Lightroom Cloud Storage - View full sized photos

Report · Dec 23, 2025

I have spent that last few days trying to view full sized photos stored in the Lightroom cloud vs just Smart Previews as I have exceeded my 20GB limit. I'm just a photography enthusiast so really don't need more than this. There doesn't appear to be any way to do this. I can view the Smart Previews, but trying to see the Non-Smart Previews seems impossible.

I have contacted Adobe Support directly about this and have case ADB-43196329-Y5W0 open. Two support people tried to assist. The first seemed to have dropped the chat when it became too difficult and the other did a remote support screen share session which I ended as they weren't addressing the question but started to look in various folders and looked like they were just guessing at an answer.

The question seems fairly straight forward. How do I filter for non-Smart Preview photos in the Adobe cloud so that I can delete them? It would seem this filter has been removed to drive customers to higher tier cloud plans. Non-smart preview photos would take up exponentially more space than smart previews would, so deleting them as a starting point would really help me.

I have also seen somewhat conflicting info that Smart Previews don't count towards cloud storage limits. My own experience would indicate this is not that case and that all Smart Previews count towards cloud storage limits. Would be good if Adobe could confirm this.

I run Windows 11 fully up to date, Lightroom Classic and the Lightroom App both fully updated.

Report · Dec 23, 2025

Perhaps you could try something like these steps-

In Lightroom - Viewing [All Photographs] in Grid view:

1) Click the funnel icon on the Filter bar

2) Click on [Synced Status]

3) Click on [Synced from Lightroom Classic] (these are the Smart Previews)

4) Select the Smart Previews [Ctrl+A]

4) View [All Photographs] again (Don't cancel the selections)

5) Go Menu EDIT > SELECT INVERSE (These are the full-size files imported to Lightroom)

"I have also seen somewhat conflicting info that Smart Previews don't count towards cloud storage limits."

It is correct. If you Add photos (you have locally) in your Lr-Classic catalog to a Collection that you mark to Sync, then what goes UP to the Cloud are only Smart Previews (I prefer the term "proxy" images.) and Yes, these do not occupy any of your Cloud storage space.

If you Add/Import photos to any of the Mobile versions of Lightroom (iPhone, iPad, Camera, including the Lr-Desktop app) then these files import as the full-size files and will occupy space in the Cloud (to use you 20GB).

https://helpx.adobe.com/au/lightroom-classic/kb/sync-faq.html

Regards. My System: Windows-11, Lightroom-Classic 15.1, Photoshop 27.2, ACR 18.1.1, Lightroom 9.1, Lr-iOS 10.4.0, Bridge 16.0.1 .

Report · Dec 24, 2025

Hi Rob,

That's really helpful, thank you. It's much closer to what I was trying to do. When I look at the Info for various photos it returns, some are showing as 'Cloud - Original HEIC' and others are showing as 'Cloud - Smart Preview', often the same photo right next to each other.

Is there a way to filter out all the 'Cloud - Smart Preview' photos so that I'm just left with the non-Smart Preview photos? The results are a bit odd as it is still showing photos synced from Lightroom even after applying the view you suggested above. Some of what it is showing me has only ever originated in Lightroom Classic so would have thought the inverse selection would have filtered them out.

What I'm trying to avoid is deleting photos from the Cloud that are part of a Collection I've synced from Lightroom Classic, the Smart Preview photos are likely part of that, whereas I could safely delete the originals as I have them all in Lightroom Classic.

Adobe clearly knows what the Cloud status is, Smart Preview vs Original, all they need to do is build a filter so it can be viewed this way.

Report · Dec 24, 2025

I have spent that last few days trying to view full sized photos stored in the Lightroom cloud vs just Smart Previews as I have exceeded my 20GB limit. I'm just a photography enthusiast so really don't need more than this. There doesn't appear to be any way to do this. I can view the Smart Previews, but trying to see the Non-Smart Previews seems impossible.

The question seems fairly straight forward. How do I filter for non-Smart Preview photos in the Adobe cloud so that I can delete them? It would seem this filter has been removed to drive customers to higher tier cloud plans. Non-smart preview photos would take up exponentially more space than smart previews would, so deleting them as a starting point would really help me.

I have also seen somewhat conflicting info that Smart Previews don't count towards cloud storage limits. My own experience would indicate this is not that case and that all Smart Previews count towards cloud storage limits. Would be good if Adobe could confirm this.

By @Darthyone

You didn't really state clearly how the photos got to the Adobe cloud. Could you please make this clear for us?

