How can I unsync collections from LR classic to free cloud storage space?

[TheHoaryHound]

i'm trying to free up Adobe cloud storage space.

i only use Lightroom CC Classic

I can unsync files from LR classic, but space does not appear to be freed up on Adobe Cloud.

Must i also manually delete the files from the cloud storage?

What's the best way to accomplish this seemingly simple task? 

At least, it should be simple.

I just want to free up space by unsyncing collections.  If I attempt to delete from LR web, it says it will delete my files on all linked accounts.

If I unsync first, then I can no longer find the files on the cloud to delete.

Can someone please help?

Thanks.

[Abambo]

Discussion successfully moved from Adobe Creative Cloud to Lightroom Classic — The desktop-focused app

[Conrad_C]

There’s a quirk with synced collections that if you unsync the collection, that unsyncs the collection, but not the images themselves. The images are still left in the cloud, taking up space.

The way you deal with this in Lightroom Classic is select the All Synced Photographs collection, locate the photos you need to delete (by looking at the Grid or Filmstrip), and delete them from that collection. They will be deleted from the cloud, but will not be deleted from your local storage drives. Files only get deleted from storage if you delete them while viewing a folder, not a collection.

It’s not intuitive, but that’s what has to be done.

[TheHoaryHound]

Thanks, that's useful info... but a bit unwieldy when you have thousands of synced files, and trying to clean up collections that were uploaded one or two years ago.

[john beardsworth · Accepted solution]

One thing you can do is duplicate a collection in Lightroom Classic (the duplicate will not be synced) and then delete that collection. This should produce a dialog box like this:

You can then uncheck the "Leave Photos" box and click "Delete".

If the dialog box doesn't appear, go to Preferences / General and reset warning dialogs.

[john beardsworth]

Remember too that anything synced directly from Lightroom Classic does not count as part of the storage space.

What does count against your 20gb (or whatever) is mainly:

• Originals - eg photos taken on the phone and in Lightroom Mobile
• Creative Cloud Files - ie the Dropbox like space
  • Empty its Deleted Files folder

There is also usage by things like Photoshop libraries but these rarely amount to a lot of space.

[TheHoaryHound]

Yes, I think you're right about that... .files synced directly from LR Classic do not count against the storage space. Perhaps that's because only a jpg-like version is stored (not the full raw).

In any case, this is an amazingly good feature.

I did find my cloud-storage-hogs... mostly raw dng files from my phone, and also probably stuff added for Adobe Portfolio (which is not a great system).

I've just discovered the LR "Gallery" share link.  This is a great feature. I've been using LR to share collections online for a number of years, so this gives me an instant portfolio. Nice!!

[john beardsworth]

Also look at Spark and Portfolio, both included in the subscription and integrating with content  synced from LR.

Spark Page is for story-style presentations. Portfolio is more for complete web sites and can have your own domain url, password protection, and  content from other services such as YouTube.