Lightroom Classic Missing Some Syncs from LR Mobile

Adobe doesn't care, and won't fix it. You'll need to come up with another solution

I have also been experiencing this issue of flag attributes not syncing between Lightroom and LR Classic.

I've been using an awkward workaround that I think is reliable as long as the photos themselves sync between environments in their entirety.  It works without much extra overhead with flags; with ratings it's probably too tedious.

* Create an extra collection in LRC called "Flagged Photos" that syncs with Lightroom. (If you have both picks and rejected, you'll need two new different collections.)

* Flag photos in Lightroom

* In Lightroom, add all flagged photos to Flagged Photos collection

* After those photos sync with LRC, flag all photos in the Flagged Photos collection in LRC.  If any flags hadn't synced with LR Classic, now they've been flagged in LRC.

* Remove photos from Flagged Photos collection

It's not ideal, but I think it at least works.

Hi all.  First of all thanks to all who have contributed to this ongoing issue for the past 2 1/2 years!  Yes it's been that long since my original post!  That means this has been going on at least this long!  Let me also apologize for lack of contribution and responses to some of you along with the way.  @sunnyraini I'm sorry that I never responded to your direct question.  Honestly, I had just given up and altered my workflow to take this out of the equation.  That is very sad considering that among other genres, I am a high school sports photographer and I used that workflow to drastically speed up my processing.  In a nutshell, I would import the pics into LrC, create a collection, and go the iPad for my flagging/cropping/rating.  I could fly through thousands of images in a short amount of time.  Once completed, I would return to the desktop in LrC and do the edits/post processing on the flagged images and then export and be done.  Since my faithful group here would keep posting the ongoing existence of the issue, I had not gone back and tried the original flawed workflow in quite some time.

However, I have noticed a new issue that I want to put out there.  I hate to start a new thread because it probably relates to the same tech issue within the ecosystem.  If I had to give it a title, it would now be the opposite of the original issue and would be called "LR Mobile Missing Some Syncs from Lightroom Classic"  Are you kidding me?  Now this?

Let me explain my new workflow and how this came into play.  In light of the aforementioned, I import directly into the desktop LrC and do all flagging, rating, post processing there.  What I do though is still create the collections and sync to LR.  That comes in very handy for sharing pics easily with parents and athletes.  What it also helps with is image proofing.  The retina display of the iPad pro is great for viewing and proofing the processed images.  It's also helpful to watch the iPad and see how many images are getting flagged etc.  I can literally watch the game collection unfold right next to me as the images and the edits are syncing to the iPad.

Herein lies the problem.  For the first time ever starting a month or so ago, I noticed that certain things I would do in LrC would cause erratic results in the collection in LR Mobile on the iPad (and LR desktop as well).  An example would be if I made a virtual copy of an image in LrC or did "Edit With" one of my Topaz products or PS and a new image was now created.  Since it was copied from a pic that was already flagged, it would be flagged as well.  It would then sync to LR Mobile on the iPad.  What I noticed was that if I then unflagged the original or unflagged any other image, sometimes that would cause several other images, unrelated to the one I just unflagged in LrC, to get unflagged in LR.  I would look up and have 100 flagged images in LrC and 97 in LR Mobile!  I would research and compare and just find three images in the collection that just got unflagged in LR for no reason!  If a did another edit or starred them for instance in LrC, it would resync and then the flags would return.  I say again, are you kidding me?  It hasn't happened consistently but enough to be a pain.  Always before the syncing in the direction of LrC to LR was rock solid.  Now it's not.

So, after all that having been said, has anyone else experienced this?  And Adobe since I know it's pertinent, I'm running the current version of everything!  LrC 12.5 and whatever LR current version is.

Sorry for the novel!

I was having this problem years ago and figured out day it would sort itself out so I stopped culling photos on my ipad. Fast forward a few years to today and I barely gave it a second thought thinking that by now Adobe would have fixed this, but I'm shocked to learn that I'm still having the exact same issue as a few years ago. Come on Adobe, what is wrong with you guys? Your products work, your products are amazing, but this is a serious bug and it affects a lot of us. When will this get resolved?

