Can I confirm that Lightroom Classic CANNOT be stopped from syncing the entire contents of Lightroom cloud to our local machine?

Over the last few years, I set Lightroom cloud on my phone to automatically import my phone photos to the cloud. Basically as a first stage backup.

I was trying to set up Lightroom cloud app on Windows to pull down the original files into a folder that I can then import into Lightroom Classic. So that I have them on MY hard drives and can back them up.

That proved basically impossible, in some part because LR Classic was also downloading all the images. And they can’t be in the same sub folders as each other. Fair enough.

So I am taking the step of importing the photos from my phone as properly imported images into LR Classic. 

Thats fine. But now I find that I cannot stop LR Classic from downloading ALL the images in the LR cloud (in my case 35GB) to somewhere on my machine. I do NOT need them downloaded. But I cannot STOP them being downloaded. And no I can’t just pause that sync for ever, because then the collections that I WANT to be synced up to Lightroom cloud won’t ever be synced up. 

When Lightroom cloud came out with its very limited features, we all asked to be able to send some sets of images from LR Classic up to LR Cloud for mobile usage. 

That eventually became possible, but now it has slipped over into malicious compliance. We wanted to be able to sync to cloud, so now Adobe have have it impossible to NOT have the cloud sync to us.

Which, by the way, duplicates what the Lightroom cloud app can already do by downloading and keeping the originals. 

At this point, my only option seems to be to delete all the Lightroom cloud images completely, and only use LR cloud as a mobile image viewer from Lightroom Classic. 

ANd of course look for other software.