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hr114
Known Participant
November 10, 2020

P: Lightroom Classic: no longer syncs completely, successfully.

  • November 10, 2020
  • 83 replies
  • 36551 views

I've had a problem getting my collections to sync for over three months now. Lr Classic used to magically sync my dozens of collections, and over 5,000 files, and did it without any hiccups for several years. Then, suddenly in late July it just stopped working. It would just hang trying to update any new items in any collection, and still does.

 

I have called support, opened two separate tickets, and followed everything they asked me to do, plus everything ever mentioned here at least three times, and still there's no fix. I even exported a large collection of my portfolio as DNGs, created a new Adobe account, created a new macOS account so everything would be in a clean state, and tried syncing about 1,000 of my photos from that account. LrC still got stuck with 200 photos remaining to sync. Why can't the entire sync database just be reset so we can just start from scratch?

 

I'm frankly at wit's end. I totally fell in love with LR Classic sync, and used it across my macOS desktop, my iPad, and even my iPhone, and it was working brilliantly. It was so magical, I built my whole workflow around it for my portfolio, my students, and even my clients. Heck, I even built my whole website with it in Adobe Portfolio! Now it's just dead in the water, and I'm stuck, and feel like Adobe doesn't even care.

 

If anyone has any ideas how to get this to work again, I'd sure love to hear them.

 

 Sincerely,

 

Hans Rupert

 

    83 replies

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    berliner_ffm
    berliner_ffm
    Inspiring
    November 11, 2020

    Lightroom Web does not show any errors. 

    Sync activity in Lightroom classic shows nothing - even after 30 Min. So no stuck images are shown here and no reason why images are not synched.

    Deleting the synch.lrdata-Folder made a refresh on all data, but kept stuck at the same images. If I remove them from sync and try to sync other ones, they work sometimes. But now and then a couple of images are again not synching. By now it is almost unusable, because you can't collections anymore, only add single images. 

    So unfortunately your solutions did not help. Btw. I just deleted all synced data about 2 month ago because of the same issue. It worked shortly afterwards (took about a week to resync), but now its stuck again, so resetting it again is no option.

    Please provide another solution! Thank you

    Rikk Flohr_Photography
    Community Manager
    Rikk Flohr_PhotographyCommunity Manager
    November 11, 2020

    Hans;


    General Lightroom Classic Syncing Troubleshooting Steps:

    1. Go to https://lightroom.adobe.com and review the Sync Errors/Issues Album (upper right). Any unresolved syncs will show up as black thumbnails and have text instructions inside that tell you how to resolved the sync. 
    2. After all sync is resolved in Lightroom Web, launch Lightroom Classic and allow it to absorb the changes you've made. If your syncing count hasn't changed in 60 minutes proceed to next step. 
    3. Go to Lightroom Classic > Preferences>Lightroom Sync | Sync Activity and allow the dialog 30 seconds to refresh.  Leave this dialog in place until all Uploading/Downloading/Pending Photo counts stop changing. Scroll down the list and find the stuck asset and remove it from your All Synced Photos collection.  Allow time for sync to reestablish. Repeat if necessary.  If the numbers do not move you can try the nuclear option.
    4. In the location where your catalog is stored is a file called 'sync.lrdata'. Close Lightroom and rename sync.lrdata to sync.old. Restart Lightroom. Allow it to sync. If you have a large number of assets, this can take some time. I usually recommend doing this before you go to bed in case it is a several hour operation. 

    Every system and sync issue has its own idiosyncrasies and these steps may need tweaking depending upon what exactly is stuck in your system. 

    Rikk Flohr: Adobe Photography Org
      berliner_ffm
      berliner_ffm
      Inspiring
      November 11, 2020

      Similar problem here:

      I created a new synched collection.

      When I started synching, it first went ok, but then was stuck and not moving any further.

      So I removed the collection again and started synching in small portions.

      Now I can narrow it down a bit more, because some images are working fine and others wont.  Synching direction is classic to cloud (synching smart previews).

      While images are stuck, the syncing activity in the settings does show nothing. Rebuilding sync data did not help either.

      Going back to an old pre-V10-catalog is no option. 

      What is the solution here? Synching was already not working well pre-V10, but now its almost unusable which is really bad, because synching my devices is one of the key features, that stands out for Lightroom compared to other alternatives.

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