P: Lightroom Ecosystem: Selective Sync

Hey there,

it would be nice, if there would be the option to only upload pictures which has been tagged beforehand into the cloud. Till now its only possible to upload every picture in the library. But I only want specific (thus tagged) ones to be uploaded.

best regards

Very well put threesixty. The only thing I would like to add is that ‘selective downstream sync’ (ie cloud to physical storage) is also of fundamental importance to my workflow and practices. The ‘all or nothing’ approach has broken an otherwise robust functionality in forcing a choice between 2 fantastic functions and operational benefits, ie the use of mobile/remote editing/display of Classic locally stored images with CC, OR cloud storage.

Hi Victoria - sorry for the late reply.

Work is always super busy and there’s very little time to be on forums.

Easy answer to your question, though Sebastian got the essence of it.

Adobe’s dev direction right now is Lightroom CC (Cloud)/Lightroom Mobile.

Which is fine — our work does demand a fully mobile-cloud integrated workflow and all the benefits that go with it, details of which I won’t bore everyone with here. 

But mandatory “all-cloud all-the-time” is a pretty klunky and rudimentary approach to cloud mobile integration and will make Lightroom CC an absolute non-starter for many professionals — including us.

Selective upstream sync is essential for us — and this issue has been noted by many working and teaching professionals in the field.

As you note, Lr Classic does have some upstream sync control — though there are significant gaps, and the interface is.... well ...(awkward silence).

With Lr CC/Mobile being Adobe’s current direction, don’t be surprised if that situation doesn’t improve much before the inevitable retirement of Classic at some time in the future.

Adobe may indeed make changes as they go (and robust community discussion is an important part of that process). Effortless and fluid selective sync is one of a number of features to enhance user control that will determine if we adopt it over other solutions.

Cheers

T.

I apologize if you felt I appeared patronizing Sebastian, that is never my intention. 

There's a lot of different levels of understanding in this thread, and when people have only posted once or twice, it's impossible to know how much experience they already have. 

As you note, this thread has indeed gone in multiple different directions over the course of the last couple of years. There's multiple different requests and needs in this thread now. 

Many photographers asking for features in LR Cloudy don't realize that they can already accomplish their intended task using LR Classic workflows. That doesn't take away from the longer term feature request, but at least solves some issues in the meantime.

An explanation of people's workflows does impact on the feature request itself, for example, Adobe may decide that they don't want to add selective sync to Cloudy but with enough votes, they might change their mind on not improving Classic sync. Or requests on Classic sync improvements may turn into a Cloudy improvement that would answer the same need. That's why I ask for specifics.

I think users have some use cases, which have been shared here and elsewhere throughout these forums. Adobe has already said they are not making any further changes to the sync functionality of Lightroom Classic, so some of us are hoping Lr CC Desktop might someday meet our syncing needs. And honestly, most probably don’t care about Lr Classic vs. Lr Desktop. Either one could meet the need if it were adjusted in one way or another.

I actually don’t think this is going to happen. So personally, I continue to remind Adobe of this use case. But I anticipate in the end, someone else will offer a solution to that use case and I’ll end up leaving Lightroom. Alas.

That said, personally, sync or no sync, all I really want is complete access to my photos on my iPad. It could be a new Lightroom Classic companion app that accesses my Lr Classic library off an external drive, for all I care. I just have this really cool and really powerful device, and I’d like to use it in something other than fringe cases :-P.

All that said, Victoria has always been nothing but helpful, and I’m sure she had no intention to make light of any of your use cases. In fact, she’s agreed with the desire for better syncing with Lr Classic in the past.

I think that Adobe addresses this issue just fine on the desktop. If you don't want or need syncing, use the classic version. In terms of the phone app, however, I would imagine that most people would not want syncing for a number of reasons. I did not notice that somehow this thread got a 'desktop' tag. It didn't start that way, so, as you say, the thread seems to have blossomed at some point. And my comments have been completely inapplicable to the desktop software. I just want to be able to use LR to organize pictures on the phone without putting all of my personal photos on the cloud. It seemed to me that that was an extremely straight-forward topic and request, but somehow it seems to have morphed into something much bigger and more complicated. Sigh ...