I can't believe that after so many years this issue is still not fixed. I've contacted Adobe many times about this issue, sent logs, etc, but finally gave up. From my experience this issue most likely happens when you sync new album to the cloud.

As they cannot find the bug, my solution was to introduce force sync option for chosen album instead of rebuilding all the sync catalog, but who would listen...

Following up again to say this issue still persists in Version 12.4 on Windows 11 system. Still requires full cache reboot for every gallery culled on the iPad to sync fully - which is unbearably slow. It's very disappointing that this issue continues to be left unresponded to despite many people still complaining about the issue 2 years on.

Just following up on my last reply about whether the latest update fixed the issue as promised. Unfortunately still having the exact same problem and still needing to use 'rebuild sync data' to get changes made in CC to be reflected in Classic. Last project 8 images didn't sync out of 1090 which had ratings changed - really irritating when it's such a small number of images that aren't working and you have to rebuild the whole darn thing.

Joining the frustration club almost 2 years later. surprised there is still no fix. In November I  synced collections for 5 years worth of photos (nearly 150K) so I can do exactly this... Flag/Rate/Cull on the go. Before I spent the weeks to sync everything over I did a few tests to see if this mobile edit sync function worked as advertised. It worked just fine in the test but not after I synced my large photo set. As someone eluded to previously, this super large catalog/collection maybe part of the issue. I'm trying the 'rebuild sync data' now but it's probably gonna take a few days to get through all the photos and as said before, this is not a sustainable practice if it happens to work for me. 

My photo edits are reflected from LR to LRC, but my flags are not.  I really do not want to manually flag photos on my iMac when I've already done it on my ipad.  Any ideas?

Good morning!  @Rikk Flohr: Photography - here's some more data. I recently upgraded to the new iMac, and so I thought maybe that had solved my problem. When I got the new computer, I had one collection synced to LR on my iPad and it did not fully sync back. So I thought maybe the problem was with the old iMac, but it unfortunately just happened again after several successful collection syncs.  Here's the data, (I started keeping it after that initial first collection failed, so I don't have those numbers, but here's everything since then in the last 3 weeks):

iMac 24-inch, M1, 2021 running macOS Monterey version 12.6

iPad Pro (11-inch, 3rd gen) Software version 15.5

1.  Created Collection A (already culled on old iMac) 118 files (56 .NEF files from Nikon D750, 62 .ARW files from Sony ILCE-6000), 1 photo is edited but I haven't had a chance to do anything with this collection, so it's just hanging out.
2.  Created Collection B with 671 .NEF Nikon RAW files. On iPad at a different location I culled through: 273 flagged (6 with 5-star rating), 69 unrated, 329 rejected. Everything synced back to LrC on iMac when I got home. I deleted Collection B.
3. Created Collection C with 700 RAW .NEF files, Collection D with 338 .NEFs, and Collection E with 559 .NEFs
4. Collections C and D synced to iPad really quickly with no delays. Collection E took longer and I watched on my iPad as there were pauses with the syncing but eventually all images were synced.
5. iPad taken to different location. Collection C: 180 flagged, 38 unrated, 482 rejected. Collection 😧 only got through first 78 images with 33 flagged, 262 unrated, 43 rejected. Everything synced correctly to LrC. 
6. I deleted Collection C.
7. 2 days later, finished culling Collection D and E on iPad at a separate location. Collection 😧 116 flagged (16 with 5-star rating), 21 unrated, 201 rejected. These synced fine.

BUT Collection E on iPad:

• 162 flagged (2 with 1-star rating, 19 with 5-stars)
• 39 unrated
• 358 rejected

On iMac LrC:

• 133 flagged (all star ratings synced)
• 157 unrated
• 269 rejected

Often when this happened in the past, there were chunks of images clustered together that didn't sync but this time it's totally random. As I scroll through the gallery on LrC it's not evident which image ratings didn't transfer.

If you would like me to go through and see exactly where it happened, please let me know ASAP. I will be trying to finish this gallery in the next few days and if I have time I will try to track exactly where the syncs failed.

Hopefully all of that makes sense.

It's also been 12 hours since the sync occurred and the missing ratings still have not gone through.