All edits in Lightroom Mobile disappeared—help!!

[Hera Dirosh]

Insane experience with Lightroom mobile--all edits disappeared!

I just used Lightroom mobile for first time to edit a photo that was synced from Lightroom Classic (desktop), where I'd originally done initial edits, and then continued editing in mobile. After successfully exporting to an image on my mobile device, I went back to Lightroom Mobile and found all the edits I'd done in Lightroom mobile disappeared! All light, color, details and masks -- poof, gone! How is this possible?

Perhaps relevant: before the edits disappeared, I got some strange message saying something like "file missing from iMac" (which made no sense, because the file is certainly there). I clicked "Cancel"--or whatever option there was to just dismiss the message--and figured it was just a temporary syncing glitch or something. And that's when I found all the edits disappeared.

I then checked Lightroom Classic on desktop, and found that the mobile version updated the file on the cloud to the ORIGINAL--undoing all my initial edits. Luckily, on desktop, the history was all still there, so at least I didn't lose those. But on Lightroom mobile, all the edits are gone--with nothing in the history except the original plus the initial edits from Lightroom Classic on desktop. 

This is incredibly frustrating. I don't know if I ever want to touch this app again. If I put in an hour's work and then it disappears for no reason, that's a completely unreliable app. Is there some hidden way to access the edit history? How am I to deal with this now?

 Any help would be greatly appreciated. 

[Rob_Cullen]

"on desktop, the history was all still there,"- If you mean History as in the image History panel of Lr-Classic Develop module, then you should be able to click of any step in the LrC history to return the image to its appearance as at that step. What is the top-most history step? Does it say "Reset" or something else?

If you restore the edits in LrC then these should again sync to the Lr Mobile apps.

""file missing from iMac" So how did you 'sync' the image to the Lightroom Cloud? Sync from Lr-Classic, or Import/Add to a Lr-Mobile App?

And are you giving plenty of time for any syncing of edits to apply  LrC<>Lr.?

[Hera Dirosh]

Sorry if I wasn't clear. I did one initial set of edits in LrC desktop, and a second set of edits on Lr mobile, which had the image with the initial edits synced.

After the edits in Lr mobile disappeared, the history in Lightroom classic only had the initial set of edits, but not the edits from Lightroom mobile. Furthermore: it also had, strangely, the the top item listed as "synced from Lightroom mobile," and that version had *all* edits undone (both initial edits in LrC and later edits in Lr Mobile--all gone). But the history (from the second item down) had all my initial edits from LrC, so at least I was able to restore those. But none of the edits from Lr mobile were in that history.

Hope that's a little clearer.

The "file missing from iMac" message appeared and then went away. Afterward, I got that same message with a few other images, but they were sporadic and I was usually able to access the image a few seconds later. My guess is that it just had intermittent syncing issues. But it doesn't solve the problem of all my edits on mobile disappearing. 

[Rob_Cullen]

Bumping this thread, as someone more knowledgeable than me, might have some answers.

Sorry I cannot be more help.

[Jim Wilde]

It would be really helpful if you could capture a screenshot next time you encounter that "file missing from iMac" message (are you sure it didn't say "Waiting for Settings from iMac"?).

Is this issue happening with every image that you edited in LrMobile, or just that one image? Easy enough to test with one edit, no need to spend any great amount of time editing an image in great detail just for testing purposes.

Regarding the image that you did spend a lot of time on, and which was subseqently reset somehow, have you checked the Versions panel to see if there's an auto-version available which does contain those original edits? If so, promoting that "version" in LrM to be the current edit state should then sync that version back to LrC.