is done, such errors can and will happen. Not even mentioning malicious intent by criminal minds, like ransomware.

[plasticman]

2 hours ago, jaapv said:

Once again - never update software for a few days and until you have read the Internet. And don't update without a compelling reason.

Sorry to be harsh, losing important images can be a minor personal disaster, but anybody who does not know by now that there are only three ways to prevent data loss: backup, backup and backup, has no real reason for complaint and only themselves to blame for the loss. Using Lightroom Mobile unsuscribed and without Cloud backup is a recipe for disaster. 
No matter how good the software company is, and how much checking is done, such errors can and will happen. Not even mentioning malicious intent by criminal minds, like ransomware.

I understand this viewpoint Jaap, but I think we're talking about other types of users here: mums, young people and casual users. This isn't a demographic that thinks or even knows about needing backups of their images. They have pictures on their phones, and they assume that they're gonna stay there, or at best get automatically uploaded to iCloud.

My understanding of the situation also includes other complicating factors: 
- it seems like iCloud backups maybe syncronized with the deleted state of the device, which would make it impossible to retrieve the lost images from the automatic backup? (I don't remember how this works, as I don't rely on this backup system alone)
- admittedly the app is the free version, but it's still not ok for a free version of an application to delete people's unique memories. This is just totally TOTALLY not ok. No app should be doing this, but you could almost argue that a free version has EVEN MORE responsibility to not delete images on a user's device. The users are by their very nature probably less knowledgeable about the application itself, and generally less informed about what they're committing to.
- many people have auto-update enabled on their iOS devices. So blaming them for not waiting to update is simply irrelevant.

As a software developer, the way that Adobe are handling this is also COMPLETELY wrong, in my view. Their excuse is that the free version of the app wasn't part of their standard test-flow, and was therefore not caught by either their automated tests nor their QA team. I don't need to say, that image-editing software should never include an irreparable stage that includes DELETING images. I just cannot understand the development thinking that went into this, regardless of anything else.

I think it betrays an internal way of thinking within the company: which is that the images that are edited with an Adobe product somehow 'belong' to Adobe. It's the same way of thinking that allowed Amazon to reach into people's Kindles and delete books those people had bought in the past, or Apple when they replaced unique versions of people's uploaded music, and replaced them with generic versions of those songs.

Basically part of the b*llsh*t that involves renting everything instead of owning it.

[andybarton]

21 minutes ago, plasticman said:

I think we're talking about other types of users here: mums, young people and casual users.

How likely are they to have Lightroom installed?

[plasticman]

9 minutes ago, andybarton said:

How likely are they to have Lightroom installed?

Did you look at the forum posts? I was very struck by how many young women were among the people who'd lost all their images. If you subscribe to any of the creative-craft youtube channels, you'll see an enormous amount of young women - mums, students and so on - and you might be surprised at how many of them use applications like the free version of Lightroom to edit their images. The marketplace for presets - take a look at how incredibly enormous that is for presets that are aimed at this demographic - I'm not meaning to sound patronizing, I think it's great. But this group isn't always super-technically informed.