Lightroom mobile: Remove originals but keep smart preview for viewing?

[reidthaler28]

Is there a way to remove the original images from my phone, but keep smart preview for viewing and editing on my phone? Clearing cache frees up some space, but originals still take up alot.

Thanks,

Reid

[Rob_Cullen]

Photos that are synced from a 'desktop' computer to 'mobile' are "Smart Previews".

Are you referring to photos taken by the phone? This will need an answer from someone more knowledgeable than I.

[Theresa J]

I haven't tried this yet, but I'm thinking it should work. Let me know if it does. Follow these steps.

1. Check to make sure that the images from your phone have successfully transfered to the computer. Do this by finding an Image in your main catalog. Right click and chose Reveal in Finder (Mac), or Show in Explorer (Windows).

2. In the desktop catalog go to All Synced Photos collection (or something similarly named. I'm not in front of my computer at the moment). This is in the top panel on the left where you find collections for All Photos, and Recently Imported.

3. Delete phone photos from this collection. Chose the option to remove from the collection, but don't delete from catalog. This will remove the images from your phone, and leave them on your computer, but it may take awhile for everything to sync up.

4. Now the images live on your computer, not your phone, and they are no longer synced to Lr Mobile. Create a new collection for the phone images and sync this collection.

5. This will create smart previews of the images to sync back to Lr Mobile.

[reidthaler28]

That's the same approach I had thought of as well. I just hoped that there would be something a little bit more elegant, like an option in Lightroom  mobile to remove raw files, but keep smart reviews

[Theresa J]

Reid, I completely agree. I also wish that images captured on my iPhone would auto collect into a mobile collection on my mobile devices. I hate that they are mingled with the catalog images I have synced with Lr Mobile.

I'm going to be at Adobe MAX next week and plan to meet with the Lr Product team. I will ask them about this workflow and find out if they know something we don't.

[ghsia]

Hi Theresa, any luck?

[Carles Alonso Photography]

Hi, landed here after working a little bit in my new mobile workflow. 

I found a way to clean up all the Raws in LR mobile once they are synced to the cloud. Basically if you uninstall Lr mobile on your phone-ipad and then reinstall it, you´ll have everything with smart previews!!  Reinstallation and sync back to only smart previews is quite fast with a good internet connection. 

I feel like a thing to do every 2 or 3 months if my mobile device storage is getting full and I´ve already edited the pictures. 

Of course anytime you can download to your mobile device the original if needed for a particular file. 

Hope this trick helps! 🙂

[john beardsworth]

It's a hammer to crack a nut. I'd recommend anyone follows Theresa's suggestion, which works - and is safer.

[JohanElzenga · Accepted solution]

Go to Settings - Cloud Storage & Sync and check 'Only Download Smart Previews'. That should automatically replace the originals you shot with the phone with smart previews once they have been uploaded to the cloud. Don't be fooled by the small 'RAW' or 'DNG' icons you see in the upper right corner of the images. That doesn't mean that the iPhone has a local copy of the raw original, but only that the image is from a raw original. You will even see these icons on images that were synced up from Lightroom Classic, which are always smart previews.

[Carles Alonso Photography]

That's awesome thanks! Much better. In settings Adobe should state that clearly in a sentence. It's quite an important topic

[danf42707116]

This doesn't work. Initially yes, but for example, if I am in Lightroom mobile on my iPad, send an image to photoshop, edit, and press the 'send to Lightroom button', all of that works fine. However, when you loo at the cloud in the corner, it syncs a PSD file to the cloud, and leaves the PSD file to the iPad. So a larger file than what I started with... so annoying. 

[DdeGannes]

Johan answer is accurate as regards to Lightroom Mobile. The image files you have in your Photo app on your phone has to be managed separately.