I deleted "Mobile Downloads.lrdata". How do I redownload?

[whlteXbread]

I did a stupid thing, I deleted "Mobile Downloads.lrdata" in an attempt to clear out some disk space. Of course this means that now the photos located there are not on my disk anymore, and LrC can't find them. However, at some point in the past I instructed LrC to download to a specific folder. This means that some of the photos in my library are still on my disk, but some are not. 

I know all these files exist on Adobe's servers. Why won't LRC download a copy?

I found the "Lightroom Downloader", and that seems helpful, except that I don't need to download all of the files.

Further, after I download the files, do I have to go through and point to the correct image on disk one-by-one?

[JohanElzenga]

In the Lightroom folder panel, you won't see 'Mobile Downloads', but your mobile devices. Each mobile device will be separate. If you download the images from one of these devices to a normal folder, then you can 'reconnect' the mobile device download folder in the folder panel to this download folder. BTW, instead of using the downloader app (which I think can only download everything), you could use Lightroom desktop (not Classic) to do this. Select the images of one device in Lightroom desktop, then export them 'as original'.

[whlteXbread]

Thanks for the tip. You're right, I can see the mobile devices in the folder panel LrC. These correspond to the device that uploaded images, so there's one for my iPad, and a couple for phones I've had over the years. (I use my ipad to import from SD cards and edit, so each mobile device in the LrC folder panel will contain images from a few different cameras.)

I did download lightroom desktop. AFAICT, there's no way to select photos by upload device, only by capture device. Am I missing something?

You are correct, the downloader will only download everything, not ideal. That said, it is much faster than downloading via Lr desktop.

[JohanElzenga]

I did download lightroom desktop. AFAICT, there's no way to select photos by upload device, only by capture device. Am I missing something?

By @whlteXbread

I'll check Lightroom desktop later, but I am pretty sure this should be possible. I am typing this on my iPad right now, and even in Lightroom for iPad I can search on phone model and/or phone lens. Just type 'iPhone' in the search field. Of course the iPhone is a capture device. I'm not sure what you mean with 'upload device' however. You want to search by phone, don't you?

[whlteXbread]

the key difference here is that i was trying to filter by upload device, not camera. 

more specifically, i used ipad 1 to upload images from camera a and camera b. in the search, you can only find/filter for cameras, not the device that was used to upload the images.

i wanted to do that because i mistakenly thought that was how subsections of the "Mobile Downloads.lrdata" package were cordoned off.

since that was not the case, searching by upload device is moot.

[whlteXbread · Accepted solution]

alright, an update for anybody else in this admittedly edge-case of a situation. to recap:

• starting in the early days of mobile Lightroom, my workflow went like this:
  • import from cameras to mobile Lightroom on an ipad
  • edit on the ipad
  • do metadata/exports/whatever in LrC
• early on, LrC's default for downloading and storing images from mobile Lightroom was a custom directory structure, and the parent...package...was called "Mobile Downloads.lrdata"
  • in my case, it turns out, there were four subfolders that contained photos from all camera devices, and all four subfolders had photos from a few years of shooting
• at some point I learned that you can make LrC store downloads in a year-month-day-ish format, and I switched to that
• fast-forward to a couple weeks ago, I deleted "Mobile Downloads.lrdata"

because those files were downloaded from adobe's servers in the first place, it should be possible to download them again and update their location in LrC. here is how I ended up doing that:

• used the Lightroom downloader app to download _all_ of my photos
  • this is significantly faster than using vanilla Lightroom on desktop to download/export originals, it turns out
  • it organizes the images in a date-based directory structure
• made a copy of all of the folders that contained images that were in the "Mobile Downloads.lrdata" file
  • I determined which dates to copy by checking the dates covered by the "other devices" parts in the "Folders" section of LrC
  • I made a copy in the case that I made a mistake I wouldn't have to download everything again
• I searched within that folder for all images, and moved all of the images into an empty, new folder
  • finder makes this easy—search for "kind:dng", then select the "Adobe Raw" option that pops up—repeat for all the different kinds of files you have
• In LrC, I right-clicked on the missing folders and selected "Find missing folder", and then pointed to the new folder, which now contains images and no other folders
  • I did this for each missing folder

I think that was the most efficient way.

feedback for the Adobe staff: I get that sync is hard and that interop between LrC and Lightroom Mobile/Web/etc. requires tradeoffs. but why wouldn't LrC be able to redownload an image it has already downloaded?