The latest update to the Adobe Lightroom Cloud-centric suite of applications was released to customers on  13 August. This update mainly focuses on a feature that enables users to recover deleted photos. It also includes support for new cameras and lenses, and bug fixes.

Recover Deleted Photos

Recovery of ‘accidentally’ deleted photos, which includes entire photo libraries, has been a long standing request (demand?) from customers since the early days of the mobile ecosystem. With this latest update, all applications within the Lightroom cloud-centric ecosystem now have a folder called ‘Deleted’. Basically, any photos deleted by the user are transferred to this folder, which at time of writing, does not count against cloud storage capacity. The photos will remain in the ‘Deleted’ folder for 60 days or until they’re permanently deleted or recovered.

Using the following series of screenshots and text I will go through the process of deleting some photos, then recovering them.

• As mentioned above, when photos are deleted we’re notified of how many and given the choice to cancel out or proceed.

• In below screenshot, I show that the 41 photos have been moved to the ‘Deleted’ folder in the desktop application and Lightroom on the web. This is also repeated on my mobile devices (i.e. iPhone and iPad).

Having deleted the photos I realise that I’d really meant to remove them from Lightroom rather than put them in the trash. In previous versions of all apps within the Lightroom cloud-centric ecosystem the deleted photos could not be recovered, but Adobe has now provided a recovery tool that can be used with the desktop application, the web based application and our mobile devices. It’s also relatively simple to use.

Now to recover the deleted photos, but first let’s also check out the options available.

• First, I right mouse-click on the ‘Deleted’ folder.

• For this example, I choose ‘Restore All’

• In below screenshots we see that the 41 photos that I’d deleted earlier have been recovered and even put back into their original album.

• The number of days left before the photos are permanently deleted is also shown.

As can be seen from above, the process of recovering deleted photos is relatively fast and simple when using only those applications that are part of the Lightroom cloud-centric ecosystem. If, on the other hand, you’re also using Lightroom Classic, which Adobe actually recommends against, then the process of recovery is somewhat more complex and time consuming.

What’s Changed?

• The ability to use flag filters and star ratings to hide photos in shared albums has been removed. To learn how to filter photos in albums for sharing, see Flag and star rating filters removed from Shared Albums.

Support for New Cameras & Lenses

For a full list of supported cameras and lens profiles for Lightroom desktop and Lightroom for mobile (iOS and Android), see these resources:

• Supported camera models
• Supported lens profiles

For more information on the latest updates to Lightroom Cloud-centric Ecosystem go to What’s New – August 2019