Lightroom Classic sync error "This appears to be a duplicate or automatically created backup of your catalog"

[tomos.jones]

I'm having terrible trouble with the appalling sync functionality on Lightroom Classic CC. What an absolute disgrace this program is.

1. I had about 25,000 photos on my hard drive, in an existing, unsynced catalogue ('A'). I changed my subscription to the 1TB cloud storage solution to be able to sync all my photos in the cloud and add to/edit them from my iPhone while on holiday.
2. Before I went on holiday I had synced about 18,000 of those photos into the cloud storage - ran out of time to sync the whole catalogue.
3. While on holiday I took about 2,000 photos over a month. I uploaded these all into Lightroom cloud storage via Lightroom Mobile on my iPhone, editing some of them as I went. So in total I had about 20,000 photos stored in the cloud, plus about 5,000 unsynced photos sitting at home on my hard drive.
4. I got back home, loaded up Lightroom Classic CC on my desktop. It started syncing and downloading the new photos onto my hard drive as expected.
5. I don't know how far through this happened, but the sync stopped and I got the message "this appears to be a duplicate or automatically created backup of your catalog". I was not able to get the sync going by restarting. I wonder if I had tried to edit some photos on my phone while the sync was happening.
6. My solution was to create a new, blank catalogue 'B' to sync with my cloud account, to get the contents of the cloud storage onto my hard drive, planning then to merge catalogues A and B. However, after completing the sync the catalogue only has 4,000 photos. These are a random mix of some of the photos I synced in step 2 above, and some of the new photos I took and uploaded in step 3.

The outcome is now total chaos. I have:

• Catalogue A: 25,000 original photos, plus a few of the holiday photos which I successfully synced in step 4
• Lightroom cloud storage with 18,000 of the original photos and the 2,000 new photos.
• Catalogue B: a random mix of 4,000 of the synced original and new photos (why the **** has this not synced fully with the 20,000 Lightroom cloud contents).

Basic question is how to get my pre-holiday 25,000 photos plus my 2,000 holiday photos into one single catalogue. In a perfect world this would be synced with my Lightroom cloud storage as I had intended, but frankly the outcome of this nightmare is likely to be that I cease using the cloud storage (and hopefully get the hell out of Lightroom altogether).

Message was edited by: Sahil Chawla

[Sahil.Chawla]

Hi there,

Sorry to hear about the confusing situation with Lightroom Classic syncing, as you have two catalogs at this point, Lightroom can only sync 1 catalog to the catalog to the cloud.

Make sure that you have the back up of all your images, the 25000 images in Catalog A and the 2000 images from the holiday. Make sure all the original images are backed up on a hard drive.

Then turn off the sync in Catalog B (Which has 4000 images) by clicking on the Identity plate on the top left corner which shows your name as shown in the image below:

After doing all that quit Lightroom and delete the Sync.lrdata file from your computer. Please check the location below:

• Windows: C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Adobe\Lightroom\Caches\Sync Data\
• macOS: /Users/<username>/Library/Caches/Adobe/Lightroom\Sync Data\

Once, you have deleted the Sync.lrdata file, open Lightroom Catalog A (Which has 25000 images) again and Turn on the sync process by clicking on the Identity plate on the top left corner.

Let all the images sync to the cloud.

Regards,
Sahil

[tomos.jones]

"Make sure that you have the back up of all your images, the 25000 images in Catalog A and the 2000 images from the holiday. Make sure all the original images are backed up on a hard drive."

Sorry but that is the problem, and to be honest the number 1 priority. The holiday photos were uploaded to the cloud directly from Lightroom Mobile and I don't have any back up. For some inexplicable reason Catalogue A only downloaded half of these to my hard drive before (5) above happened.

I have (kind of) followed the Johan advice and imported Catalogue A into Catalogue B, and am now in the process of syncing Catalogue B. However what is already obvious is that the other 50% of the cloud photos are not being downloaded into Catalogue B. I can see them all present in Lightroom Mobile, but the number of photos remaining to sync - according to Lightroom Classic - is way less than the missing number of holiday photos.

[JohanElzenga]

You can only sync one single catalog to the cloud, so the solution is to merge the two catalogs first and then sync the merged catalog. You can merge catalogs by selecting one as the new main catalog (catalog A makes the most sense in your case) and then choose 'File - Import from Another Catalog'. Then select the other catalog as the one to import.

BTW, Lightroom Classic syncs smart previews to the cloud, not originals. These smart previews do not count for your online space allocation, so you did not have to increase the storage space to 1TB.