There don't seem to be any "misunderstandings" other than yourself not being able to get why people want 1) uniformity across application versions and 2) file syncing which is actually user-friendly. This really isn't complicated and doesn't need questioning; these are the sorts of design points which other developers of comparable software put in from day 1.
And given that this topic was first raised two years ago, in which time the many versions of Lightroom have traded names back-and-forth, I don't think it's much surprise that people may want to include versions of Lightroom in the topic other than the one explicitly tagged years ago; especially when, as pointed out already, some platforms have limited options as to which version of the software they can use and so we're expected to use all of them together anyway. (After all, using Lightroom's built-in syncing inherently implies you're trying to keep files consistent across multiple different devices, as syncing if you only use one version of Lightroom on one single device is pretty pointless; again, as Jon Anscher highlighted, if you're going to do that you may as well save money and backup to any other cloud storage service instead.)

I appreciate not everyone works/has worked in software development and/or plain isn't as deep into these things as some of us, but there's no need to be patronising. This is an extremely straight-forward topic and request.

Sebastian, I'm asking because this is thread is tagged as a LR Desktop (aka CC desktop) thread, and many of the requests in this thread are for LR Desktop to do selective sync.

Lightroom Classic already has selective sync with the cloud (albeit more limited than we'd like) and is designed for large quantities of photos, so I'm asking questions to clearly understand the specific reasons people want LR Desktop for selective sync, rather than Classic. There are valid reasons for doing so, but there's also a lot of misunderstandings.

@Victoria Bampton (I don't know why this forum system is so archaic that it can't handle replying directly to a comment from a desktop browser, yet can from a phone, but hey, that's another story)

They want to use the "cloud app" because it's the only one available on phones and ipad to pass files on to desktop. threesixty literally listed their phone and ipad as devices they work across. Obviously, that means that if they want any form of Lightroom on those devices, it has to be Lightroom CC and of course if we want to sync any data between devices then we have to do so through the cloud. The problem then comes that we don't want to sync all our data every time.
This really is not a hard concept to follow and it bothers me greatly that people claiming to be experienced experts with Lightroom, let alone the designers themselves, are overlooking this kind of basic functionality.

- People want to use Lightroom across multiple devices, whether that's CC or Classic.
- People want to be able to sync some files—some, not all—between those devices.
- People want to be able to choose when their files sync, without having to awkwardly turn auto-sync on and off over and over.

It's a really straight-forward problem with a very straight-forward solution. Offer auto-sync as one option and manual sync as a second with a single button press, so we can choose whether we want all things to sync at all times or whether we want to sync only when we say. Then offer two more options: sync all or select which files to sync. Again, not hard. This is no different to moving individual files around in Lightroom Classic. How many of us have imported a whole bunch of photos off a memory card and only wanted to export a handful? Imagine if Lightroom insisted you had to export every file every time. That  is, essentially, what the current auto-sync does.

And yes, as Jon Anscher points out, it doesn't help that Adobe's cloud pricing is well above what other companies offer and that if someone did want to copy everything to a cloud system then they probably wouldn't want to use Adobe anyway, at least at the current pricing.

I, like threesixty, want the Smart Preview sync from Classic. I want to be able to sync the Smart Previews from my library to my iPad, including my organization and folder structure and all my photos. I also want to be able to import and go through the entire editing process on my iPad, though I’d be willing to accept local storage there, if the new iPadOS external storage implementation allows that.

I actually wonder if Adobe’s attempt to keep the two softwares connected is actually causing problems here. Let them be separate and give Classic a far more robust Smart Preview only sync. But allow photos imported on the iPad to sync back to the desktop or to a connected hard drive locally or via WiFi.

I’ve already got a robust backup system for my photos including unlimited cloud backup for $5/month through BackBlaze (that’s right, unlimited, I currently have 19 TB there, mostly in video content, though I recognize their average user will probably have much smaller amounts, but still, I can manage my own local + remote backup for my photos for much cheaper than Adobe’s rates). I don’t need to pay Adobe for cloud backup. I just want a library and photo editor for my iPad. And local storage for that would be fine. I already behave my Lr Library on an external device because I edit from two machines.

That said, I’m not opposed to cloud storage. There are some limitations there (problems with bandwidth over cellular, for instance, and having to choose between allowing all syncing or none, versus Smart Preview only). Just not at Adobe’s price structure. I’d also be fine bringing my own backup solution and Adobe just syncing the Smart Previews, or allowing local access via iPadOS (again assuming that’s possible, since the implementation is still fairly limited in iPadOS, I get that’s an Apple issue and Adobe hasn’t even had that option until now).