Lightroom Mobile: iOS: Missing Pictures, Presets, and Watermark Data after 5.4 Update

Just use 5.4.1 and restore your originals from cloud sync.

I am afraid our last iTunes backup is about 1-year old. Made it when replacing the broken iPhone at service.

Ralf Böhler Hi. do you have a n adobe creative cloud subscription ? if sync on you could possibly retrieve your data.

Apple should allow incremental backup lik imazing team can do on personal computer

https://imazing.com

Ralf, if you have a paid subscription all your images should be synced to the Adobe cloud. Did you not enable the sync? If you sync to the cloud, it will not fill up your other devices. It will only keep recently accessed images on your device and dynamically manage the space usage on your device. You can check if your images are synced to the cloud by opening a browser and going to lightroom.adobe.com and logging on with your creative cloud account.

If you disable sync (which you really shouldn't do if you pay for a subscription!) your only hope is restoring from a iCloud backup. This is done by taking one iOS device and resetting it, logging on to your iCloud account on it and chose to restore the device from the device that had all the images on it using a backup from just before the device got the bad Lightroom update. This should in theory restore Lightroom to the version just before the incident. 

Hello Kris. Thanks for the tip.
I stopped syncing a while ago to keep the cloud storage from overflowing. Therefore the lost photos are not included in the Creative Cloud.

Hello, Jao,

Ok, I understand that my data, photos, presets, ... are definitely lost. The synchronization to the Creative Cloud is not active and the last iPad backup does not contain the lost data. Bad enough, but not to be changed now.

Unfortunately I have to disagree with your statement about the synchronization between the different mobile devices, or have I made other experiences.

I use LR on one iPhone and one iPad. If the sync is enabled on both devices, every action is synchronized immediately. If I import one (or more) photos on the iPad, they are immediately loaded into CC and synced on the iPhone, the same happens when I create folders or albums. When I perform these actions on the iPhone, they are immediately synced to the iPad.

This makes no sense in my eyes. Who wants to have all photos on all devices? I would like to be able to determine that myself.
The many posts in these threads show that I am not alone with this view.

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Ralf, the entire goal of the Lightroom cloud apps (iOS, Android, Mac, Win, ChromeOS) is to store the photos in the cloud and provide access to them across all devices. By keeping sync enabled the photos are uploaded and stored in the cloud. There is a Creative Cloud Lightroom only subscription plan that includes 1TB of cloud storage to make this work. 

If you want local control over what photos are in the cloud and which are local you want to use Lightroom Classic, which is part of the Creative Cloud Photography plan (along with Photoshop). The Photography plan does allow for syncing Lightroom Classic to the Lightroom cloud apps, but it only includes 20GB of storage. 

Who is "you" to whom you refer? I think the real "you" is the person who did not sync.

No. Not syncing is not the cause of the data loss.

No, it wasn't. But failure to sync was the cause of not being able to recover. Anybody using any kind of data generating software should know that backups are MANDATORY and that software error is INEVITABLE and that the only insurance is BACKING UP.

I have read the whole thread and cant find MrRodney saying "always backup, it is all your own fault" Weirdly quiet from him. ;-) 

Did you sync? Are you on the Free version? Read the thread postings by Elezenga who explains how to recover. If you are on Free Version, I agree you should get back what you paid...

I cannot sync while backpacking, funnily enough.  Der.  Obviously I have a paid subscription if I asked for a refund.  Who are you?  Do you work for adobe, or are you just that bored?

Easy there, big fellow! Just trying to help! Did you sync after you got home?

This is exactly correct. If you don’t make backups you leave yourself wide open to data loss. Yes, this time it was Adobes fault, but you can just as easily lose data other ways, theft of iPad, corruption, accidental deletion. For those who never made any backups of any sort, it’s a life lesson learnt. I lost a load of photos last year when a memory stick got corrupted, luckily I had another backup, so all I really lost was a bit of time. It’s your data, look after it.

Hello, Daniel,
how to backup photos, presets, etc. from the Creative Cloud to external media?
I have not yet discovered this possibility.

Honestly I hate iOS and would recommend against having an iPhone, I got the iPad Pro in the end because of the better hardware since I wanted a tablet specifically for Lightroom.

In Lightroom Desktop preferences under Local Storage, choose Store a copy of all the originals at the specified location. There put it where you want it. Mine ended up on an external drive, since my internal drive had the same catalogue but in Lightroom Classic and I was migrating it and had no room internally. Ideally you'd store it on a large internal SSD which I will do next, and have that Lightroom folder on the drive backed automatically to an external drive.

