Lightroom 5 has been Released, but it comes with an Important Warning

Lightroom 5 has been released... see the announcement at Adobe.

There's a bunch of new stuff.... a good place to start your own investigation is Victoria Bampton's “What's New in Lightroom 5” and “What's New in Lightroom 5.0 Beta” articles. Also, Sean over at Lightroom Blog is keeping a list of tutorial/review links.

The most exciting new things for me are “Smart Previews” (I can work with my entire 130k library of images on my disk-starved laptop), “Upright” perspective correction in Develop, where I can easily correct for my bad habit of not holding the camera level, and the new advanced healing brush, to paint away things you don't want in the image. I also like the new True Full Screen mode.

Warning Warning Warning

One thing I don't like is a very dangerous Publish-related bug that remains in the final 5.0, that can cause you to delete your master images without even realizing it!

UPDATE (Nov 9): I believe the bug is fixed in Lr5.3RC: see here
UPDATE (Oct 25): Possible workaround discovered: see here.

The problem is that the selection shown in a Publish Grid may not be the actual set of selected images, and so when you intend to perform operations (update metadata, delete images, export, etc.) on what you see as the selected images, it might not happen... a completely different set of images may be affected (updated, deleted, exported).

In my eyes, this is just shocking. This screenshot shows the problem, using the Publish Collection for my “Selected Blog Photos” gallery on Google Plus as an example:


Example Manifestation of the Bug
Notice how the selection appears differently between Grid and the Filmstrip?

The selection shown in Filmstrip is the actual selection... it's the selection shown in Grid that this bug causes to sometimes be wrong. In the example above, the two water-polo shots of my 10-year-old son are shown as selected in the Filmstrip, and they are the ones that any operations will actually act on, yet in Grid, six unrelated images are shown as selected. They are not actually selected, and invoked operations will not act on them.

The moral of the story is:

In Lr5, never select images in Grid in a Publish Service.

Even using the next-image arrow key does not properly update the true selection, though it does update in Grid, making you think everything is working fine. It's a very dangerous bug.

It's best to avoid working in Grid in Publish until this is fixed, but if you must, be sure to do so with the Filmstrip also open, and use the Filmstrip to make and identity selections.

Continued here...


All 36 comments so far, oldest first...

Thanks for the heads up, and the warning. I was never a big fan of the publish module – for some reason, it always felt like a more complex solution to a rather simply problem. But now I have another reason not to like it.

I was not a fan of it when it was proposed, but it’s grown to be utterly indispensable for me. When used appropriately, the idea is perfect (though the implementation still has many holes). Because I use it so much, the 5.0 bug is quite painful. —Jeffrey

— comment by Dan Sroka on June 10th, 2013 at 7:56pm JST (10 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink

Thank you so much Jeffrey for this Lightroom 5 export issue update. Are your export plugins for LR5 available for download? I just installed the upgrade and the LR4 to Zenfolio plugin won’t render. Thanks so much for your wonderful work- TJP

Modern versions of the plugin work in Lr5 just fine. Your mention of “won’t render” sounds like a problem unrelated to plugins, but it’s hard to guess. —Jeffrey

— comment by Timothy Pasch on June 10th, 2013 at 10:34pm JST (10 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink

Although Adobe has a list of known problems for LR 5.0, including potentially serious ones, this Publish problem isn’t on the list. Have you contacted Adobe?

Yes, of course, I let them know. —Jeffrey

— comment by Carl Bickers on June 11th, 2013 at 1:09am JST (10 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink

Thank you Jeffery for the information.
Have you seen any import Lighroom 4 catalog problems, I got unknown error?

I’ve not seen any such problems. Perhaps try disabling all plugins then giving it a try; if it still happens, zip up the catalog LRCAT file and submit to Adobe? —Jeffrey

— comment by Mats on June 11th, 2013 at 6:02am JST (10 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink

I’m not seeing this? At least not in the quick testing I’ve done so far. Does it happen all the time or only occasionally?

