P: Lightroom Classic: no longer syncs completely, successfully.

[hr114]

I've had a problem getting my collections to sync for over three months now. Lr Classic used to magically sync my dozens of collections, and over 5,000 files, and did it without any hiccups for several years. Then, suddenly in late July it just stopped working. It would just hang trying to update any new items in any collection, and still does.

I have called support, opened two separate tickets, and followed everything they asked me to do, plus everything ever mentioned here at least three times, and still there's no fix. I even exported a large collection of my portfolio as DNGs, created a new Adobe account, created a new macOS account so everything would be in a clean state, and tried syncing about 1,000 of my photos from that account. LrC still got stuck with 200 photos remaining to sync. Why can't the entire sync database just be reset so we can just start from scratch?

I'm frankly at wit's end. I totally fell in love with LR Classic sync, and used it across my macOS desktop, my iPad, and even my iPhone, and it was working brilliantly. It was so magical, I built my whole workflow around it for my portfolio, my students, and even my clients. Heck, I even built my whole website with it in Adobe Portfolio! Now it's just dead in the water, and I'm stuck, and feel like Adobe doesn't even care.

If anyone has any ideas how to get this to work again, I'd sure love to hear them.

 Sincerely,

Hans Rupert

[berliner_ffm]

Similar problem here:

I created a new synched collection.

When I started synching, it first went ok, but then was stuck and not moving any further.

So I removed the collection again and started synching in small portions.

Now I can narrow it down a bit more, because some images are working fine and others wont.  Synching direction is classic to cloud (synching smart previews).

While images are stuck, the syncing activity in the settings does show nothing. Rebuilding sync data did not help either.

Going back to an old pre-V10-catalog is no option. 

What is the solution here? Synching was already not working well pre-V10, but now its almost unusable which is really bad, because synching my devices is one of the key features, that stands out for Lightroom compared to other alternatives.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Hans;

General Lightroom Classic Syncing Troubleshooting Steps:

1. Go to https://lightroom.adobe.com and review the Sync Errors/Issues Album (upper right). Any unresolved syncs will show up as black thumbnails and have text instructions inside that tell you how to resolved the sync. 
2. After all sync is resolved in Lightroom Web, launch Lightroom Classic and allow it to absorb the changes you've made. If your syncing count hasn't changed in 60 minutes proceed to next step. 
3. Go to Lightroom Classic > Preferences>Lightroom Sync | Sync Activity and allow the dialog 30 seconds to refresh.  Leave this dialog in place until all Uploading/Downloading/Pending Photo counts stop changing. Scroll down the list and find the stuck asset and remove it from your All Synced Photos collection.  Allow time for sync to reestablish. Repeat if necessary.  If the numbers do not move you can try the nuclear option.
4. In the location where your catalog is stored is a file called 'sync.lrdata'. Close Lightroom and rename sync.lrdata to sync.old. Restart Lightroom. Allow it to sync. If you have a large number of assets, this can take some time. I usually recommend doing this before you go to bed in case it is a several hour operation. 

Every system and sync issue has its own idiosyncrasies and these steps may need tweaking depending upon what exactly is stuck in your system. 

[berliner_ffm]

Lightroom Web does not show any errors. 

Sync activity in Lightroom classic shows nothing - even after 30 Min. So no stuck images are shown here and no reason why images are not synched.

Deleting the synch.lrdata-Folder made a refresh on all data, but kept stuck at the same images. If I remove them from sync and try to sync other ones, they work sometimes. But now and then a couple of images are again not synching. By now it is almost unusable, because you can't collections anymore, only add single images. 

So unfortunately your solutions did not help. Btw. I just deleted all synced data about 2 month ago because of the same issue. It worked shortly afterwards (took about a week to resync), but now its stuck again, so resetting it again is no option.

Please provide another solution! Thank you

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

You seem to have tried the usual fixes, so let's concentrate on the Mac OS, by giving your Mac the "once over" to delete more caches and application states.

Download the free Onyx (https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html), select the Onyx version for your OS, download, run it, reboot.

In Onyx run almost everything in the Maintenance tab, deselecting things you may not want deleted, like Launch Services. Hit the "Options" button across from "Internet" and check/deselect more stuff like Cookies & Other Site Data, Browser History, Form Values, (which are OFF by default), but make any other choices you want to keep. Don’t know what something is? Google it, or ask me, or don’t run it, then hit Run Tasks. After it's done it will ask for a reboot. You will see you've gained some hard drive space, but try to use it again.

