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Lost iPadOS LR photos...

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M

memoretti

New Member
Joined
Aug 20, 2020
Messages
4
Location
Chevy Chase, MD
Lightroom Experience
Advanced
Lightroom Version
Cloud Service
Lightroom Version Number
LR for iPad 5.4.1
Operating System
  1. macOS 10.15 Catalina
  2. iOS
Greetings all... new user here, on a referral from my regular haunts at DPReview where I live as Hilifer. I’m an amateur photographer, shooting Nikon digital for street, landscape and travel. And an occasional building or bird.

Returned from several weeks in Mexico on Sunday with 1000+ RAW (NEF) images that I’d directly imported to LR from my D850 and Z7 XQD cards. As bandwidth was limited for much of my travel, I observed that my images were slow to sync and backup to my Adobe cloud account. On Monday morning, I connected to my home Wifi network, launched LR, exported a few images to share and set about return to the ‘real world’ of work and home life. Last night, I checked on the status of my sync and backup and was bewildered to see many of the images which I had just been scrolling thru on Monday were missing...

This morning, I reached out to Adobe’s chat help and was soon directed to LR CC’s Sync Issues folder (above the Deleted folder) where I discovered 329 placeholders for images that I’d imported between Aug 5-12, but for some reason had failed to complete sync and backup. When I inquired how I might track down my RAW files in my iPad’s file system, the chat agent suggested that I contact Apple as I have no other backups of the images.

This afternoon (bear with me, I’m just about finished), I discovered an update to 5.4.1 available in the Apple App Store. The first item ‘fixed’ in this update addresses a bug in which users have ‘lost access to their photos’. On launch of 5.4.1, the cloud (sync) icon in the upper right of the UI is green; clicking it exposes a link to generate and email a diagnostic log to Adobe. Interestingly, and coincidentally, the 5.4 update was just pushed out on Monday, the first update in over a month from the last 5.3.x version. (I have the Photography package with 1T cloud storage.)

Keeping my fingers crossed that LR will somehow cough up my photos. Meanwhile, as I could find nothing similar to this problem after extensive searching, I wanted to get the word out to anyone else perplexed by similar issues.

Michael
 
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How much storage do you have on the iPad and which version of iPadOS? Of the storage on the iPad how much is un used?
An XQD card can hold a lot of image files. Often more than the storage available on the iPad. (Is this an iPadPro?

Next question. Have you looked at Lightroom on the Web to see if your images made it there?
https://lightroom.adobe.com/If they made it there, then you can resync LrC and get them into your master catalog.

When you travel do you make a backup of your NEFs before erasing them from the camera card? The Adobe Cloud is not backup. When Traveling you may have slow internet to NO internet. Your images are most vulnerable when the only copy is on the camera Card.
 
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clee01l said:
How much storage do you have on the iPad and which version of iPadOS? Of the storage on the iPad how much is un used?
An XQD card can hold a lot of image files. Often more than the storage available on the iPad. (Is this an iPadPro?

Next question. Have you looked at Lightroom on the Web to see if your images made it there?
https://lightroom.adobe.com/If they made it there, then you can resync LrC and get them into your master catalog.

When you travel do you make a backup of your NEFs before erasing them from the camera card? The Adobe Cloud is not backup. When Traveling you may have slow internet to NO internet. Your images are most vulnerable when the only copy is on the camera Card.
Click to expand...

Thank you for the response!

I have the latest iPad Pro with 512 GB of memory, currently using about 20% of that.

I did check my LR account on the web and it shows the same count as my two mobile devices. As noted, it also shows the 329 missing image records in the Sync Issues folder.

I broke with my regular workflow on this trip as I was using direct import for the first time... such a fault-proof process, I thought, to have all my images automatically backed up to the cloud. And, it would have worked out if Adobe hadn’t decided to release 5.4 just as I was arriving home to complete the sync on a high-speed connection. Nonetheless, I get that I own the problem... although I brought a 3T WD My Passport for backup, it remained in my suitcase, no doubt smirking at my irresponsible behavior. I’m going to try and recover the images from my cards in the coming days. I’m no stranger to file recovery after 30 years in the Mac ecosystem.

Michael
 
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Success. :)

I was able to recover all of my photos from both Sony XQD 128 G cards (D850 and Z7) using an app called Data Recovery Essential (Mac, but available also for Windows). The images were, with few exceptions, listed in the scan preview in month/year order, in the original shooting sequence from earliest to latest timestamp, though with a serialization naming designated by the app. As I noted earlier, both of my cards had been formatted, though I had been careful not to shoot any more images to them since the loss.

When I reimported them into LR, I discovered that all of the metadata, including location from Snapbridge, was retained. Furthermore, any editing that I had done before they were lost was restored, including crops and profiles.

The only difference between both card recovery efforts was the original name (e.g., _DSCXXXX.NEF) was also restored for the Z7 card images. The D850 images kept the serial names written by the recovery app.

I believe it’s important not to delete the proxies for the images lost in the sync failure which I found In the “Sync Issues” directory in LR Web between All Photos and Deleted, before restoring the images. My sense is that this is where all of the image edits, etc. are stored.

I also tried using Stellar Photo Recovery ($39), but it was unable to see the NEF’s, even though I was able to filter for that format in the app’s settings. I was able to recover what appear to be two events in 2008 that I shot on my D100 to a Lexar 4 GB card. The card had been formatted at some point; no images were otherwise visible on the card.
 
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