Lightroom Mobile Photos Gone

[quinstonmerryweather]

Today I went to check my Lightroom Mobile photos synced to the Adobe cloud but couldn't get the Mac app to connect (it continuously said "waiting for connection"). I went to my iPad to check the photos from there and it told me I had no collections. I went over to my iPhone's LR Mobile app and when it first opened, all of my collections were there. Then it went to a loading screen and when it came back it said I had no collections. I had hundreds of pictures synced to the cloud so this is both incredibly frustrating and terrifying. Is this just a connection issue or did all of my photos some how get deleted?

[greule · Accepted solution]

Did you connect a new Lr Desktop catalog to your account? Since Lr Mobile currently only supports one catalog at a time the previous connected catalog will be purged. In that case you should have recieved a caution allert within Lr Desktop. - Guido

[quinstonmerryweather]

Yeah, I think that's exactly what happened. So there's no way to restore them once they've been purged?

[peter-b]

We aren't able to restore your online catalog to its previous state, but if you have somehow lost photos, we may be able to recover them.  Do you still have all the original photos? 

-Peter

[mmeclimate]

I had the exactly same problem. I am using the trial version of lightroom on my mac and iPhone. I spent a lot of time editing my photos using the Lightroom App on the phone. When I opened Lightroom on my mac, I got a message saying if I wanted to sync my photos. I clicked yes. No photos were synced (from the cloud) and my iPhone photos were all gone.

This has happened twice. The first time I thought it was a glitch with Adobe cloud. So, I created a new collection and worked on the photographs. Now, I don't have either collection anymore. In addition to that, the mac Lightroom was never able to sync with the cloud.

Is there a way to recover the photographs I edited with Lightroom? I have the original files.

[mmeclimate]

The strange thing is that the app shows that my disk usage is 102 GB of 114 GB. But where are my photographs?

[derekm1987]

I'm having the same issue. I had the mobile app for awhile, then all the sudden a 30 day trial appeared. Once it ended, it logged me out. Once I logged back in, all my photos were gone! Did you get an answer to your question, cause I'd like to know. Would hate to lose all my pics. plud at the bottom on the LR app, it says 13 GB of 56GB.

[greule]

Did you connect your catalog with a different Adobe Id? - Guido

[cical16]

greule​ already solved the problem, as i suspected my MAC LR still connect to the LR3 catalog (i thought it would be completely new when i installed CC). so i just copy the catalog from my PC and paste to my MAC and now it works.

[greule]

Glad that you were able to solve the problem

[BoatengPhoto]

Hi Peter,

I've found myself in the same situation as the OP.

I have most of the photos but there's one particular collection that I do. How would I go about recovering the photos?

[peter-b]

I will send you one or more zip files with all of your original files.  Will get back to you shortly, via email.

[grimmvolker]

Hi Peter, very same thing happened to me right now. I am trying out Lightroom CC. I created a number of albums on the mobile version which now appear to be all gone. I would appreciate if you can please recover the originals and send them to me. Once they were in Lightroom Mobile, I deleted them from the camera roll, so in the moment they are lost to me. Very annoying.

So, how does one connect a new desktop version of Lightroom without running into this issue?

[peter-b]

Yes, will get that for you.  Please give me a day.  I'll also make sure to get the guidance on setting up a new LR version. 

-Peter

[peter-b]

Unfortunately, there are not any photos associated with your lost catalog.  Do you possibly have another Adobe ID that you've used?

[grimmvolker]

Hi Peter, things are not quite as dire as I initially thought. I started the trial of LR while I was travelling and I was only shooting with the iPhone since I was not carrying anything else. I then used LR mobile to sight, group the shots into collections and sort them. I also set up a LR Windows desktop and connected it with the he Adobe ID to be able to see sync the pictures to a PC.

