Cumbersome syncing between LR Classic and LR

[PaulR10]

Because I want to share the best of our photocollection with my family members I want to sync my LR Classic collection (partly) with LR. As so far this has been an hour consuming, cumbersome activity.

First, every collection needs to be converted to a seperate catalog before import to LR. But this is not the worst. After importing in LR and syncing, I really need to clean up a mess in LR CC: sometimes copies of my pictures have been made and thrown in a new location "2021", which I have to undouble with the original photo (I exported as catalog ao with the aim to keep the original locations). Sometimes a virtual copy has been made, I have no clue for what reason. And now, since I use the mask function in LR more and more, I need for every picture to rebuild the masks in LR CC after syncing.

Once LR was a wunderful package. But it seems that an unclear "cloud strategy" of Adobe has introduced a lot of problems not to say maltreatment of LR CC (I do not mention de sync problems itself I have, ao  LR being constantly in "still syncing 2 photos mode").

[Jim Wilde]

You stated you upload you JPEG's; does that  implicitly mean you don't do that with you RAW files (if you have any)? In case you have, do you have any experience with uploading your RAW files (especially in combination with edits made before and after)?

I didn't actually say that I only upload Jpegs, I said that I upload "originals", i.e. full-resolution files (mix of older Jpegs, Tiffs, proprietary Raws, and DNGs). I was trying to make the distinction that, because I don't upload the lower resolution Smart Previews from LrC, my family/friends are able to download those full-resolution files in Jpeg format (with the newish contribution feature I could even make the actual original files available to them if that was ever necessary, but they'd need their own Adobe subscription for that). So yes, I do have plenty of experience with uploading Raw files and have never encountered any issues regarding edits.

[Jim Wilde]

For sharing with family I would not use Adobe's cloud gallery sharing thing. It is really not very good for this purpose. You want to use a solution like zenfolio, smugmug, flickr, etc. all of which have very nice publish service plugins in Lightroom Classic.

I totally disagree with this comment, Jao. For my own sharing with family and friends, I switched from Flickr to Lightroom's album sharing almost as soon as it became available....and since then the functionality has improved much further. Two main reasons:

1. I never have to export/publish any of my shared images....any changes I make are immediately available to the album viewers.

2. I can use the segmentation and text features in LrWeb to "tell the story" behind some of the images and places in the albums, which I use quite frequently as I live at some distance from my family and this allows me to add commentary regarding places that they wouldn't normally see. This applies even more to my cross-Atlantic friends.

With further changes, especially the collaboration functionality, Lightroom is getting closer to allow us to set up and maintain a family archive, and in fact some people are already using it that way.

The Gallery function in LrWeb is useful to group a set of albums together, so a single URL can suffice for that, though it would be better if more than one Gallery could be created and shared. The option to use multiple Portfolio sites is also available.

All my images in the Cloud are the originals, which means that any of the family/friend viewers can download full-resolution jpegs if they want to do some printing.

I agree that Lightroom's album-sharing is not good for a professional looking to sell product, but for family/friend sharing it works great, IMO.