And have you filed/is there a bug report filed against it? If so do you have a link for it?

Apparently it doesn’t affect everyone… I don’t know what sets it off… the catalog, the plugin, the collection, the system… I get it pretty consistently, but some folks don’t get it at all. I have submitted a bug report, but through private channels, so there’s nothing I can point you at. —Jeffrey

— comment by Jason on June 11th, 2013 at 9:05am JST (10 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink

Glad I read this, thanks for sharing (and thanks to Victoria Bampton for linking to this).
Definitely passing on an LR5 upgrade at this time – why would I jeopardize my library for the sake of a few new features, when this should eventually be fixed?
I’m just shocked like you Jeffrey that such a serious bug would be left in the final release.
I find Adobe does not seem to give much heed to s/w quality.
If this is not fixed quickly, then combined with the continuing nagging threat of a subscription-only LR will have me switching software (sadly, for the 2nd time).

I think it’s not fair to say that they don’t care about quality… that’s just ridiculous. Everything has bugs (except, perhaps, my own software 😉 ), and it’s a balance among many things what gets addressed, when. I’m not privy to those discussions. This does seem to be a pretty big deal if it affects you, but perhaps they know that it won’t affect many(?). As troublesome as it is for me, I could never go back to Lr4, so I’ll stick with it. —Jeffrey

— comment by Colin on June 11th, 2013 at 10:06am JST (10 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink

Noticed this behavior in the beta, was hoping it were fixed before the release – its a serious bug. Hoping Adobe releases an update soon.

— comment by Dan Osipov on June 11th, 2013 at 10:14am JST (10 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink

I’m noticing that this bug happens not only in the Publish module, but also when selecting images to develop in the Develop module. I have to select them in the filmstrip. Major bug, IMO. Hope it gets fixed soon.

— comment by Joao on June 11th, 2013 at 10:29pm JST (10 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink

Jeffrey wrote “I think it’s not fair to say that they don’t care about quality…”.
Just to be clear, when I said they don’t “give much heed to s/w quality” I didn’t mean to suggest Adobe doesn’t care about s/w quality. Its just that it is apparent some vendors seem to care more about quality and/or have a more advanced process that will provide a better quality product than other vendors. Let’s just say Adobe, with the LR product, doesn’t appear to be a leader in this regard!
(The other issue that stands out for me is all the reports about bugs with the Book module.)
On the other hand I’ve been a long time PS user and that product seems very good.

— comment by Colin on June 12th, 2013 at 12:09am JST (10 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink

Hey Guys,

I’m not sure what version you guys are using are what specific route you are taking to find this bug, but I’ve tried it on mine and find no such thing.

I’m using Lightroom 5, Mac OS X, 64 bit. I tried selecting files and gone to develop module. I’ve also done the same thing while attempting to upload via Flickr.

In both instances, the files I selected matched what was displayed both in the grid and filmstrip.

Perhaps a detailed documentation of your steps could help someone from Adobe re-create the error and fix it.

It doesn’t affect every situation; I’m not sure what triggers it. —Jeffrey

— comment by Michael Mba on June 12th, 2013 at 3:53am JST (10 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink

That’s a bad one. Thanks so much for posting, Jeffrey. Highly appreciate it.

— comment by Dietmar on June 12th, 2013 at 5:00am JST (10 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink

i have a similiar issue with LR 5:

i select images in LR and send them to PS. i edit them in PS and close them.

then i swicth back to LR and select different photos and “try” to send them to PS… instead the SAME images i selected before (and are now unselected) are send over to PS.

happend a few times in the past days.

— comment by Hamada on June 12th, 2013 at 5:35pm JST (10 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink

i forget to add.. this happens in the LIBRARY VIEW!!!

