P: Issues exporting photos to a Network Drive

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Since I upgraded to V8.3 of Lightroom Classic I can no longer export my files to our Synology Network System, I get the following error message "The specified folder in not writable"

After contacting support they were not able to resolve my issue, they maintained that it is a network issue on my side. I could not find any answers here or anywhere on the internet and decided to report this issue.

Because I share my processed photos with the rest of the office, my only solution was to un-install V8.3 and go back to V8.2.1, by doing that it resolved my problem.

So yes Adobe you have network issues in V8.3 as version 8.2.1 works perfectly when saving files to a network drive.

[Samoreen]

Victoria,

Rollback, reinstall, reset (your preferences) : indeed, these are the 3 words that anyone wanting to update a version of Lightroom should learn.

The fact that not everyone is affected doesn't mean anything and it's not a indication that it's not a bug. It is one, obviously. When a developer changes something in the code and a program feature no longer works afterwards while nothing changed in the user's environment, how to call this other than a bug ? We can't reproduce so we don't file this as a bug. Interesting. Is this how code quality is measured at Adobe ?

I'm rather irritated by this kind of Pavlovian reflex at Adobe tending to systematically insinuate that we are the problem. The main problem at Adobe is the ever declining  quality of the code. They are now unable to release a new version without breaking something. And this didn't start with version 8.3 of LR.  Each time, it's a loss of time (and sometimes of data) for many users. This indicates problems

- with the development methodology and tools  (LUA, OMG, why LUA ?)
- with the quality insurance dpt.

Anyone having experience in software development and observing what's happening can draw the same conclusion.

[Jason_NZ]

I have rolled back to V8.2.1 and the issue has gone away

[GoldingD]

Somewhere above it was stated no NAS no problem, not true. I do not have the issue, but both in this feedback site and over at https://forums.adobe.com/community/li... customers without NSS are having the problem. look at
No Export after update
"The specified folder is not writeable" during Export after update to LR Classic 8.3
All folders on Synology NAS are write protected
Exportproblem nach update auf LR 8.3
Lightroom 8.3 unable to write to hard drive after update
export message "the specified folder is not writable"?
Lightroom Classic 8.3 error "the destination folder is not writable"

[yvondaigle]

All my files are on my NAS. I can export on the original directory but not on an others directory.

[owlhuang]

Wow, I cannot believe what Victoria has said above.

The workaround does NOT work for existing publish services, which cannot change the destination once they were set up. And a lot of people, like me, have many publish services, which renders creating new ones is not an option, either.

Telling a paid user not to use the latest version and rolling back to an old version is not a solution at all. We might be forced to roll back WHILE ADOBE IS FIXING THE CODES, but it is definitely not a solution without filling it as a bug.

This is absolutely not the reason we are paying for the subscription. Contrarily, we are paying for continuously bug fixing, new features, quality improvement, and good customer support. Again, telling a paid user to roll back as a solution is totally unacceptable.

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

Oh man, I can't say anything these days. 

• I'm not saying it's not a bug.
• I'm not saying Adobe shouldn't fix it ASAP.
• I'm not saying that rolling back or using a workaround is a permanent solution. 

I alerted my readers to it because some may be affected, and I wanted them to know where to come for information if they were.

I haven't told people not to upgrade, because most people clearly aren't affected and will want to benefit from the new features. Of course that doesn't make it any less of a problem for the people who are affected.

If you are affected, this is the right place to find out the latest information and help Adobe figure out why they can't reproduce this bug yet. That'll get the solution we all want much quicker. And in the meantime, rolling back is a reliable workaround.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

The same for me. Publish services which had a OneDrive folder as a destination have stopped working with the error "Folder is not writable". 
I'm able to use the "workaround" for Export, but not for Publish services. And actually Publish services are the comfortable way of burning jpegs, without them exporting photos becomes a pain for me.

[andrewm99048561]

I upgraded yesterday, to try the new Texture feature, and I'm hitting the same problem when I try to export.  Shame there wasn't any warning, and that the upgrade was still being offered when there's such a significant bug.

Yes, the work around works for me, but I've wasted an hour trying to find the cause.

[Samoreen]

> Oh man, I can't say anything these days.

Victoria,

I hope there's no misunderstanding here. I do appreciate your work. I'm a premium member of your site. I've never considered you as an Adobe evangelist. Just, you should take into account the enormous frustration that is generated among many customers by the way Adobe manage their business and their software. Every post that is apparently "defending" Adobe (be that true or not) can generate irritated reactions.

Like you, I always want to be positive but very frankly, their behavior is questionable. I'm a former developer and system engineer. I have taught software engineering for years. Lightroom is an open book about their internal difficulties and I don't observe any attempt to do something about that. Regression testing obviously bypassed, bugs lasting since years, trend to consider that problems are on the user's side, ready-made answers (the famous "rollback-reinstall-reset" trio mentioned above),... This kind of behavior always appears in monopolistic situations. They should be cautious, though.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

For what it's worth, I too discovered the problem immediately after updating to 8.3 when trying to update a long-ago-established-and-much-used published collection on a network folder.  Tried a straight export to the same network folder and had the same problem (i.e. "not writable").  Then I set up a published collection on a LOCAL drive and had no problem publishing,  I am using a fully updated Windows 10 PC. The "choose folder later" workaround is great (thanks), but helpful only on export since this option is not available for published collections.  Need a fix soon.

