March 10, 2014
A few minutes ago, Apple released an update to iOS. This update, iOS version 7.1, will cause Photosmith to crash to your iPad’s home screen after importing images from Photos.app / Camera Roll and when converting link/copy. This app crash isn’t as catastrophic as it appears – It’s a display-only bug, and your photos and metadata are perfectly safe. No data loss will result from this crash. Restarting Photosmith after the crash will show all your previously imported photos in Photosmith’s catalog (including the photos imported and converted just prior to the crash). You may continue working as your normally would in Photosmith.
More importantly, Photosmith will continue functioning as it did prior to updating to iOS 7.1. Importing photos via Eye-Fi, FTP, iTunes, or when syncing with Lightroom, isn’t impacted by this issue. This is an issue specific with how we’re handing the import dialog window after the import is completed. Instead of closing the import window and displaying the normal Photosmith interface, the entire Photosmith app shuts down.
Every major and minor release of iOS from Apple contains its share of quirks, which are usually addressed through a process of non-public beta testing between developers and Apple. Once Apple feels this internal testing has run its natural course, they traditionally issue a final “Gold Master” version of the iOS update, which is then sent back to developers for testing a few days ahead of its public release. This is when our final testing usually occurs, and is the time when we usually make any necessary adjustments to Photosmith. The root cause of our app crash is an iOS bug introduced in iOS 7.1 – we didn’t anticipate this issue living through to the final public release.
This isn’t our first rodeo: We’ve observed iOS issues in beta versions which caused all sorts of havoc with Photosmith, but these were always fixed by the good folks at Apple by the time the “Gold Master” version was released. We’re not keen on wasting hours, days, or even weeks of development time working around an iOS issue in our app, only to have it ultimately not be an issue in the final shipped version of iOS.
The difference this time around, however, is that Apple didn’t provide a “Gold Master” of iOS 7.1 to developers prior to the official public release. Today was our first opportunity to see the final release… after it was already public.
We are already working on a fix for the import and convert window crashes, but for now, you may safely import from Camera Roll and convert links/copies, and expect Photosmith to crash at the conclusion of the import or convert. Then relaunch Photosmith and get to work adding tags, star and color ratings, pick, reject flags, then sync it all to Lightroom, if that’s your workflow. If you experience any other issues with iOS 7.1, please let our Support Team know: support.photosmithapp.com
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