— comment by Hamada on June 12th, 2013 at 5:36pm JST (10 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink

I’ve posted an update on this bug here

— comment by Jeffrey Friedl on June 12th, 2013 at 6:51pm JST (10 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink

I just installed LR5 and came to your site because LR5 told me that your Zenfolio and Facebook plugins needed updating. I’m glad I decided not to wait. Nothing I’ve read hinted at this as a potential error. I’m building my wife’s art portfolio and could have had disastrous results if I deleted images of artworks sold many years ago.

— comment by Bob Simmons on June 16th, 2013 at 9:48am JST (10 years, 9 months ago) comment permalink

Thank you Jeffrey for sharing These bugs with us. I have seen this Problem myself on LR5 and that’s a bit sad that Adobe released a final with that many bugs.
I wrote a short article about Lightroom5 and ist Problems on my german blog:
http://www.lanpho.de/?p=874

Moritz

— comment by Moritz on June 20th, 2013 at 11:13pm JST (10 years, 9 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey! Thanks for the heads up! I downloaded Lightroom 5 as part of Adobe CC the night before last (June 18) and I don’t see this problem so far. When I select something in the film strip it is correctly reflected in the grid view. I don’t use LR very much, but I have not run into this with LR 4 that I _know_ of. I use both your FB and Zenfolio export plug-ins and they are awesome! Thank you so much for your hard work:)

Arnor

Selecting in the filmstrip always work… it’s when you select in the grid that it might not work (the selection will appear to have changed in the grid, but the filmstrip will show a different selection). —Jeffrey

— comment by Arnor Baldvinsson on June 21st, 2013 at 7:16am JST (10 years, 9 months ago) comment permalink

Jeffrey: Aha! That makes perfect sense! For whatever reason I always use the filmstrip to select. I hardly ever use the grid view, guess I like the filmstrip! Arnor

— comment by Arnor Baldvinsson on June 21st, 2013 at 7:51am JST (10 years, 9 months ago) comment permalink

From: Iowa, United Sates of America

Jeffrey,

I have a registered plugin to use Jeffrey Friedl’s “Export to Facebook”. My problem is the plugin WILL NOT connect me to my “Facebook Fan Page”.

1. I have another Lightroom friend, we sat down together at his Apple OS, did all the same steps that I had did and done. His Jeffrey Friedl’s plugin works flawlessly and beautifully allow him to export directly from his Lightroom 4 into his photography Facebook Fan Page.

2. Both his and my Fan Page reside inside each of our regular Facebook Pages. I guess I am saying we each have only one Facebook account.

3. I have used Jeffrey’s manual (your) here to help with the process, but I cannot figure out what I am doing wrong or why it will not connect to my Fan Page. http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/facebook/publish

4. Jeffrey is there something hidden or buried inside my Lightroom settings or in my Apple Library for Lightroom that I need to remove. Or do I need to reset something with my Fan Page.

5. I need your help, please! Open for all the suggestions and angles you want to give to me.

Verne Wonderlich “Vaquero-Photography”.

I need more information than “will not connect”…. after it fails, send the plugin log describing what you attempted, what you expected, and what actually happened, and then perhaps I can see where things went off track. —Jeffrey

— comment by Verne Wonderlich on June 24th, 2013 at 3:32am JST (10 years, 9 months ago) comment permalink

I have also had a problem in the publish part of the Lightroom 5 beta. If I tried to delete a photo which was selected to publish but had not yet been published, old photos which were previously published would delete ( I don’t know if I lost the originals). Also, I had inadvertantly selected a psd to publish. Lightroom tells me it is too large a file to publish to the web but won’t let me delete it so it sits there in the to publish collection. Win 7 professional 64 bit.

— comment by Karen on June 29th, 2013 at 10:53pm JST (10 years, 9 months ago) comment permalink

I installed your picasa Plugin, but when i try to accept the API (clicked the register button, firefox popped up and i clicked accept) the browser sais that it cant open the link “lightroom://info.regex.lightroom.export.picasaweb2/token=4….”

so no registration possible. hm, i payed $5 and hoped, the picasaplugin would work like your flickr plugin. what i am doing wrong?

