How to troubleshoot sync errors?

[Henkki Zakkinen]

Hi,

I installed the new Lightroom Classic CC and now experience syncing errors. A collection that should have 370 photos shows up in LR CC (mobile and web) as having only 318. I can see sync errors under preferences, but don't know where to go from there. It just says "Error".

Any idea?

On Windows 10, if that matters

Best

Henrik

[SidewinderX]

How did you get that screen to show you what you're syncing and what you're stuck on? I keep getting an error when I shut down saying  "6 photos are still syncing with lightroom mobile", and it never finishing syncing. It's only synced 291 photos (of 1800 I have on creative cloud). I'm trying to figure out what's going on

[John R Ellis]

How did you get that screen to show you what you're syncing and what you're stuck on?

Go to Preferences > Lightroom CC.

[berardino antond90257327 · Accepted solution]

I found that, in the library, each synced photo has this icon in the top right corner.
Photos stuck with syncing error has this icon instead , if you double click on this icon, Lightroom retries to sync that image, an at least in my case, it works.
The problem now is that there is no option to restart the sync process for all the images with Error. You have to find them and double click one by one.
Luckily there is, under Catalog, on the left, a smart group named "All Sync errors" (or something like that, I'm using Lightroom in italian)

[murky-brew]

Thank you for the tip - this saved me so much headache! The photos sync perfectly fine after hitting that icon.

[rsarmaphotos]

Thank you, this worked!

[Philip Baines]

Was quite excited to hear the solution of clicking on the sync error icon even if for each image, but I simply cannot get it to appear like that icon is 'clickable'.

Is this in the normal view??

Thanks

[therealayn]

To re-sync all photos with sync error in batch, just select all of them, right-click on one, and choose Remove From Sync Error, I think that basically does the same thing as clicking on that sync error icon on all of them at once.

[PBMarc]

Does that work or is not?  Does it lead to other problems? Thanks!

[April_W]

In Lightroom preferences, Sync tab, hold down the Alt (PC) or Option (Mac) key to display the "Rebuild Sync Data" button.

[PBMarc]

Oh! Nice... Thank you April! I will try ASAP.

(PS To any Adobe people reading: ADOBE, WHY DOES THIS GET HIDDEN?! So now we have to look for Easter Eggs? Because we all know how reliable the Sync and LR Database are...)

[April_W]

If that doesn't work, you can do what I did and downgrade to Lightroom 7.4. See this thread of common sync issues, and the success with downgrading to 7.4. Apparently, there are issues with LR 7.5. LR Classic 7.5 Sync error "bad argument #1 to '?' (number expected, got nil)

[PBMarc]

Gotcha.

thank you!

[nadayoga]

That rocks! Thank you!!!!!

[Felipe Lodi]

That was magic, thank you!

[cynthiag28746160]

April, thanks for this info. I am running LR Classic version 9.1 and synced my entire library of 36,982 photos, but had 23 fewer photos in "all synced photographs." Once I identified the 23 photos I went to Preferences and used your trick to see "Rebuild Sync Data." Once I did that and restarted, everything was synced. I didn't have to do one single other step. I hope others see this as well because it was a very simple fix. Thanks again!

[psyborgue2]

"Remove from sync error" does NOT work. It remove them from cloud entirely. Good luck finding them again in your destop catalogue. Lightroom Classic is such garbage. Adobe doesn't give two :pile_of_poo: about Classic anymore. It keeps getting worse with every release. Darktable is better now even, by a lot. I only pay for Photoshop but even then, Adobe doesn't care about their older products. They want to force "cloud" down our throats. Well you can take your cloud and shove it.

[N D H]

It works, by taking the photo out of all synced collections.  This is probably not what you want.

Double-clicking the icon doesn't work for me either - nothing happens.  (This used to work, but no longer - or the photo keeps erroring out.)

[27shutterclicks]

FIXED: So I had the same issue for a few months with Lightroom Classic CC showing "Syncing 4 photos" in the top left corner. Whenever I was adding more photos to be synced, that number would increase, but it would come back to showing syncing 4 photos when the new photos were done syncing.

In the Library > Catalog panel, I had All Sync Errors showing 34 photos. I didn't think much of that since I didn't necessarily care about those errors and the number didn't match the number of photos stuck syncing (which was 4).

I went to Preferences > Lightroom Sync, and under Sync Activity I had the log of the (34) errors. That didn't help me much either at the time.

Following one of the suggestions above, I went back to Catalog > All Sync Errors, selected all images and right clicked to choose Remove from All Sync Errors. That gave me a message saying these photos will be removed from Lightroom CC and collections but not from the desktop catalog. Now I am not sure exactly what all that meant, but I proceeded anyway since all that mattered to me was that the images remained in the main catalog.

That step cleared all images from All Sync Errors, but the Syncing 4 photos was still showing in top left.

Now here's the thing. I then went back to Preferences > Lightroom Sync, and this time (after removing all images from All Sync Errors), the Sync Activity section was only showing 4 entries! Each entry was showing issues with Metadata. Clicking on each entry in the log will take you to that image in the folder/catalog (or you can simply go that image manually in LR since it gives you the path and the name of the file. Once you get to the file in the library, the double arrow icon should show with three dots below it, as per the examples higher in this discussion. Clicking the triple dotted double arrow (;P) will show a dialogue saying that the metadata for that photo was changed in Lightroom and asking if you want to save the changes to disk. I clicked Save and after a second (if you mouse over again the section that shows Syncing X photos in top left), the top left corner was now showing syncing 3 photos!

I did the same for the other 3 photos and problem solved. Here's a shorter breakdown of the steps:

- In Library view, go to Catalog panel, All Sync Errors.

- Select all images, right click, choose Remove from All Sync Errors.

- Go to Preferences > Lightroom Sync and identify which images are still present with errors (likely Metadata errors).

- Go to each image and click the triple dotted double arrow icon in the top right of the image thumbnail to solve the metadata error.

Hope this helps.

[davidb40513970]

I had this same weird sync problem and I hadn't gotten anywhere with it until I read your very clear response. Thank you so much!

[Viktor F]

Uhm...

I've had the same problem as well and followed the suggested steps.

But... by removing them from Synced Errors the pictures are also removed from the original Collection!

So i've had 1.100+ pictures with Sync errors. And now I can try to get them back to there original Collection.

I've got a backup catalog... maybe thats helpful.

[robertc90737048]

In Adobe Lightroom CC (ALCC), I chose File, Add Photos and selected the non-synced photos on my iMac hard drive in "Pictures".  This took care of what I wanted in ALCC, not the auto-sync issue.  It is a good work-around until Adobe sends us an update for our sync issue.

[Dept521]

Dear Adobe ... any chance you might fix the sync error problem?  This is extremely irritating and has persisted for a long time.  I am using your latest issue and I continue to experience the problem ... very often.

[Minorscraps]

I found that my sync errors were related to virtual copies that had mysteriously shown up in my catalog. After deleting the virtual copies associated with the sync error photo, syncing returned to normal. Responded too soon after trying my fix.. now I have different sync issues.

[cristib33594909]

Clicking the icon in the top corner doesn't work anymore. Any other ideas on how to resync?