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em8586
em8586
Participant
February 6, 2026
Question

Syncing issues

  • February 6, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 42 views

I am having so many syncing issues, and am hoping someone here can help me figure out the issue. I recently moved about 200K of my 250K photos to a new hard drive, and relinked all of them in LrC. There were no issues with relinking, and there are zero missing photos. Every photo has a smart preview and its original. However, when I add these already imported photos to a new or current collection, they will not sync. In the upper right corner, it says all photos are ‘Synced’. But when I go to the Sync Activity window, it shows thousands of photos ‘Uploading’ in the window. I’ve tried rebuilding the sync data several times and let it run over night. I’ve also tried deleting the Sync.lrdata file and letting it resync. I’ve also optimized my catalog, and tested the integrity. Nothing is working. 

 

These photos I am trying to sync appear in the All synced Photographs section, but will not sync when added to a new collection. 

 

If I import new photos to my library and add those to a collection, it syncs just fine. It is only the already imported photos that will not sync when added to a new collection. 

 

I’ve also checked for sync errors on Lightroom web, and deleted any sync errors. Also cleared everything in the Deleted folder. 

 

Any idea what the issue could be? 

    1 reply

    J
    Community Expert
    Jao vdLCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    February 8, 2026

    Try quitting and reopening Classic (ignore the sync warning) and see if the upload restarts. Also try rebooting the computer completely if you haven’t tried that yet. The sync is rather finicky and sometimes hangs for a long time. 

    Also, you do not need to have smart previews for syncing. They are generated on the fly. Smart previews are rarely used in Classic. They only apply if your actual images are offline normally. Most of the time they are just wasting hard disk space. 

    em8586
    em8586Author
    Participant
    February 8, 2026

    I’ve tried restarting Lightroom and rebooting the computer several times now. :(

     

    Is there any way to remove all Uploading items from the Sync Activity window? There are thousands of files listed there and I don’t want to have to remove one at a time. 
     

    Sadly I’m out of ideas as to what to do next. 

    J
    Community Expert
    Jao vdLCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    February 8, 2026

    Not really. I have a number of files always stuck in uploading. This seems to be a general bug where files get stuck in uploading without any reason. Usually removing them and reading them fixes it. With 1000’s of them that is not a scalable solution and nuking the entire cloud library when and starting over might be the only solution unfortunately. No guarantee that it won’t happen again though. Sync from Classic is not that robust in my experience.

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