Lightroom Classic automatically restores all changes done on "develop" module

Report · Jul 15, 2024

Hi everyone,

I just encountered an issue that is blocking my workflow on Lightroom Classic.

After updating it on 13.4 I open Lightroom Classic and every time i click on a photo the program resets all edits I did on develop module. Fortunately the "history" is unchanged and I can go back to the last settings. Anyway it is completely impossible to work properly, because if i need to export a lot of images I need to manually restore the history for every single photo.

OS version: Windows 10 on AMD Ryzen

LR: 13.4
Camera RAW: 16.4

(of course i just restarted both Lightroom and PC but the issue is not solved)

Hope I was able to properly explain my issue, I didn't find a direct adobe contact to report an issue other than security issues, please tell me if there is a way to do it. Thanks to everyone.

Report · Sep 13, 2024

Have you tried exporting (a few selected) images "as Catalog", just to see what happens with those?

Also - for an image that shows the undesired behaviour: if you write metadata out to file, and then open that file into Photoshop directly (not via Lightroom Classic) does the image that you then see inside PS include the effect of latest editing, or not? There is a fallback method available there (though not a very appealing one, in that it strips off the detailed intermediate History steps, ignores virtual copies, and fails to preserve Collection membership and some other stuff).

[the above tests are for information gathering, and not describing actual steps to fix]

Report · Sep 13, 2024

Thanks for suggesting it, now I discovered that I can't export group of images too, it seems impossible to export not a single directory:

The most akward thing is that the backup that I took weekly for years cannot be restored too. It is a really incredible security issue, backups are the only important thing. An application can have bugs and everything, that's why we take backups.

I think my specific problem is secondary now, Adobe has a really huge issue about backup handling.

We could think about a "system corruption" or something like that, but I repeat that I perform this test from 2 different systems, a windows 10 and a windows 11 systems, so it is really unlikely that 2 different pc's with 2 different os versions are experimenting the same os-related issue.

Anyway thanks for telling me to try it, I didn't though that a single export like that could fail.

Report · Sep 13, 2024

I suppose a malformed Catalog (copies of that) might exhibit the same problems, even in the context of LrC in different OS installations. A malformed Catalog may refuse to participate in exporting to a Catalog, and may refuse to participate in importing (merging) into a Catalog. It is possible I suppose that your historical backups could include malformed Catalogs if the relevant database issue happened a long time ago - though I would have expected normal Catalog integrity checks to have found and either fixed or notified that problem at some moment, in that case. You are un-zipping the backup Catalog before trying to open it, is that correct?

Report · Sep 13, 2024

oh, I'm sorry maybe I didn't explain it in a proper way: I can open the backup catalog, but it results of course in the same issue. Moreover if I try to perform an "import from catalog" selecting my catalog (or one of its backups) it fails (you can see screenshot up in this thread).

My complaints to Adobe are only about the backup handling, I would expect that during a backup the system performs the same integrity check that it performs during imports: so the time I face a corruption I would have noticed at the first backup attempt and I'd restored last working catalog loosing only 1 week of work (I performed it weekly).

Anyway thinking about the last test you suggested I tried to "export as catalog" a recent directory (I don't face this issue with files I saved in the last couple of months) and it works. I will perform deep tests to find the boundaries of this issue. My next try will be to click on every image of a non-working directory and manually restore the last history step, then try to export it again as catalog. If it works I could give to support an important information. I only hope that the next agent I will talk with will trust me and won't make me perform again all the tests of this thread.

Report · Sep 15, 2024

Update after conversation with richardplondon in 13/09/2024:

During my analysis I discovered an interesting behaviour I didn't notice before, I will describe step by step because it's even stranger then expected and it's difficult to explain using only words.

1) I select an old folder (remind: I don't face this issue with new imported folders) from library and I start randomly select photos into that folder.

If I select an image without any edit on it this happens:

fig.1 (the edits mark appears)

it becomes marked as if it has edits, of course if I go into develop module there are no edits in history, then I can manually select the "import" step and the mark disappears:

fig.2 (the unselected import step in develop module)

fig.3 (the mark disappeared after selecting the import step)

2) Now it starts to be really really strange so I hope I'm able to let you understand me, if not please tell me and I'll try again:

If I select a second photo (i.e. the number 217) the "edit" mark appears on the 217, but the preview still shows the image n°219:

fig.5 (select a second image (217) and the mark "edit" appears)

3) Now to properly select the image n°217 I have to manually select another photo and then go back to 217:

fig.5 (select the image n°214, the preview still shows the n°219)

fig.6 (selected the n°217 again, now the preview shows the correct one)

Now I can view its history and select the "import" stage, the mark now disappears:

fig. 7 (select the correct image)

4) If I perform this operation on ALL images in a directory its still impossible to export that directory as a catalog.
5) You can verify that the expected behaviour is that the "import" step is selected when opening a photo in develop module.

6) When I had my second video chat with an adobe agent I still didn't noticed this behaviour since we focused on the edited photos. Anyway he told me that in his opinion this was some kind of metadata corruption and not an ircat corruption. (the first agent was talking about a catalog corruption).

P.S. the situation remains unchanged if I perform this step in remaining in "develop" module or switching from "develop" and "library" modules

Anyway the result is still a "corrupted" catalog when I'm stuck in exporting photos as catalog and I can't use backups because I don't know when the "corruptions" started.

It's two months since I noticed this behaviour and still don't have a solution or a possible workaround. I'm scared to contact support again because I'm really tired of talking with a new agent and start again EVERY test I just performed.

As always thanks to everyone who will help me and who helped me before.

Federico

Report · Sep 16, 2024

If you take one of these problem images, write metadata out to file just as it is, then take that directly into Photoshop (not via LrC: start PS separately and then use its own Open function, browsing to the relevant file on disk) - do you see that image showing your latest edits?

If so, this suggests the "nuclear option" of re-importing files to which latest edits have been written, to an entirely fresh Catalog. This method notably does not preserve every aspect of your work even if you have written latest edits.

The missing aspects are most importantly IMO: Virtual Copies [these could be included into the externally written metadata of the master version for that photo, by having made a Snapshot from each VC beforehand, and then later recalling that Snapshot and generating a corresponding new VC showing the same edits]; Collection membership [this can be written to each image in the form of special keywords and then these keywords can be later used to re-create the relevant Collections].

Not what you want to hear, but for very important images you do have some options.

Another option to test with one or two images, again for information gathering, may be exporting copies with file type set to 'Original'. Then seeing how those test images open into PS directly, or else how they import into a fresh Catalog. This option will work for Virtual Copies (physically duplicating the source file) but - again - you would need to have first marked Collection membership as a direct attribute of each image (via a keyword, say). Collections otherwise come only from the relevant Catalog.

Report · Sep 24, 2024

Hi Richard, a brief update about it: I talked with Adobe support again on september 16, they liked this thread as an organized history of this issue, they escalated internally.

During the call we performed the test you suggested too. The result is that if I export an "affected" image there are no edits in the metadata file.

One week later (yesterday) they asked again to send them my catalog and other informations like where I store my catalog and its backups. I tried to ask again where I could find log informations but they didn't answer.

I would really like to find out what tells lightroom the "step" to apply to every photo to force every image to reach the last history step.

Thanks again. As always I would love to know if anyone has any new ideas.