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Yukon Dan
Yukon Dan
Inspiring
September 25, 2018
Answered

What causes Lightroom to re-sync everything?

  • September 25, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 1816 views

Usually when I open Lightroom there are a few photos to sync. I'm using the mobile app on my iphone, so it'll sync the latest images from my phone.

In the last couple of days, when I open Lightroom, it seems to want to re-sync all images in my cloud which is about 15,000 photos. Unfortunately this seems to take up much of its resources because any other kind of browsing grinds to a halt at this point and often it just seems to crash getting the Mac OS "Application Not Responding" message when you right-click the App icon in the dock.

Is there some sort of sync cache that has been corrupted somewhere?

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer Yukon Dan

    Review this thread Lightroom Classic CC stuck syncing 1 photo, have tried Rebuild Sync Data which seemed to be a similar problem. Notice how we first tried normal solutions, and only after exhausting them did we go on to more drastic steps.

    Re-syncing everything can happen for a number of reasons. For example, if you apply a keyword to lots of raw files, the syncing message will appear. But that's because LR is syncing the updated metadata, not the files themselves. That's just one circumstance, and it would eventually clear.


    Thanks for chiming in John.  The re-sync issue wasn't triggered by anything I did to the images. It was trying to repeatedly re-sync every image in the cloud. If you let it get through a few thousand it would eventually crash and then when you restart it would be back to the beginning again.

    I actually ended up fixing it by opening preferences, holding the option key and pressing the button to "rebuild sync data".

    Literally as soon as I pressed that button the application stopped trying to sync and everything has been back to normal since then. Shame the Adobe staff didn't seem to actually want to help me though. They got off to such a positive start by trying to learn more, but then didn't follow up to actually help.

    1 reply

    Akash Sharma
    Akash Sharma
    Legend
    September 25, 2018

    Hi DanCarr,

    Sorry that Lightroom is repeatedly syncing all of your images to the cloud which is causing the app to freeze.

    Could you please let us know the exact version of Lightroom you're using? Do you see an image or batch giving out errors in the Preferences> Lightroom Sync menu?

    Image result for lightroom sync error preferences

    Thanks,

    Akash

    Yukon Dan
    Yukon DanAuthor
    Inspiring
    September 25, 2018

    Hi Akash,

    I'm using LR 7.5.

    As for your second question, the strange thing is that when I go to the preferences menu it simply says "no sync activities" so something is clearly broken here because it's definitely trying to sync thousands of images.

    The other strange thing is that I also seem to suddenly be having major issues with Photoshop. It's crashing all the time as well.

    Is there some sort of common cache that the two applications share? Sometimes I'm not eve able to get them to Force Quit, I actually have to hard reboot my laptop by holding down the power button.

    Yukon Dan
    Yukon DanAuthor
    Inspiring
    September 25, 2018

    Thanks for the update. What is your operating system version? Has something changed on your computer recently like OS update or Adobe app updates?

    ~Akash


    I'm running 10.13.6 (17G65)

    Nothing has changed in the last couple of days since that began happening.

    Photoshop seems to work ok if I do not open Lightroom, but if Lightroom is running, Photoshop crashes with even the most basic tasks like copy+paste and then the same issue happens where I'm not even able to Force Quit it. I have to hard reboot the computer again.

    Lightroom continues to struggle with the "sync" , the number of files that it says it is syncing seems to go up and down, but remains massive. Even if I leave it for several hours. Sometimes then it just becomes unresponsive so I have to reboot and then it's back to square 1.

    Also in the "All sync errors" section it has several thousand images.  But I'm not able to see them. if I click that section it just slows down and I get the spinning beach ball. Which is pretty much all I get when trying to do most things with it right now. It's unusable.

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