Merging Mobile edits with LR Classic imports.

[xzzy]

When I'm away from home I'll import individual images from my camera into LR Mobile and do some first pass editing. These sync to the cloud, and when I get home and bring up LR Classic on my desktop the files show up in the folder in my catalog that was specified for syncing. At this point I'll import every image on my memory card into Classic for further culling/editing.

However Classic is pretty inconsistent with matching up my cloud-edited images with the freshly imported raws. For example with my lastest import I brought in about 700 images and had 56 in the cloud. Of those 56, Classic matched up 16 of them with the local files and made them 'Copy 1' versions of the originals. The remaining 40 did not do this. All files are being reported with the same file name + extension (CR3) so I take that mean to nothing has been converted to DNG (which might mess up filename matching). I don't know if it's useful but I had 9 days of shoots and only photos from the last 4 days got properly matched between cloud synced and local imports.

I can work around this by copy+pasting edits from my cloud edited files to the local import but this is very tedious so it feels like there should be a better way.

Any ideas/fixes? Like maybe a trick to force Classic to re-run its duplicate detection?

This is with LR Classic 14.3.1 on Windows 11.

thanks

[KR Seals]

My system for handling that is to import the main photos that you haven't processed in Lr Mobile (photos taken with my Nikon). In my case, during import, I create a folder like "2025-08-09-Oxford Graduation". Once the import is finished, I go to the folder designated for Lr Mobile synced photos and drag all the Lr photos of that event into the main "2025-08-09-Oxford Graduation" folder. Will that work for you?

[xzzy]

I appreciate the idea but that doesn't seem to work. If I drag from my cloud sync folder to the local imports LR tosses up an error that the file already exists in that location. Which in some ways is good I guess, it realizes they're the same photo.

Now it just needs to make it easier to sync cloud based edits to local files. 🙂

[Rob_Cullen · Accepted solution]

I am not sure I understand your workflow.

"it feels like there should be a better way."  I would suggest there is.-

"I'll import individual images from my camera into LR Mobile"

That's OK.  These image files (with some Lr edits) will automatically 'sync' and download to a folder in the 'local' Lightroom-Classic catalog. They do not need to be Imported again.!

"I'll import every image on my memory card into Classic for further culling/editing"

LrC should only allow you to import files that you did NOT import to Lr-Mobile.  Those Lr-Mobile files should already be synced down and appearing in your catalog, and should be ignored if you have the option set to [Don't Import suspected duplicates].

Changing file extension (CR3 > DNG) when importing could be a problem, but TBMK LrC should identify duplicates regardless of file-type suffix.

"matching up my cloud-edited images with the freshly imported raws"

This should not be neccessary. If you allow the files in Lr-Mobile to fully sync down- they are already in the LrC catalog and nothing needs "matching".  You will only ever have one copy of each image file in the catalog-  Some from Lr-mobile import, some from 'local' import.

The folder for files that sync from the Cloud (Mobile imports) is set in Preferences.

SYNC SETUP IN CLASSIC

[xzzy]

That makes sense, thanks. I don't particularly like that workflow but I can learn to live with it.

In my perfect world the mobile edits would automatically apply to anything I import into Classic assuming the file names match. It sort of already does this, for some of my duplicates it added a virtual copy of my mobile edits next to the freshly imported raw, but it's been inconsistent.

I could see it being due to running an import while it's still syncing from the cloud. Perhaps next time I'll experiment with the order of doing things and see what happens.

Either way, thanks!