Comment by drdexebtjl

Right, but do these incremental upgrades preserve the look of the image? Or do they just keep the library accessible?

For example, increasing exposure in poorly lit adds noise, so you might counteract with a noise removal filter. Later on, the developers come up with a better exposure boosting algorithms that takes more sensor characteristics into account, and produces less noise.

Ideally, you’ll get this new algorithm on all new photos, but not the old ones. It’s unreasonable to expect you to go through all images you already processed and decrease the effects of the noise removal filters.

Or maybe you liked the noise on those pictures, and now it’s gone, and you need to add it back.

It’s a very reasonable to expect your photos to look the same long term.