Also try to fix any directory damage by running Disk First Aid from Disk Utility: boot into Recovery Mode, (hold down Command-R when booting). When you're in Recovery Mode go to the Utilities menu and launch Disk Utility, select Macintosh HD (or whatever), and say Repair Disk. When done go to Apple Menu for Startup disk and restart normally.

[berliner_ffm]

My OS in Win10, but I already tried deleting the lightroom cache and also did drive maintenance recently. But that did not help either

[berliner_ffm]

ok, here is some more info about my problem after spending the evening narrowing it down.

After synching files one by one I realized, that there is a pattern to those files failing. In the end 16 images will not sync whatever I try. The following might help to further investigate the issue on Adobe`s side:

• All images that failed where shot with a manual lens where no exif data was transmitted from the lens. So all images have 0mm focal length and f0 as aperture
• All images were single exposure, ORF (OLYMPUS-Raw-Files). Images that were bracketet or panos merged in Lightroom as a Pano/HDR-DNG-File do sync!

So proprietary RAW-files (non-DNG) with no Lensdata do not sync in my case.

This is by no means a solution, but maybe it helps someone from Adobe to fix the issue.

[hr114]

Agreed on all counts. It has actually been broken for me since about v9.3

[hr114]

@Rikk Thank you for the reply, however:

#1 – I've never seen this "Sync Errors/Issues Album" you're talking about on Lightroom Web. All I see is the activity alarm bell icon, the cloud storage icon, and my account avatar icon.

#2 – No changes could be made per your Step 1. I did, however rename a few collections on LR Web, but they're not showing up in LRC on macOS.

#3 – Nothing ever shows up here anymore. It used to of course, but not anymore. Now the main sync panel (cloud icon, upper right, small) just showed the very stuck "LOCAL ACTIVITY syncing 68 photos" forever and forever.

#4 – I assume this is the "nuclear option" you alluded to. I've done this with no success at least a half dozen times in the last 3 months. It never seems to help, sorry.

[hr114]

*carlos_cardona Well, I've been doing UNIX and MacOS sysadmin for 25 years, and I'll just say that if this is the kind of voodoo housekeeping necessary to get Adobe Lightroom to run properly, then Lightroom needs to be rewritten from scratch. This is the kind of disastrous system corruption that led me to abandon Windows 25 years ago for NEXTSTEP (now called macOS, funny enough)

I'll try this all as a last resort, so thank you for your efforts with my problem.

[hr114]

*carlos_cardona Also, I'm not sure if you read my original post, but I did indeed create a fresh, virgin account on macOS, AND a new Adobe account to sync to, just so I could test such a theory, but even that got stuck.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

@hans_rupert Me too, I was an Apple-certified Mac Sysadmin, also for 25 years, mostly in New York City! Small world, huh? I still go by the dictum "computing is like an iceberg, 85% is the OS, 15% is the app"! As to your sync issues, I will add that my experience with Adobe's backend authentication servers, over 25 years, has been a freakin' nightmare! I can't TELL you how many Creative Cloud users I've had to delete and recreate in corporate environments, because nothing else would get them back working again. So maybe it's not your Mac?

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Here is what it would look like on Lightroom Web in step 1: 

Give me an overview of your sync clients:

I know you have Web and Lightroom Classic. Do you. have any devices, other computers, etc. Please list all, devices attached to your Adobe ID and their current OS and LR version.

Example: iPhone 10 - iOS 14.2 - Lr 6.02.

[berliner_ffm]

No, Lightroom Web does not show any sync errors in my case.

My OS is Windows 10 64bit Built 19041.630.

I am running Lightroom 10.

My phone is a Samsung S10+ running Lightroom Mobile v6.0

Lightroom CC is on a Surface Pro (also Win10) but not used in month (version 9.4), since sync take hours if not days to finish.

As said, synching problem in my case only effects the direction Lr Classic  => Mobile. Only RAW-Images in non-DNG-Format with no lens data are affected. If I remove those from the queue syncing works in both directions (which is obviously not a solution, only a short-term workaround).

[hr114]

Rikk –

Thank you for the continued follow-up. Please find attached a screenshot from Lightroom Web showing that I have no sync issues.

