Ideas
Bump1nTheNight Hey, thanks for the heads up! Just to be clear, if I move all of the photos to a sim's inventory, they're safe? I would just go to Manage Worlds without saving to hit each household with a Save Game Custom Texture prior to saving.
MercAB3 so far from my testing yes any images in Sims' inventories save to your file. One trick I saw and I think this works is if you have a photo on a wall, and make an in-game COPY of it and put that copy in your sim's inventory then it also makes the on-lot photo safe. By copying I bet its only keeping a reference from both objects to that same image, and since the image is safely saving thanks to a sim's inventory object pointing to it then the in-lot version doesn't break either.
I'm going to try that one tonight but others have pointed out this is a clunky but effective work-around while we wait for EA to try and fix this, again. I'm so mad about them deciding to wait until Feb despite apparently knowing how to fix it now. I don't think they realize how many of us are upset.
I even refunded my pre-purchase of the Legacy DLC over this. Sorry for ranting, this is just such a terrible situation and after so many poor attempts I have no faith in EA's devs knowing what they're doing or how to actually fix this anymore. I think they're afraid to release the latest attempt to fix this and want to use the DLC release to mask its problems.
Between this and nerfing the image resolutions of all the photos and paint-by-references EA has deeply disappointed me, this was one of my favourite things to do in the Sims and now its busted and low-res trash and I can't do anything about it.