Why is my lightroom just saying downloading when I click on a picture in my library?

Welcome to the Lightroom Community. I'll help you figure this out. What version of Lightroom & the operating system are you working on? Have you recently updated the operating system?

Lightroom clears the local storage automatically once the original images are uploaded to the cloud. You can log on to Lightroom Web (https://lightroom.adobe.com) to check if all the images have synced to the cloud.

Try this:

• Create a test album in Lightroom.
• Right-click on the album and save the album locally
• Try editing any images from this album.

Let me know how it goes,

Thanks!
Sameer K