Arghhh....Lightroom's Got A Bug

I don’t usually use Lightroom Mobile, but I have an iPhone 11. Which is to say that I can’t take native RAW images with my phone, just JPEGs, unless I shoot with Lightroom Mobile, which yields a DNG file. I don’t use my phone for ‘serious’ photography much (I’ll just shoot JPEG snaps with the native camera) because I’m just not a fan of using my phone that way, even though a know that a lot of people do, and very successfully. But on a recent family vacation, I did take Lightroom Mobile photos since my family members are not big fans of waiting around while I shoot. So I recently decided it was time to synch and download some of those images to LR Classic. I had done that once before without a problem, but this time all hell broke loose.

First of all, the photos that were supposedly downloaded are….who knows where (I still have copies on my phone though). They didn’t land anywhere on my PC, best I could tell. And to make matters worse…..far worse….Lightroom stopped working. Well, that simplifies it a bit in that a trip to Windows Task Manager showed that it was working in the background….invisibly. There was no way to access or use it though.

I tried all sorts of fixes but no luck. A call to Adobe technical support followed, and they were very good. They took over my computer (with my permission) for almost two hours and worked at lightning speed on it (note to self: I would never be able to undo all the changes they made). But alas, it was to no avail.

Final Adobe Diagnoses: “You’ve got a bug.”

Me : “What! What do you mean you can’t fix it, it has been working fine for ages with the newest Lightroom version until I tried to synch, so it must have something to do with that.”

Adobe: “That’s what a bug is, it only comes out in certain circumstances. We’ve known about this bug, it’s not common and occurs mainly in Macs, but rarely in Windows (how comforting).”

Me: “So what do we do about this?”

Adobe: “We roll you back to Lightroom 11.5, and you use your last saved Lightroom 11 catalog (because Lightroom 12 catalogs won’t work with Lightroom 11).”

Me: “OK, other than reimporting and re-keywording a year’s worth of RAW images sine Lightroom 12 came out and I upgraded, how do I access my last year’s worth of photos?”

Adobe: “Unless you reimport, you can’t access them in Lightroom.”

Me: “OK, if I leave those for now, and import all my new photos into Lightroom 11.5, what do I do when Lightroom 12 is fixed? And by the way, when will this bug be fixed (since Lightroom 11.5 was working just fine, just as they said it would)?”

Adobe: “Well, I would make a new catalog and import all your new photos into the new catalog. Then when the Lightroom bug is fixed, you can convert that new catalog to a Lightroom 12 catalog and merge it with your last saved Lightroom 12 catalog. In terms of when the bug will be fixed, I don’t know. That’s up to the product development team. Hopefully, with the next update.”

This is quite painful. The only good news is that my computer is fairly old. I bought it in 2015 and had been thinking of getting a new one. Perhaps the universe is telling me that now would be the right time for that.

Adobe - you gotta love them and you gotta hate them! In the last few days, it’s really been mostly hate.

Has this bug bitten anyone else out there reading this?

OK, Rant Over!

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