Photos added to collection automatically removed.

[hao_atlarge]

Here's a strange issue:

There are certain photos not synced in my catalog. I add them to a collection that is being synced. About fifteen seconds later, they somehow disappear from that collection and therefore cannot be synced.

This seems to be my first time encountering this. I'm using Lightroom Classic 14.1.1 (m1).

[moved from bugs to discussions according to the community rules - Mod.]

[Califdan2 · Accepted solution]

This problem is usually caused when one changes the sync catalog, such as going to a backup catalog, and has become more and more common since v13.3 when they changed the sync architecture.  I call these "Orphan" images.  

An ‘orphan’ image is where the image is in LrC and may have the icon showing that it is a synced image, and may appear in the “All Synced Photographs” special collection as well as one or more other synced collections but is not in Lr/Cloud.  If you un-sync and then re-sync such an image, the sync status shows that it is syncing but as soon as it is done it is immediatly un-synced, renmoved from the All Synced Photographs special collect and from all other synced collections. 

One cause of this is when a synced  image is present and synced at the time a catalog BU is taken but was subsequently removed from LrC or Lr before the BU was restored.  The image then come back into LrC with the restored catalog but it's mate in Lr/Cloud is not there since it had been deleted after the BU was created.  This also results in the counts of synced images to be different between LrC and Lr/Cloud. 

One solution that sometimes works is to 

- save metadata to disk with LrC

- Remove the image from LrC

- Re-import the image

- Re-sync the image

Note: you will lose edit history, you will lose participation in all collecitons, you will lose participation of image in Publish Services.

Editing the image, un-syncing and re-syncing do not work with these orphan images.  

[Califdan2]

ADDENDUM,

If you want to keep Collection Participaion and edit history, in the above steps "Export As Catalog" (without negative files) and then "Import from another catalog" instead of just a plain Export and Import

[Mark Muntean]

I had this same problem too and it was driving me crazy.  There are other related posts with solutions but none seemed to work.  This solution worked perfectly first time.  Exported the local folder as a catalog, deleted it, restored from external catalog, then repopulated the collection and synced with the web.  Thanks SO MUCH for this solution!

[hao_atlarge]

Many thanks, Califdan2, it perfectly works!

[Califdan2]

Thanks for letting me know.  Did you do the plain export/import  or the export/import catalog?  I'm trying to keep track of what has worked for various folks.

Dan

[hao_atlarge]

I did plain export/import. I guess export/import catalog should also work and contain more metadata.

Thanks again,

Hao