P: AI Masks Require updating and/or disappear

[Shelemiah]

Hello,

I recently had a call with Adobe support with no luck. I have found some threads on this but nothing presents a solution and it seems hard to find what the actual issue is.

If I edit a client gallery and use any healing brush tool or AI masking tool, the mask or healing brush/generative AI will get a red dot underneath after going back to the start of the gallery, my AI edits are gone....

I also noticed this happens 100% of the time when I quite and reopen lightroom, I can fix the mask, update ai settings but it just resets each time I open lightroom.

We tested a new catalogue, we tested a bunch of things with no luck. 

We really need a fix on this Adobe it is killing workflow, not sure what broke this setting. I can't revert to an old version because I have lots of photos (I do 1 catalogue per year) and can't go back weeks of client work.

Also this catalogue was started at the begining of 2025 so there is no version 13 of this catalogue to revert to and test.

PLEASE HELP ADOBE!

[MaloFX]

Contacted ImagenAI, no fix in the past, but this time they suggested a few things, one was to update app and rename .lrcat-data file associated with my catalog.

This fixed the issue. 

[johnrellis]

@MaloFX: "rename .lrcat-data file associated with my catalog. This fixed the issue."

Imagen AI caused these symptoms for a fair number of LR users:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-discussions/p-ai-masks-require-updating-and-or-disa... 

At first, they claimed it was a bug in LR and they had worked around it. When the problem kept occurring, they went silent, but at some point in the last month they fixed the problem (in their servers):

https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-discussions/p-ai-masks-require-updating-and-or-disa...

Unfortunately, the bug poisoned the the .lrcat-data file, and once poisoned, it would no longer work correctly, regardless of whether you were still using Imagen AI. So you had to delete the .lrcat-data file, select all photos in the catalog, and do Update AI Settings.  Unfortunately, that will generate new variations for Generative AI Remove, so you need to inspect each instance of Remove to make sure they're still acceptable.

This nasty situation was a direct result of the surprising way Imagen AI chose to integrate with LR Classic. Rather than updating the catalog via the supported SDK for plugins (which has limited functionality), Imagen AI writes directly into the LR catalog SQL database, a method undocumented and unsupported by Adobe. Thus it's not surprising that a prior release of LR changed the database and Imagen AI started behaving badly -- this was Imagen AI's fault, not Adobe's..  It's very possible this will happen again in the future.

I recommend that, if you continue to use Image AI, you use it's "Bridge workflow" rather than the "Lightroom Classic workflow".  In the Bridge workflow, Imagen AI downloads .xmp sidecars containing the changes its server has generated for your photos, and then in LR, you select the photos and do Metadata > Read Metadata From File.  This will avoid any possibility of Imagen AI trashing your catalog again.

[johnrellis]

Moderators, @Rikk Flohr: Photography, please merge with the existing thread on this topic:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-discussions/p-ai-masks-require-updating-and-or-disa...

[MaloFX]

Thank you for your post, it all makes more sense now. 

After renaming/deleting .lrcat-data file my catalog has been acting weird. Finished an edit earlier today, then exported those photos, then realized something was off, so I went back to the gallery to fix it, and half of the photos were unedited, super weird. 

I have 180k photo catalog, I'm not sure if everyone has one catalog, but I would love to start a new catalog with all the current photos. 

Does anyone have instructions on how to do so? 

Thanks everyone!