Lightroom’s URL handler is apparently not registered properly… a reinstall should fix it. See this FAQ. —Jeffrey

— comment by Sebastian on July 6th, 2013 at 7:04am JST (10 years, 9 months ago) comment permalink

Glad a friend of mine led me to your website. I have the exact same problem and it was driving me nuts the other weekend during a workshop I was at. I was showing one of the instructors what was happening and he shook his head as well. Now I know at least for now I need to use the filmstrip. I normally use the grid….yikes…

— comment by Ed V on July 11th, 2013 at 7:22am JST (10 years, 9 months ago) comment permalink

Any idea of when Adobe will fix the publish bug in LR5? I’d like to upgrade to LR5 but want to wait until it is fixed since I use the publish module all the time to update my website. Thanks
No idea, just (waning) hope; I’m waiting too. —Jeffrey

— comment by Denny Riffert on August 28th, 2013 at 3:12am JST (10 years, 7 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey – can you confirm it’s fixed? I only saw the bug once so can’t tell if it’s gone in the 5.2 Full Release. Appreciate it if you could update soon. Many thanks for the great work you do. Cheers

Paul

The bug has not been fixed in 5.2 actual. —Jeffrey

— comment by Paul Parkinson LRPS on September 19th, 2013 at 5:11am JST (10 years, 6 months ago) comment permalink

Thank You for the heads up. You are wonderful. I won’t be anywhere without you.

— comment by Sherbi on September 26th, 2013 at 6:37am JST (10 years, 6 months ago) comment permalink

Jeffrey – Being new to Lightroom, I entered captions for 1000 photos into the Caption metadata field. Only to realize that when I publish to Facebook, the text must be in the Title field to show on Facebook.

Do you know of a workaround, including for example an app that would let me copy the data from one field into another in bulk?

Thanks!

-Matt

My Facebook plugin lets you choose what to send… set the Caption field in the “Facebook: Metadata Management” section of the export/publish dialog to “{Caption}” and it’ll send Lightroom’s “Caption” field as the Facebook caption. But if you want to actually move the data from one field to another, perhaps the Lr/Transporter plugin will help. —Jeffrey

— comment by Matt on September 26th, 2013 at 12:43pm JST (10 years, 6 months ago) comment permalink

I have just experienced this bug and I’m getting it frequently now. Anything I can do to help your or Adobe’s investigation? I see that there aren’t any official bug reporting channels you can point us so maybe it’s just a wait and hope situation?

— comment by Ben on October 2nd, 2013 at 6:52am JST (10 years, 6 months ago) comment permalink

In fact (though this may be a different bug) I actually had all my folder appear empty in the Folders list. The Loupe/grid view would continuously say “No photo(s) selected” or something regardless of what I did including turning off filters and restarting Lightroom. It wasn’t until I restarted my Macbook and perhaps fiddled around in the Published Collections modules that the view finally came back.

— comment by Ben on October 2nd, 2013 at 8:00am JST (10 years, 6 months ago) comment permalink

I am experiencing something very similar to what Ben mentioned. Switching between folders and collections seems to work fine, but suddenly, after having visited a published smart collection, the grid is stuck with appears to be the content of the last published smart collection, and regardless of what I do after that, the photos in the grid remains the same.

I just contacted Adobe about this and “please try to re-install the software” was the suggested action to take. And of course it didn’t help

— comment by Henrik on October 3rd, 2013 at 5:22am JST (10 years, 6 months ago) comment permalink

Henrik this is definitely some of the behavior I’m seeing. Sometimes I’m able to get the proper grid view back in the Folders view, other times I have to quite LR to get things to show properly.

— comment by Ben on October 17th, 2013 at 3:28am JST (10 years, 5 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey,
I upgraded to LR5.2 (non-beta version) and the Publish bug still remains. I posted it on their feedback forum and, apart from being flagged as ‘acknowledged’ the problem remains. I didn’t notice it in LR4, but, like you, it’s consistently there in LR5.3. I justed phoned Adobe support, but their policy is not to help, if it’s a 3rd party plugin. I’ve just tried it in the supplied Flichr plugin and the problem is there too.