Back at home I did now set up the LR desktop on the OSX machine that I normally use for all my picture editing and connected that to the Adobe id with the expectation that I would start to see the pictures I shot while travelling would start to sync down to the desktop. Instead I saw the pictures all disappearing from the LR mobile installations because they now started showing the empty OSX catalogue. This caused a bit of a panic.

I did now remember the original LR desktop Windows installation and connected that back up. Now the pictures start to reappear in the mobile LR installation, too.

So how do I now get the OSX LR desktop connected into this and have them all work of the same catalogue?

Is there a more technical paper available that describes the synchronisation between the different LR versions and catalogues? Eg. What happens with dslr pictures that I shoot while travelling and load onto the iPad for sighting and sorting once I get back home? Will they sync with the desktop LR version in full resolution? What about pictures shot in RAW mode? If I upload those into the iPAd while travelling will they sync back to the desktop in Raw format?

I'll start experimenting with this now but would appreciate if you had some more details for me. Specifically on how to get the home LR OSX installation connected.

Thanks, Volker

[peter-b]

Volker,

Are you trying to set up 2 different LR desktops at once, or just move to a new one?  The former can be tricky, the latter is more straightforward.  Please let me know and I'll get you the appropriate guidance.

-Peter

[otoolerc]

Do you know how much of a piss off this is? I had a dozen photos I was carefully working on, and then boom, purged, gone, nothing. What am I paying for? This isn't a service. I specifically "x'd" out of the sync prompt and then all of a sudden my photos disappeared. That was not an agreement to sync! Thanks a lot.

[rzvaq]

This exact same issue has happened with me as well. I x'd out of syncing a new catalog as well and all my photos have disappeared! I had been working on over 1000 photos and now all are gone. This is horrible.

[peter-b]

I will contact you via email to send you the files that had synced to the server.

[renzor88015619]

Hi Peter, I took advantage of a free trial on offer and upon requiring to sign-in, it appears that all my photos are gone. Any help would be greatly appreciated. 

[Charlie.D]

Hi @renzor88015619 

Checking the Adobe ID you used to post for help, I see a valid Lightroom Mobile subscription.  The server let me know you also seem to have another Lightroom account/Adobe ID, and my guess is the photos you want are inside the free (unsynced) account on your device.

DO NOT delete the Lightroom app, as this will delete any unsynced photos that may exist only in your free Lightroom account.  

To ensure you don't lose any files, I recommend you do a full backup of your phone!

Then, please see the help shared at this other post for info on how to copy images from your free account to your paid account:
https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-for-mobile-apple-tv/photos-disappeared/m-p/12066834#M13516 

"In your paid account, create a shared album, and then invite your free account to join it. Be sure your paid owner of the shared album has applied "Can Contribute" settings for the free user in the shared album settings. After your free account accepts the email invitation, sign into the free account again in Lightroom, and then add all the photos it has to the shared album it just joined. Let this sync to your paid account, and then sign back into your paid account. You should not see all your same photos in the paid account. See this help page for basic info on how to set that up: https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-cc/using/save-share-photos.html "

The other post shares a couple other options too, like using iTunes / MacOS File Sharing to recover images from the Lightroom app cache, but copying your images from your free account to your paid account using a shared album is ideal to preserve both originals and also your edits.

I will send you a private message with some advice on how to sign into your unpaid Lightroom account, in case it's not clear what Adobe ID/login method you used for that.

[Michelle23657301w4io]

Hello Peter, it seems I am also now in a similar predicament. I had all the photos but there were a couple of collections that disappeared from when I was getting engaged. It would be wonderful to get a hold of those. I hope you can help.

[siennade]

Hi Peter, 

I just upgraded my lightroom app on my iphone and all my presets and photos are gone! Please help! It took hours to get all my presets on there and lots of photos too! 

[pujia5133729]

Peter,  i hope you can help me too. All of my photos is gone when suddenly my adobe LR sign out. Its really important and i take the photos by LR's camera on my iphone. I try to sign in and there's no collection on mu album.