Confused about CC storage vs photo storage

[rk123456]

I have a CC photography subscription, the one which gives you 20GB of storage, LRCC, LRCC Classic and Photoshop. I just uploaded 8GB or so of photos I was working on in LRCC Classic by making the collections 'synched'. Indeed they now show up in LRCC and on my iPad and on my phone and on the LR web.

What confused me however is my CC storage is still showing 0 used of 20GB, I assumed the photos I uploaded would count against it. The Creative Cloud Files folder on the Mac is empty, the web says empty. I've checked it in every place I can find a storage meter, they all say zero.

Is Creative Cloud storage entirely separate from storage for photographs synced through CC and actually just for sharing random files? If so what's the limit on uploading photographs? I wondered how 20GB was going to work when a day out is 5GB of raw files but if photograph storage is separate and the 20GB is just like a dropbox random file store, that makes life much easier.

[KanikaS]

Hi Rk123456,

Please make sure the File sync is turned on.

Also, please see the link for help: Browse, search, sync, and manage Adobe Creative Cloud assets

Thanks

Kanika

[rk123456]

Yes file sync was always turned on, if I drop a file into the creative cloud storage folder it syncs everywhere. However that goes nowhere to answering the question which was about why LR photos from LR CC Classic sync and are available on all devices but don't show up against the CC storage quota, at all, not one single byte.

And I've read that link and it also isn't relevant to the question.

[rk123456 · Accepted solution]

well I made some progress with some more googling. Now I see that the photos I have in Lightroom CC are just 'smart previews' and I've found some posts suggesting that smart previews don't count against storage.

So again the workflow here was importing photos locally on my mac into Lightroom Classic CC, editing them, then making the collection 'synched'. That appeared to sync the photos to the cloud however it didn't really, it just put smart previews there and I'm not entirely sure what use they are.

Is it possible to start from Lightroom Classic CC and sync full raw photos out to the cloud for use within Lightroom CC or do you have to do it the other way around, import them into Lightroom CC and then sync them back again to Lightroom CC Classic? And if you do it that way, do you get the whole original raw file on your desktop for use in Lightroom Classic CC again?

The whole creative cloud concept seems like a total mess. I wish you could still just buy Lightroom Classic outright and use it with your own storage and be done with it.

For those interested, https://www.lightroomqueen.com/community/threads/how-do-you-manage-space-on-the-cloud.33215/ is the thread I found which explained this pretty well.