If youre on Windows 10 (7 too I think) you can set up backup to do your backup to an external drive automatically, and like every week, every day, every hour or a scheduled time etc, and you can include specific folders like your Lightroom folder containing originals, the Lightroom folder containing catalogue, and find where your xmp presets are stored etc, . You can also set it up to backup to the cloud or a network drive.

.

Tim Ryland Luckily I had done a four days old iOS Backup on Mac.
For the future I will do incremental backups after each app update with "imazing" Mac app.

https://imazing.com

if it can help others for future backup routine....

Hi Daniel,
I am using the same configuration, iPhone, iPad Pro and a MacBookPro with external SSD. In addition I am using an iMac with external SSD and HDD for backup.
On both desktops I am automatically store the originals.
I have not lost a picture because I have switched on the sync process and I have switched off the automated update of Apps.

 There is still a big gap in your method and my method, because presets are not stored, the Album and folder structure is not stored and edits are not stored as well.

From time to time I am exporting manually originals and xmp files to backup my edits.
OK, my bought presets are stored on my desktop anyway because I am importing it via LR desktop.

The professional way would be to use LR Classic, create smart collections and sync to the mobile devices, then you have smart previews which save space on your mobile and have a 100% backup on your desktop via time machine or CCC or other tools.

Adobe should implement a local backup functionality for LR mobile to allow the user to save all pictures, edits, presets and album/folder structure.

All this cannot rescue the lost pictures and presets we have seen in the last day, but can help to avoid future data loss.

best regards
Peter

Hi Kris and all,
have bought iMazing to see how it is working and here the view after the first backup which took a several hours. You can see in screenshot the LR files and the possibility to store and restore it. I am not brave enough to test it on my "production" iPhone, but I will try to find a test device.

Peter, album structure should be stored in your catalogue, so back up the catalogue too. Presets are XMP files and are stored in different places depending upon your os and Lightroom version, you’ll have to look up where it is, you can include these in your backups, I don’t use presets personally.

Hello Daniel Lee, hello Peter Obermeier,

Thank you for your explanations.

I do not have LR Desktop. I only use LR mobile (Premium) on the Ipad and iPhone. Primarily on the iPad (Pro 12,9). 
On both devices a backup of the LR Cloud (or the local library) is not possible.
If I look at your explanations, I can even understand that. 
So it is clear: An additional (external) backup is only possible via LR Desktop. For this I would have to change my subscription. I would have to think about that.

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You could use Carbonite for automatic backup. It backs up changed files and does so to servers min multiple sites.

Ralf, you can use external HDs with an iPad Pro, since iPadOS came out, I’m not sure what the best workflow would be for that or backup Lightroom easily.

Did you open 5.4.0 on both your iPhone and iPad? You could restore from one of them if only one was deleted.

It’s a bug in 5.4.0 in iOS version of Lightroom, you can update to 5.4.1 and restore the images from your cloud sync if you have a subscription. Or restore it from an iCloud backup if you have a recent backup before this happened. Or if you have the same somewhere else like a pc you can reimport them manually.

Hi Daniel, I happened to find an iCloud backup from before the wrecking Lightroom update a few days ago. However when I restored this backup, it took a few hours to load the Lightroom app (seemed stuck, I was hoping it was download the library of several gigabytes). Then it suddenly started to reload (new loading circle) and loaded really fast. When I opened the app it was the newest version with still no library.

I'm restoring again now, since somehow the files should be there (it's a backup from before the update). I'll immediately turn off automatic app updates.

Any ideas about how to handle this & make sure it installs the old version with library?!

Thanks!!
Kris

Dont open Lightroom if its 5.4.0, you can go to your Apps list and check the version of lightroom, or update it to 5.4.1? I hope you get it restored successfully. If you do, make sure you to make some kind of backup.

Laguna paron preset is one of the most frequent used by me (not that one above) any idea how to find it again?

And how come that Lightroom cant at least name my presets that are gone?

You might want to wait until a new product is released in early 2021, expected April 1, 2021, by a startup company working with programmers in Hungary. It is going to be a new use of AI, tentatively named NANNY-AI. The developers are working on an approach that will anticipate every possible mistake that a user could make, and correct it before that user sits down at their computer. One of the hurdles that these researchers must overcome, is discovering the near infinite combinations of mistakes and false expectations possible. Investors believe that their greatest potential market will be users of software that don't read instructions nor take training courses. Not making backups is an example of a user behavior that will benefit greatly!

Until this is available, doing regular File Saves is a workaround, as would be having a UPS Uninterruptible Power Supply.