Can't Substitute Previews for Originals in the Cloud

Forum|Forum|3 months ago
November 14, 2025
2 replies
150 views

This is a last-ditch effort to fix my sync issue which two remote access sessions with Adobe customer service and advice from another forum has failed to resolve.

When I travel, I import my RAW files into LR Mobile on my iPad to do minor sorting, editing and sharing. When I get home, my original RAW files automatically download to LRC on my PC. This leaves the original files in the Cloud where they take are taking up 70% of my 1TB space.

What I want to do is free up space by removing the original raws from the Cloud and substituting previews which do not count against the storage space but keep them available in LR Mobile and Web. This should be a simple matter of unsyncing the files from the Cloud and then resyncing them. Unfortunately, whatever I do (or whatever Adobe customer service did), results in the resyncing photos getting stuck in the sync queue. The only way to stop this happening is to remove the photos from LRC and re-import them. Of course, in the process, all the edits are lost.

NB. There are no photos in the web Clean-Up, Deleted or Sync Issues folders on the Web. I have rebuilt the Sync Data. I am using W10. LRC and Mobile are latest versions.

The options I am yet to try are: i) saving the metadata for each file (thousands); or, ii) creating a new catalogue and importing the old one. But this will lose all the Publish Service data for SmugMug.

Grateful for any other suggestions to fix what should be a simple matter of LR ecosystem functionality.

john beardsworth

Community Expert

Why not:

1. In Collections panel, show all synced collections

2. Give those collections a colour label (green)

3. Delete all the synced data (from Preferences)

4. In Collections panel, show all collections with the green label

5. Sync the collections again

S

stevevpAuthor

Participating Frequently

How do I filter for all synced collections please? Is this an LRC option? I can't see it.

I'm wary of deleting the whole lot in one go in case all 60k currently synced photos end up stuck in a sync queue - but I am getting desparate!
I've been trying to remove photos from All Synced Photos collection by collection and 100% of the resynced photos get stuck and I have to remove them form LRC and reimport.

S

stevevpAuthor

Participating Frequently

Thanks for the further advice John. I wasn't aware of the other stuff but have checked and it's only a few photos in PS Cloud.

A couple more questions please before I try to do the deed:

1. I have about 100 synced collections totalling 61331 photos. Should I attempt to de-sync these before deleting all sync data?

2. When I press the "Delete All Synced Data" button in Preferences is says "Go To LR Web to Proceed". What do I do there? Just select and delete all the photos? There doesn't seem to be a "Clear Cloud" type option.

Progress! That Delete All Synced Data seems to be a legacy command. I found reference to the Delete Library option under Account which may be a later option and, in desperation, I've done this. That resulted in zero photos in the Cloud, zero photos in the All Synced Photos and nothing in the sync queue.

I didn't think this had worked as the first Collection of 20 photos I tried to resync immediately got stuck in the sync queue but they are now syncing albeit painfully slowly, 30 minutes for 20 photos, which makes me think something is still not right given I have Gigabit fibre internet. It's going to take a while to get everything back but I can leave it to run 24x7. In any case I don't intend trying to sync 60k images in one go. Hopefully this process will be more robust.

Many thanks for your advice.