Lightroom Mobile Photos Gone

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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.

Hi Peter, I have just had this happen too, are you able to help at all? Many thanks

Matthew,

I'll contact you offline and see what we can do.

-Peter

Good evening,

Unfortunately I just logged into my office desktop where I have Lightroom CC and now all my mobile photos taken through the lightroom app that synced over wifi are completely gone from my phones and not appearing on my desktop. Need this resolved as well.

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.

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

Just had the same problem here, my trial period still 15 days to go, and today when i open lr on my ipad all my lr photos are gone. i didn't do anything just open the apps, and i saw the sync proccess automatically running and all photos are gone

can somebody help me?

Did you connect Lr Desktop with a new catalog to your Adobe id? - Guido

greule yes i did, sorry for my long responds. But i think i might know how my problem begin. So this is the chronology:

1. I started using lightroom mobile apps for the 1st time. Trying free trial for its creative cloud.

2. After few days i install lightroom desktop for my PC.

from this point there is no issue about sync catalog and all my pictures remains safed.

3. Then i install lightroom for my Mac, and that is how (i guess) my trouble began. Unlike when i using lightroom desktop for PC, on MAC there is warning pop up when i tried to sync catalog say that i only can use one catalog and because i use this MAC's created catalog the previous sync on my mobile lightroom gone.

fortunately when i checked my PC all my previous catalog still there, and i re-synch everything so that i now i can manage all of my photos on my ipad again. But today after my trial expired and i upgrade the license, i try to use lightroom from my MAC and the same problem came out. Now i didn't sync from my mac yet but is there someway i can do so i can sync safely from my MAC ? as additional information i still installed Lightroom 3 (i was using years ago), can this be the caused of my problem?

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.

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

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.

Glad that you were able to solve the problem

Peter,

I have the same problem I login in a desktop and my mobile catalog is gone

Theres is a way you can help me

Thanks

Greule

I did this I login in LR Desktop and my mobile catalog is gone, there is a way to recover my Mobile Catalog ?

Thanks in advance

Geovanny,

I will email you a link to recover your original files from the deleted catalog.  I'll use the email address you've used for this forum. 

-Peter

Peer, sorry to add to the deluge of people here, but I did the same thing and would like to recover the edits I had made to my files.

Thanks!

Hello,

I'm hopeful that you can also help me.  I did not realize that when resyncing that the photos would be deleted from my phone and everywhere else for that matter.  I really need to recover the photos that I lost - 48 in number.

Please let me know if you can help!

Thanks,

Holiday

Eugene,

Edit recovery will take a bit longer.  Will email you when it's ready.

-Peter

Holiday,

If your files are available, we'll recover and send to you.

-Peter

Thank Peter.  I truly hope so....

holiday

Hi peter-b, i think i had the same issue as everybody said above. Please i do need help in restoring most of these photos, it consist of my just deceased friend photo. Would really really appreciate it, the most important collections are the recent one which are about my friend.

peter b Thank you so much, you have no idea how much gratitude i have now. Thanks for the assistance, appreciated it a lot!

Hi peter-b

I've just experienced the same problem. I had about 80 photos I had taken through Lightroom Mobile for iOS as DNG files. This is my first time using the app & my Lightroom CC Desktop would not sync these photos. I realized it was because my ID was synced with another catalog. When I corrected the issue, I experienced the same purge issue the original poster had and all of the photos I had taken disappeared from my phone.

I'd really like to recover these photos. Your help would be greatly appreciated!

EDIT: Also, if it helps - this probably happened within the last hour or two. Phone support told me there was nothing they could do but this post is giving me a glimmer of hope.

Tom,

Will see if we can recover those photos for you.  I will contact you directly with more info.

-Peter

Hi peter-b,

I think I am having the same problem as other people in this thread. I just returned from holiday with a lot of photos stored in Lightroom Mobile on my iPad (which I am beginning to think was not a good idea). I wanted to sync these photos with Lightroom Desktop but when I tried to do that they disappeared from LR Mobile and haven't appeared in LR Desktop.

I also have two catalogs (which I'm also beginning the think is not a good idea - talk about learning on the fly...)

I would really appreciate any help in recovering these photos.

Thanks.

Tim

Hi Tim, one question. At the time you connected the different catalog to your adobe-id and pushed the "start" to sync within Lr Desktop. Did Lightroom come up with a "Sync this catalog instead" dialog (See attached screenshot). ...and when you pushed the Delete option  from this dialog a browser page opened where you needed to confirm to delete? - Guido