Software
Adobe accidentally deleted people's photos in the latest update to Lightroom
For the past two days, photographers have been panicking across Twitter, Reddit, and Photoshop feedback forums. They downloaded Adobe's latest update to Lightroom's iOS app, and all of a sudden, their photos and presets were gone. The issue has now been confirmed by Adobe, and it has also been said that the data is gone for good.
"I've been talking to customer service for more than 4 hours in 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 said they've lost more than two years of photo editing. The concerns have been reported by PetaPixel.
"This is literally the worst," tweeted another customer, who said they lost not only 800 images, but hundreds of dollars worth of presets.
Adobe representative Rikk Flohr acknowledged and apologized in a forum post yesterday for the snafu. Flohr did not address the scope of the problem, although he stated that the issue had only had an impact on assets that were not synchronized with the Lightroom cloud. Per Flohr, the company has released another update to prevent this issue from affecting additional customers.
However, according to Flohr, the photos can't be recovered. The update will not help anyone who has already been affected.
“We sincerely apologize to any customers who have been affected by this issue,” Flohr wrote.
This is not the first time that company failures have caused user images to go missing: Canon took down its "image.canon" website earlier this month after a storage problem resulted in the loss of some photographs and video files. It ought to serve as a reminder to everyone: back up your things.
