Lightroom Classic imported copies of random photos from iPhone 14 Pro

Report · Oct 20, 2023

I keep having a lot of "firsts" with LrC lately... here's another fun one... took pics of horses at a nearby stable today. The iPhone 14 Pro with iOS 17.0.3 sync'd to iCloud and I see on the Photos app on my Macbook Pro there is one copy of each photo... not bursts or duplicates. I opened LrC v13 and selected Import. I again see the same photos, single copy of each and imported them all. I ended up with dozens and dozens of them having a "Copy" (attached shows all images with a "2" in top left have copies). They are DNG files but just duplicates. Random, no pattern. Not all, just some. Some here, some there. Will require a lot of "unstack" and then hunting them down and deleting them to clean this up.

Why is this happening and how to stop it?

Report · Oct 21, 2023

These are not real copies, but stacked virtual copies. I assume it has something to do with these photos having edits or other metadata saved in XMP, possibly created by iCloud (Apple Photos). I would advise against using both Lightroom and Apple Photos. They don't work well together.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

Report · Nov 04, 2023

Thanks. I discovered the issue. I had turned on to have Lr Mobile sync with my device photos so it was pulling in copies but then I also manually imported them as I have done long-term. So, I ended up with virtual copies for some reason. When I've imported something twice in the past, it's made the second item -2 with a name or something similar, but not virtual copies. So, that was confusing.

I thought the "sync" automatically would be easier. But, when it does this method of moving photos from the iPhone photo catalog to Lr mobile cloud system, it does NOT put the imported photos into dated folders on LrC Desktop. Don't know why as it would be the perfect solution if it did put them in folders. But, it doesn't as far as I can tell.

Anyway, turning off the auto sync and going back to my previous method of Import from the iPhone manually corrected the issue after a little clean up on LrC Desktop.