If you used Lightroom Classic to upload to the Adobe cloud, you cannot view the full sized photos in the cloud, because the full sized images are not uploaded to the Adobe cloud. The Smart previews do not count towards your 20GB limit.

If the photos got to the Adobe Cloud some other way, then the above doesn't apply.

Report · Dec 24, 2025

Hi dj_paige.

My photos get to the cloud in various ways.

1) I have a Smart Collection in Lightroom Classic that automatically sync's the last 3 months worth of photos to the cloud. I use the Any Source sync plug-in for this.

2) I create Collections in Lightroom Classic that I sync to the cloud, generally a selection of my favourite photos per month.

3) I use Lightroom on my iPhone to sync photos from my iPhone to Lightroom Classic - I suspect the originals remain in the cloud which is what I'm trying to identify and delete.

4) I have also used Lightroom on my iPad to sync photos from my Camera after importing into the Lightroom mobile app (very seldomly). These are cr2 files and would be very large, again I am trying to identify these and delete them as they are now all in Lightroom Classic.

5) I use Lightroom mobile in my iPad mainly to view photos on my TV after editing them (to share with family). It may also sync the odd photo I've taken on my iPad.

So there is a bit of back and forth going on here.

All I really use the Lightroom cloud for is to share photos with family and friends, I don't use it for any editing.

At this point I'm tempted to stop all my syncing with the cloud, ask Adobe to just empty out my cloud account (or I just delete everything I have there) and then start my sync again - might be much easier than using the tools that seem to be available from Adobe to manage this.

Report · Dec 25, 2025

1) and 2).....these will be smart previews in the cloud, so do not count against your 20GB allocation.

3), 4) and 5)....these will be in original form in the cloud, therefore WILL be counting against your 20GB allocation.

To replace those originals with Smart Previews, here's a procedure that you could use as a one-off exercise:

a) In Lightroom Desktop (LrD), create a temporary album named e.g. To be Swapped. That album will be synced to LrC and will appear in the "From Lightroom" collection set.

b) Still in LrD, click on All Photos and then click on the Filter Bar icon.

c) Select "Synced & Backed Up" from the drop-down list. That will populate the grid will all those "Synced & Backed Up" images, which are in fact all the Originals.

d) Press Ctrl+A to select all those images, then either drag them to that "To be Swapped" album or if it's easier right-click on any one of the selected images and hover the cursor over the "Add xxx Photos to Album" entry, the list of all albums will appear, select the "To be Swapped" album from that list.

e) Now switch to LrC in Library mode. Find the "To be Swapped" collection and wait for the number of images to match the number of images in the corresponding album in LrD. That shouldn't take very long.

f) Now the crucial bit.....Unsync that "To be Swapped" collection by clicking on the double-headed sync icon in front of the collection name. If you don't do that, the next step will empty the collection and you'll have no easy way to identify the images again.

g) With the now-unsynced "To be Swapped" collection still selected, do Ctrl+A to select them all. Then, with them still selected, click on the All Synced Photographs special collection in the LrC Catalog panel. Within that special collection, find any one of the selected images and right-click on it and click on "Remove from All Synced Photographs".

h) That will remove them from that special collection and that action in turn will unsync all those images and will delete them from the cloud (thus freeing up the cloud space).

i) Select the "To be Swapped" collection again, then enable it to sync (click in front of the collection name). That will cause all the images in that collection to be sync-enabled and consequently be uploaded to the cloud as smart previews.

It takes less time to do that than it's taken me to type out the instructions. The only thing that might be an issue is that this procedure will cause any of the affected images to be removed from any other synced collection that you might have added them to. No easy way of dealing with that other than by perhaps adding a keyword in LrC that identifies the collection membership, thus allowing you to add them back to the collections after the original-to-smart preview swap has been done.

Going forward, based on the above procedure, develop a workflow for yourself that catches any new originals added to the cloud and replaces them with smart previews.

Report · Dec 30, 2025

Hi Jim,

Thanks for all the advice, I took a deep breath and went ahead. First I stopped syncing all my LrC Collections and confirmed they had all been removed in LrD. I then followed the process you described.

Of the 25,000 odd photos in my LrC All Synced Photographs there were about 6,500 that were removed. My Cloud storage has now reduced from 21GB to 9.5GB. I also deleted all the photos from my Deleted items but that made no difference so clearly photos in Deleted don't count towards Cloud storage. I would have thought my Cloud Storage would have reduced to 0GB as in theory I now only have Smart Previews in the cloud.

I have noticed that LrC is reporting 18,504 All Synched Photographs whereas LrD is reporting 19,217 so there is still something odd there.

