Syncing my 20,000 photos from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom Mobile

Question

Hi!I have a question about syncing my 20,000 photos from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom Mobile. Objective: I would like to view ALL photos from my LrC-catalog (MacBook) on the iPhone and iPad..Initial situation: The photos in my catalog are on an external SSD and in around 500 folders, for example 20250305_Holiday Sicily, etc.LrC and Lr installed on MacBook, LrM installed on iPhone and iPad. Synchronization is activated and working.It would be elegant if you could create and synchronize smart collections - but unfortunately that is not possible.Moving all 20,000 photos to the "All synchronized photos" folder is not an option for me because of the confusion.I currently see only 1 possible solution:I could create a collection from each of the 500 folders in the catalog and then synchronize these 500 collections.Pro:Folder structure on mobile devices is identical to the folder structure in LrC.Cons: Complex creation of 500 collections.Changes in the folders in the catalog would not be automatically synchronized with the collections. I would have to delete the old collection and create a new collection when making certain changes to the folders, e.g. when I add new photos to a folder. But maybe you know other ways to achieve the goal described above. I am grateful for every tip and every idea.Best regards from Vienna, Peter.

Jim Wilde · Accepted Answer

I've now adjusted my workflow according to the tips and am getting along well with it.

Apparently, there are still some "skeletons" on Adobe Creative Cloud that I created during my initial attempts.

Is there a way to control the photos stored in the cloud?

Since I only synced collections, my entire cloud storage (20 GB) should be available. However, about 3 GB are used up—presumably by uploaded raw files from my test phase.

Is there any way I can identify these "skeletons" so I can delete them from the cloud?

Not sure what you mean by "skeletons", but if you have some of your 20GB allowance already used up, the logical assumption is that you have some originals stored there (such as photos imported from LrMobile on a mobile device, or imported directly into the Lightroom Desktop or Web apps). Any of those images will already be in the LrC catalog (assuming sync was fully up to date between LrC and the cloud), but if you want to identify and remove those originals from the cloud (and replace with Smart Previews) the easiest was would be to use the Lightroom Desktop app:

1. Open LrD, click on All Photos to populate the grid with all the cloud images.

2. Create a (temporary) new Album, give it a unique name.

3. Click on the Filter icon (at the end of the top centre search bar), and select Sync Status from the filter bar.

4. That will show various entities, such as Synced from Lightroom Classic, but the one you are interested in will be "Synced and Backed Up", which is all the images stored in original form.

5. Click on that "Synced and Backed Up" entry and that will populate the grid only with those images.

6. Cmd+A to select them all, then add them to the new temporary album.

7. Wait until the equivalent collection appears in LrC.

8. When the collection has appeared, unsync it by clicking on the sync icon on front of the collection name. That will have no affect on the synced images in that collection, they will remain synced.

9. Select that collection, then Cmd+A to select all the contained images. Then, keeping them all selected, click on the All Synced Photographs special collection, then right-click on any one of the selected images and "Remove from All SYnced Photographs". This will remove all those images from the ASP and will also cause them all to be deleted from the cloud.

10. Monitor the LrD app until all those originals have been deleted from the cloud. When that's done, and assuming that you want them all back in the cloud as Smart Previews, go back to LrC and re-enable sync for that collection, which will upload them all as smart previews. Any that you don't want to resysnc, remove them from the collection before enabling it to sync.

Jim Wilde · Answer

I currently see only 1 possible solution:I could create a collection from each of the 500 folders in the catalog and then synchronize these 500 collections.Pro:Folder structure on mobile devices is identical to the folder structure in LrC.Cons: Complex creation of 500 collections.Changes in the folders in the catalog would not be automatically synchronized with the collections. I would have to delete the old collection and create a new collection when making certain changes to the folders, e.g. when I add new photos to a folder.By @Peter35664653u66f Assuming your folders in LrC are organised with one or more parent folders, you can have LrC automatically generate a collection set/collection hierarchy (which will include all the images in the folders). Simply right-click on a parent folder and choose "Create Collection Set...." from the menu and repeat for any other parent folders. Once the collection set/collections have been created you can then enable sync for each of the collections. Note that only the collections can be synced (into "albums" with the same name in the cloud), but collection sets do not so you would need to manually create the collection set (called "Folders") in the cloud. In terms of the other "con", if you add new images to a folder in LrC you simply need the workflow discipline to add the same images to the corresponding synced collection. Eventually you may come to realise that there is no need to organise your images using folders in LrC, instead you could switch to using a date-based folder structure going forward and switch the organisational function to the collections.

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