— comment by Dayve on October 18th, 2013 at 7:10pm JST (10 years, 5 months ago) comment permalink

Same here…restarting seems to cure the problem most of the time. Mac OSX 10.8.5 LR 5.2

— comment by Andre on October 29th, 2013 at 5:24am JST (10 years, 5 months ago) comment permalink

What is probably an manifestation of this same bug is a selection bug that only happens when viewing the publish grid. The zoom that comes up when you double click a picture is the picture that is selected in the filmstrip. It is NOT the picture that you double click on. So, if you’ve got picture A selected in the filmstrip and double click on picture B in the grid, the zoom image that you get will be picture A. If you single click on the grid picture to highlight it and THEN double click on it, you will get the correct zoom of picture B. This doesn’t happen when using the folders grid or the collections grid, only publish services. It looks like the filmstrip selection isn’t updating fast enough to get picked up for the double click. Anyone else see this one?

I’ve given up applying presets in the grid mode because it just doesn’t apply them to the photo I think I’m applying them to.

— comment by khariV on November 7th, 2013 at 2:57pm JST (10 years, 5 months ago) comment permalink

I’m a long time user of Lightroom–started on the Mac in version 3. I discovered a disturbing bug in version 5:
I have found that after I publish to Flickr (the only service I publish to) the preview database is corrupted. I cannot see the images associated with the collections in Gallery mode. I have to delete the previews database which forces Lightroom to rebuild the previews before I can see any of my collections properly. Then everything is hunky dory until I publish again. This is distressing and a pain to deal with.

I wonder if anyone else has had this problem?

I’ve never heard of this, and have a hard time imagining how it could happen (but then, bugs are not known for being reasonable). Please report to Adobe. —Jeffrey

— comment by Margo Palmer on December 17th, 2013 at 6:13am JST (10 years, 3 months ago) comment permalink

I have two “Published Services” installed in Lightroom 5.3, one for 500px the other for Flickr. I also experience the “Published Services” problem which manifests itself in both 500px and Flickr being highlighted which makes it impossible to switch between them.

However, if I double click on the highlighted “Flickr” area to bring up the “Edit Photoset” dialog box, add a space at the end of the name, then re-save it I can change the “Published Photos” focus. When it happens again I change the name again by deleting the space from the name and resave!!!!

I don’t quite understand what you’re describing, but it doesn’t sound like the bug this article talks about. I suggest reporting whatever it is to Adobe, but be sure to be very clear about exactly what it is (with screenshots and the like). —Jeffrey

— comment by Novisteel on January 3rd, 2014 at 6:51pm JST (10 years, 3 months ago) comment permalink

This bug has returned in Lightroom CC 2015.7 – it was so incredibly frustrating. Selecting what I wanted to work on in the grid would never update the loupe on the 2nd monitor or take effect when moving into Develop module. In my case, restarting LR reset the behavior to normal but I sure would like to know how this mode is even triggered! I have to go back and check what actually happened to my work, since I was working with a “bulk import” from my phone (something rather unusual for me) so I had the metadata preset very generically and my whole purpose of selecting images at the grid was to tweak the location EXIF data. I may have just changed the same image’s metadata 100 times since I didn’t notice the strip selection wasn’t changing. We’ll see – but I wanted to let you know that this has definitely cropped up again.

Yikes, that’s worrisome! Thanks for the warning… I’ll keep a look out. Please also report it to Adobe. —Jeffrey

— comment by Brent Harsh on November 21st, 2016 at 2:24am JST (7 years, 4 months ago) comment permalink
Leave a comment...


All comments are invisible to others until Jeffrey approves them.

Please mention what part of the world you're writing from, if you don't mind. It's always interesting to see where people are visiting from.

IMPORTANT:I'm mostly retired, so I don't check comments often anymore, sorry.


You can use basic HTML; be sure to close tags properly.

Subscribe without commenting