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

Hey Patrick. I really do understand the frustration, probably more than most, because I get to spend my days listening to people (understandably) complain about things I can't fix. 😞

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Is there any update on this issue?

[yvondaigle]

I received this from Adobe, this morning:
Hello Yvon,
Greetings from Adobe!
Thank you for your response, You can continue start working in the older version which
is 8.2, we will let you know on our next update if the issue get fixed in the 8.3 update.


Thanks&Regards
Adobe Support

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Same here. It is obvious there are no issues with permissions for drives or folders because even Lightroom can write to a folder as soon as so select the folder later.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

For me, I can export locally, but I cannot export to a Synology DiskStation (which has worked fine until LR 8.3).  On my wife's computer, which was still running 8.2, I exported to the DiskStation.  I upgraded LR to 8.3, and got the "folder is not writeable" message.  I wrote software for 25 years before retiring.  Something changed in 8.3 that broke exporting for many of us.

[calyth]

The reason why we're being asked a bunch of information is clearly that they're missing that key piece to identify why it works in their test environments and not ours.

I've seen bugs that we know exists, but we could not root-cause for months. In that example, it was code that was working on Linux with case-sensitive filesystems that did not play well with OSX's case-aware filesystem. Without that information, we can observe the misbehaviour but never quite know why it was misbehaving.

I have been just tracking down deadlocks at work for a few weeks, and initially I had a snowball's chance in hell in finding it. Without some critical information, again, we would only know that something is wrong but not where it might be.

Depending on how they structure their release, a minor version bump could have hundreds or thousands of commits between 8.2 and 8.3. You might say, oh why not just git bisect and it should be found with 10 tests with a binary search of the first defective commit. But that hinges on being able to actually reproduce the problem. *That* is what they really need to locate it. If they can't reproduce that issue themselves, just purely staring at the code won't help much. I had been staring at code for the deadlock I had been chasing for a week and all that gave me was eye strain.

It's easy to vent because it's frustrating and appears to be a simple issue. Heck, I had given a smart-aleck comment already. And frankly I myself do have lots of choice words about testing, it's my bread and butter afterall. But doing that alone won't help jack. We think it's easy, because it's a "network drive", but there are at least two major protocols (SMB, NFS), a handful of versions each, and different server providing the protocols. The number of combinations goes up fast, even if someone is quite dedicated in setting up all the test beds to cover as much as one can. There is no such thing as 100% coverage.

Believe you me, I'm not particularly happy about this bug, but the quickest way to solve it is to provide information. One of these would be the key to help RCA the bug and get it fixed.

@Deleted User incidentally a casual glance suggests a lot of consumer grade NAS ran into issues. They're probably running some version of Samba. Mine is a hand-rolled server running Samba 4.1.22 (I know it's ancient...)

[GoldingD]

Is it limited to NAS? in the various discussions at the customer forum, non NAS users are reporting the issue . Ok, supposedly not NAS users. incidentally, Not a NAS user, not having the issue.
One of the six or so threads: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2621939

[gfield22603]

Yes, when googling this problem I saw that in version 6 they had the same problem. Obviously no regression testing is being done...

[gfield22603]

This is obviously a regression caused by a change made between v 8.2.1 and v 8.3 and it's in the permission checking code that is bypassed by selecting the "choose folder later" option.
Everyone using v8.3 with a NAS (seems like mostly Synology NAS) is seeing this problem, why don't you? Obviously not the NAS since it works fine with v8.2.1!

[tmickow]

"Everyone using v8.3 with a NAS (seems like mostly Synology NAS) is seeing this problem, why don't you?"

I'm guessing the folks at Adobe would love it to be that simple.  Trouble is, that's not the case.  I'm using 8.3 on Win10 with a Synology NAS and can't replicate the issues.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Greetings all,

I wanted to give you an update on this issue. We've been able to identify a possible bug with regard to this issue. We are currently testing the fix with a few users to verify that it does cure the issue. At this time I do not have an ETA for a public-facing fix.

If your issue is with Export the workaround continues to be: https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/error_export_folder.html
If your issue is with Publish Services, the only workaround is to revert to version 8.2.1. 

Thank you for all the information you've provided thus far and we hope to have this resolved quickly so everyone can get back to their normal workflow. 

Thanks for your patience.

[gfield22603]

As someone else implied, it must have to do with the NAS user account being used. I do have a NAS account with a different name than the Windows user name...

[tmickow]

Same here...Windows account & Synology account are completely different.

[tmickow]

Same here...Windows account & Synology account are completely different.

[Laura Shoe]

Thank you for jumping on this, Rikk and team, and for the update.