Pale black and white photos from VSCO

I think I have found the cause of the problem, and a workaround.

The problem is the smart previews generated in LR Classic. Photos with VSCO profiles tend to get an error (pale or oversaturated) when converted to smart previews and synced to the cloud.

The solution is to force these previews to update/regenerate. I just make a small change to a photo in LR CC, and then the smart preview updates all over in the cloud, and in all web galleries. And it looks correct. I must of course have the VSCO profiles installed also in LR CC.

To do this a little more effectively with many photos, I collect all the affected photos in a synced gallery in LR Classic. I then open LR CC and go to this collection. Here select one photo, open the Edit panel, and find an edit setting that is similar on all photos. In my case I uncheck the "Remove Chromatic Aberration" checkbox (this is usually always checked on all photos). I copy this setting, go to Grid view and paste it to all the other photos. The blue status symbol beside each thumbnail starts to rotate. All previews are now regenerated and synced.

I thought that when all previews were updated, I could re-check the checkboxes and let them sync again. But it seems like LR CC remembers the last edits and put back the old previews, instead of making new once again. So this is unfortunately not possible. But if you don't want to "distroy" any edits from LR Classic, a solution is to remove these checkboxes in LR Classic first, and when they have synced, you put them back in LR CC.

And keep in mind that if you later make any change on a photo in LR Classic, the error comes back in the synced photo, and you must repeat the process in LR CC.

This workaround works for me, but of course this issue isn't fully solved until LR Classic can make the smart previews correct in the first place.

Now I have also experienced profile errors with color images. A photo with a Kodak Gold 200 profile appeared very oversaturated on a web page. Probably there are many more, but less evident errors, that I haven't discovered yet.

This is very frustrating, because my shared web pages have become useless. In some cases I have been forced to make alternative copies of the affected images without the VSCO profiles.

Please fix this issue, so we can use our VSCO profiles on the web!

YES! We have the exact same problem and have since Day 1 years ago with Lightroom Mobile Sync. The craziest thing is that we only ever use these exact two B&W presets, so we just assumed it was a B&W issue.

Once we were able to load the presets in to LR CC to get them on mobile devices it half-way works now, but you have to zoom into 1:1 to see the true contrast curve... and it totally doesn't work at all for shared gallery links.

Has anyone figured out a solution to this?

There is an issue with Web Gallery previews. The previews are not correct. Always inspect color and tone in Develop. If you upload the images, they should preview correctly in a color managed browser and match what you see in Develop if you soft proof to sRGB. Just ignore the wrong previews in Web. Not all web browsers are color managed and that too could be an issue. Color managed browsers will match Develop.