Lightroom Classic stuck syncing 6 photos

[Dunlapjc78]

First, I have had this problem for quite some time.

• Windows 10, latest updates of both lightroom and windows installed (7.3.1).
• My header says "syncing 6 photos"
• My sync Activity in preferences shows nothing ( 0 Uploading, 0 downloading, 0 Pending)

I'm at a loss on how to fix this.  It keeps my PC from sleeping (I can fix that symptom with the option), but I also can't exit from lightroom cleanly, and I want to find a solution to this problem.

Any ideas?

Thanks for your help, much appreciated,

Jonathan Dunlap         

[Nomarz]

I tried and It works, Thanks !

[markz91047602]

Wow! this is magic. Thank you! It works.

[Per5E22]

Thank you - this worked and the nightmare with this stuck files is over!!!

[jackdaw_1066]

I have the same problem, on OSX. I tried holding Alt to reset and now instead of 10 photo's stuck i have 103,000. out of 115,000.

When it rebuilds it actually counts down and goes bellow 70,000. I've not watched it the whole time but when i come back its back up to 103,000.

Its driving me mad!

[DrSniffy]

I have the same thing in Windows. The sync goes down and I think it's  all good. Then it starts going up again..

[DrSniffy]

I solved mine... I needed to delete the previews cache db and seemed to solve it.

[ozanmutludursun]

How? Can you tell me how you solved it step by step?

[ozanmutludursun]

I have the same issue, 6 photos are stuck on sync. I tried pretty much everything but no joy. I'm on Mac OSX.

[ozanmutludursun]

I removed all photos from my Lightroom catalogue, where this "syncing 6 photos" problem were happening and re-imported them. Now the program gives me sync errors. Please fix.

[ozanmutludursun]

Nevermind. This actually fixed it.

1- If photos with sync issues belongs to a collection, remove that collection and photos entirely from LR Catalogue (Don't delete the physical photos).

2- Create a new collection and re-import photos to that collection/catalogue.

3- Watch how the sync goes. I had some sync issue problems which you can spot under "All Photographs" tab in Library view.

4- If it synced everything, great. If there are some unsynced photos left, you can see it left side of the window.

5- Click that Sync Issues tab, and double click the little two-way arrow (sync icon) with dots near photos. It should try to sync them again- in my case it succeeded.

I checked on LR Mobile and everything seems fine.

Couple of feedbacks;

This issue has to be fixed and it should try and do this itself. I had near 200 photos, what would happen if someone had over 2000 photos?

There is no good way to see the photos that LR trying to sync either. I didn't have that "Sync Issues" tab before when it tried to sync and got stuck. After re-importing, it showed up, so I physically fixed the issue. That tab should remain there, all the time.

If you manage to fix the issue by following these steps, please let us know. Cheers.

[chief714]

I have this exact problem.

At first it stalled at 865 photos... which occurred after utilizing a new Ex HD.

Contacted Adobe via chat... they went ahead and did their magic and now I have 23,465 photos that are infinitely syncing.

They stated via chat that I could always migrate my catalog to cc and use that instead...….

Nice to see I'm not the only one having this problem... unfortunately, 3 chat agents later... my issue is worse... Adobe you need to fix this asap....

[dbdikeman]

I just upgraded my LR Classic CC with the new version, and my sync problem has gone away.

[chief714]

Not mine. I upgraded last night. Still stuck in the same place. Let the techs in Adobe auto in and now my computer doesn't even function with Lightroom. Not sure what they did, but I'm done. I can't continue to work like this. I've purchased capture one and affinity photos. No lag. Night and day difference

Sent via the Samsung Galaxy Note9, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone

[pumphouse51]

I also upgraded to the new Lightroom and the sync problem remains.  I did try "Rebuild Sync Data" but no joy.

[chief714]

I just think it's ridiculous. This sync issue is common. Been happening over and over again for a number of users. Why is there no fix? Is it something Adobe pushes in it's advertisement if services but has an understanding that they can't do this efficiently?

[Masintus]

Ridiculous indeed. This problem has been ongoing for the better part of a year. I've had this issue from when Adobe renamed Lightroom CC to Lightroom CC Classic and started offering Lightroom CC as the web/mobile solution. If I can recall, that was back in September 2017 or somewhere thereabouts. Removing the sync data doesn't seem to work, neither does any of the solutions proposed in these forums. With every update to the software, I hope for a fix, but I've been disappointed yet again.

Now that it's been over a year, I'm beginning to wonder if it will ever be fixed. I pay $19.99 a month for this nonsense?