Any chance you may have further thoughts on how to delete any remaining originals from the cloud?

Once I have this all sorted I'll restart the sync process. In theory this shouldn't use any cloud storage given they'll then all be Smart Previews.

I've changed my workflow so that LR Mobile no longer syncs local photos up to LrC, it's a bit of a pain but will manage this by manually downloading my photos from iCloud. At least that way it is really clear what is going where. I have years worth of Collections that have all been emptied out which I noticed when I first started trying to understand what was going on here a few weeks back, I am going through a process of recovering them through my backups, but takes a fair bit of time to work through all of them.

Really appreciate all the help you've provided here.

Report · Dec 30, 2025

Hi Jim.

Further to the above, I went back into LrD and went through the process again. I found an additional 165 photos. I created a "To be swapped 2" album and did this all again. Of the 165 photos only 76 where found in the All Sycned Photographs in LrC. After removing those I checked again in LrD and there are still 89 photos appearing when I select Synced and Backed Up. They are all either .mov or .mp4 movie files. Not sure why these are still appearing but thinking I might just delete them in LrD as they would be taking up a bunch of space as well. Any thoughts?

Report · Dec 30, 2025

I have deleted all the remaining movie files after manually checking that they were all in LrC, it was fairly straight forward given the relatively small number of them. I think the reason LrC can't find them is that I rename all my photos and LrC doesn't search the Original Filename for movie files for some reason. Anyway, my cloud storage is now down to 463MB. Not sure why not at zero, I'll see if I can find the last few remnants but really happy with how this has worked out.

@Jim Wilde many thanks for your help here, really appreciate the advice. Has solved a long standing problem for me.

Report · Dec 31, 2025

Hi Jim.

Further to the above, I went back into LrD and went through the process again. I found an additional 165 photos. I created a "To be swapped 2" album and did this all again. Of the 165 photos only 76 where found in the All Sycned Photographs in LrC. After removing those I checked again in LrD and there are still 89 photos appearing when I select Synced and Backed Up. They are all either .mov or .mp4 movie files. Not sure why these are still appearing but thinking I might just delete them in LrD as they would be taking up a bunch of space as well. Any thoughts?

By @Darthyone

Movies are something of an anomaly in syncing terms. Movies added to Lightroom, e.g. movies taken on phones and synced to the cloud, will then sync down into LrC as normal, but after downloading into LrC they are unsynced in LrC (so don't appear in All Synced Photographs). They do, however, remain in Lightroom.....so if there are movies in the system they will cause a totals mismatch between All Photos in Lightroom and All Synced Photographs in LrC. Another oddity is that deleting/removing a movie from LrC will actually cause the movie to also be deleted from Lightroom.

Report · Dec 25, 2025

At this point I'm tempted to stop all my syncing with the cloud, ask Adobe to just empty out my cloud account (or I just delete everything I have there) and then start my sync again - might be much easier than using the tools that seem to be available from Adobe to manage this.

I really don't think you can ask Adobe to delete your files in the cloud. The whole thing is completely under your control, so Adobe will most likely not do it for you.

Report · Dec 25, 2025

At this point I'm tempted to stop all my syncing with the cloud, ask Adobe to just empty out my cloud account (or I just delete everything I have there) and then start my sync again - might be much easier than using the tools that seem to be available from Adobe to manage this.

By @Darthyone

If you really want to start over, the easy way to delete everything from your cloud account is:

In LrC Preferences>Lightrrom Sync tab, click on the option to "Delete All Synced Data". That sends you to the LrWeb app in your browser, once there click on your Avatar top right corner, then click on "Account Info" in the drop-down menu, then click on "Delete Lightroom Library".

Same caveat as before, if you have any synced collections in LrC it would be best to unsync them first. That way all the collection contents will remain after you delete the cloud library, then you can resync those collections afterwards to start to repopulate the cloud with smart previews.

Report · Dec 30, 2025

Hi Jim,

Thanks for the further advice. Still trying to see if I can delete all my originals from the cloud, Jim's advice has helped but looks like still some way to go here. The nuclear option of deleting everything from the Cloud is still something I'm considering if I can't sort this one out fully.

I do wonder what is going to happen when cloud users start using up all their 1TB plans. It's one thing trying to sort this out with my 20GB plan, but it's going to be a much larger challenge for others.

Adobe could go a very long way in helping this be a whole lot easier, they cloud provide simple filters for what are non-Smart Previews, offer to convert originals to Smart Previews and upload originals as a backup to LrC, etc. Clearly the objective at the moment is cloud storage and associated costs, but seems fairly short sighted and not for the long term benifit of their customers.