Bug with syncing of spot removal / adjustment tool.

[hoytak]

I just encountered a rather serious bug with syncing in which the locations of the spot removal / healing brush from one image get applied to all images in a collection, deleting any previous work.  I'm currently working on a desktop using Lightroom Classic (just updated to the latest version), and on my iPad using the lightroom app (also just updated).  When I encountered this issue, I first edited all the images on the desktop, which included editing some of them in photoshop.  After all the images were close to satisfactory, I made some tweaks on the ipad to one of the images, then went back to the desktop to export the collection.  At that point I noticed that all the spot removals I had added along the way were completely wrong; upon investigation, the spot corrections I made to that one image had been copied to every single image in the collection, overwriting the edits to all other images.  It seems the work on the other images is completely lost.  

Is this a known issue?  I did update lightroom classic to the latest version between the first editing session and when I edited the collection on the ipad. 

[Todd Shaner · Accepted solution]

Sounds like you may have had Auto Sync enabled at the bottom of the Develop panel AND all of the affected image files selected when you applied the Spot Removal to the first most selected image file. It's a very easy mistake to make and I've done myself many times. You can try using Undo (CTRL/CMD Z) or step back in History to before the inadvertent Spot Removal application.

[hoytak]

Ah, thank you; I do believe that could explain it.  I hadn't noticed all of the "Sync Spot Removal" entries in the history when trying to figure out what happened, and backing it up all the way fixed it.  (There were a number of local sync entries in front of those, which didn't have a noticeable effect when hitting CTRL-Z, so I assumed history was lost). 

Thanks again!