I have the following devices running Lr:

• 2018 Mac mini running macOS 10.15.7

• iPad Pro 10.5 running iPadOS 14.1

• iPhone XS running iOS 14.1

I'd really like to update macOS to 11.0 Big Sur. I do a lot of mobile editing, organization & publishing from the iPad (which I absolutely love) I often capture scouting and grab shots from the iPhone with the LR camera app, and love that too. EVERYTHING was working as smooth as silk through about July, at which point LR Classic got stuck on syncing a few dozen photos, and has never recovered since.

Now what?

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Thanks for the screenshot Hans.

Can you get me a screenshot of the Classic Sync Panel (Cloud Icon - upper right)

[hr114]

Sure thing, Rikk. Here's the URH sync panel from LR Classic 10.0 on macOS Big Sur:

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Does the 52 count ever change?

[hr114]

No. Unless of course I add more photos to sync. Then of course it just puts those on top of the clog.  ;-|

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Open Preferences>Lightroom Sync and wait 30 seconds for the Sync Activity to populate.  Post a screenshot of that next please. 

[hr114]

Sure thing. Please find attached below. FWIW, all those pending iPhone XS shots synced from my phone to LR Web just fine it would seem. LR Classic is just stuck still.  =(

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Hans,

So, the pending shots are all in the Web safely and waiting to come down to Lightroom Classic - correct? 

You only have 651 total photos synced so a resync from scratch isn't that arduous of a detail. 

"In the location where your catalog is stored is a file called 'sync.lrdata'. Close Lightroom and rename sync.lrdata to sync.old. Restart Lightroom. Allow it to sync. If you have a large number of assets, this can take some time. I usually recommend doing this before you go to bed in case it is a several hour operation. "

Does that clear it?

[huaqingy55292324]

Hi, Rikk, I have the same sync issue as @hans_rupert reported. I am using windows 10 and LR CC v10. Here are some facts about my issue:

1. The Local Activity in LR CC keeps showing "Syncing xx photos". The xx number increases as I added more photos to the Collections. None of new collections (jpg, raw) can be sync'd to the cloud.

2. My lightroom cloud web does not show failed sync. I may have deleted some photos that were in the Sync issue folder when I first noticed the issue.

3. The new photos I have added to the LR app in my cell phone (Samsung S9) are timely sync'd to LR CC on my desktop. It tells me that syncing from phone app to LR CC on my desktop works well.

4. I have done the things you suggested: changing the sync.lrdata to sync.lrdata.old, rebuild sync data thru the preference window, uninstall and reinstall LR CC v10.... nothing helps me. 

5. The sync issue seems to start right after the LR CC V10 upgrade.

This issue really drive my nuts! 

It will be appreciated if you can help me address the issue.

Thanks.

[hr114]

Rikk -

I really appreciate the continued follow up. I REALLy want to get this fixed and back to work with my previous LR Sync workflow which was absolutely magical when it was working.

I know I have tried rebuilding the 'sync.lrdata' several times before, but without any success. I will try again since it's such a small number of photos. Please note that I had over 5,000 photos successfully synced before, and it was growing daily. Now I'm just dead in the water stuck. 

[hr114]

Just as a follow-up:

• stopped syncing, quit LR Classic

• nuked 'sync.lrdata' again

• went to LR Web and did the "delete xxx photo permanently" reset, logged out of Lightroom.adobe.com

• started LR Classic again, verified no synced collections

• chose one previously perfectly synced collection of 271 photos

• start sync, watch big sync panel (with files list)

• LR Classic says it has 271 photos in "All Synced Photos" collection.

• LR Web shows only 100 synced photos

• LR Classic's URH sync panel says it's still chugging away at the remaining 171 photos.

• It's been stuck on those 171 photos for the last 45 minutes and counting.

Something is very broken with the sync engine. There are no "photos with sync issues"in the LR Web collections. There are no "missing photos" from the LR Classic app search.

Why can't problem photos be skipped and set aside or logged to let the sync finish? Why can't the sync databases just be completely reset? This is getting infuriatingly frustrating.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Was there a reason for doing these?

"• stopped syncing, quit LR Classic"

"• went to LR Web and did the "delete xxx photo permanently" reset, logged out of Lightroom.adobe.com"

I fear that things are getting muddied when you manipulate multiple clients at the same time.   All that was necessary was to rename the sync.lrdata. The other steps were unnecessary and may have set the diagnosis back some.

If things do not resolve themselves by leaving the sync running overnight, we will have to identify the stuck file and see what it is.  I would highly recommend not modifying Lightroom Web at all during this process.