Other functions of the application seem to work well enough, and this is more or less an annoyance. Because of the sheer number of pictures I haven't come across something that was supposed to be on the cloud, but wasn't, or vice versa. Whenever I try to shut down the app it asks me if I want to continue because syncing isn't complete. I'm also missing around 300 or so photographs that are on my hard drive, but somehow didn't make it to the Cloud. I have no idea what those may be, but then again, I never missed them.

I would have figured synchronization is an all or nothing deal, but it looks like 99.2% is good enough for Adobe, and more than enough for government work.

[bonanza3]

Maybe they hadn't heard about Coke Classic...

[Jared Platt]

I have been asking Adobe to fix this since syncing began.  The issue has something to do with the way Classic and the new versions in the Web and Mobile and the new version of LR don't talk the same language.  There is some kind of translation problem in handing photos back and forth between Classic and the New Kids on the Block.  But if Google can translate Chinese characters into English in real time on my menu through my phone, I imagine a way to translate one new program's info to an older program's language shouldn't be too difficult... but I just use programs, I don't program them.  I know it must be harder than it seems to make it work, but I think the real issue is how much incentive there is NOT to deal with it.  Not enough people shouting about it!  The higher priorities will always get the resources and until it is an issue that everyone cares about, the teams of smart programmers will be diverted to things like artificial intelligence "show me my BEST photos" in Lightroom Web, because that seems more important than people losing their photos in an endless sync loop. . The best solution to this problem is to collect a mob of people who care and make enough noise to get the programming teams diverted to solve the issue.  Right now, this is a pretty small group of people shouting about it.  Not one will care until it is a big group of people shouting about it.

[pumphouse51]

In my case, scanned photos, the "Capture Time" was blank.  (Inscrutably, that shows as "12:00:00 AM" on the Metadata Panel. I determined the value was blank using Jeffrey Friedl's online Image Metadata Viewer.)  I changed two of them to have a real value 12:00:01 PM and they very quickly synced.

Now I just need to find all my photos with blank or 12:00:00 AM Capture Time.  I see no obvious way to do that. I'll look at John Ellis' "Any Filter".

[johnrellis]

Now I just need to find all my photos with blank or 12:00:00 AM Capture Time.  I see no obvious way to do that. I'll look at John Ellis' "Any Filter".

Any Filter or Data Explorer will do the job. Both offer free trials that should cover this one-off use.

[pumphouse51]

I tried Any FIlter and grouped on IPTC:CaptureTime.  I had it make a collection for all "12:00:00 AM" and it worked a treat.  Thanks!

[Darthyone]

I have this same problem as well. Latest version of Windows 10 (build 1809) and latest version of Lightroom just recently updated. Stuck on Syncing 103 photos and no indication of what photos it's stuck on. Before the update Sync Activity would at least show what was stuck, now nothing appears in the list. I have rebuild the Sync Data and has made no difference. Very frustrating. I've had minor issues with Sync in all the versions but always been able to resolve, the new release seems particularly buggy here.

[andreask58085088]

I have had the same problem as the rest of you: stuck on 36 images that wouldn't sync and didn't seem to exist. I'm using Windows (which I believe is relevant in my case) and for me, the problem turned out to be related to images that I had taken with my iPhone, just after Apple introduced the HEIC-format (something which I only realised weeks after they did it).

I flagged all images in Lightroom Classic, then moved to Lightroom CC and filtered the unflagged images, i.e. the ones that wouldn't sync to my sync folder in Lightroom Classic. They were all HEIC-files from my mobile. So I just made sure I had those images backed up somewhere else before I simply deleted them in Lightroom CC. For me this solved the problem and Lightroom Classic is no longer trying to sync images that doesn't seem to exist.

Reading your posts, I doubt this is the solution for everyone, but perhaps some of you might want to have a go at it.

[musicfan145]

With inspiration from the posts by andreask58085088 and pumphouse51 above, I found a solution that worked for resolving the 2,300 mystery files that were still stuck syncing for me:

Re: Lightroom Classic STILL won’t finish syncing

[baldfatlimey]

I found a solution that worked for me - I was working from the wrong end!

When I had loaded images into LR on my ipad I did not realise that my camera had restarted numbering but not changed the algorithm so I had more than one image with the same name. LR had blanked that image - 0 bytes (and a few others) - when I removed those apparent duplicate images (they were easy to see as they were blank and had a large exclamation mark icon on them) from LR on the ipad the syncing feeling stopped - no more images being synced in LR classic.

Hope this helps other folks