Where to find the photos uploaded to the cloud?

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
June 2, 2024
2 replies
5114 views

Hi everyone,

ive recently moved my workflow from working with lightroom classic and importing photos into an external drive to just importing the photos to the cloud on a ipad. However now that my online storage is almost full, i want to move a batch of photos into my external as backup and clear the cloud storage. Is there an easy way to do this? Thanks

Conrad_C

Community Expert

This depends on how your Lightroom Classic catalog is set. If it’s enabled for sync with Lightroom Photos in the cloud, then any time you start Lightroom Classic, it looks on the cloud server for any originals it doesn’t already have, and if it finds any, it’s always going to download those originals to your computer.

So, where do those downloads go? That depends on how sync is set up in Preferences > Lightroom Sync on your computer. Downloaded originals go to the folder in “Specify location for Lightroom’s synced images” and within that folder, they are organized by the “Use subfolders…” option.

The way I do it is I set up the Lightroom Sync location and subfolder organization to match the Destination panel in the Import dialog box when importing from camera cards. That way, no matter where the images come from, whether it’s my camera or coming in through the cloud from my iPad or iPhone…they all get organized under the same parent folder on my external volume.

I think changing the sync location in Preferences affects only future downloads, so if you check those settings and discover that originals have been downloading to a folder where you don’t want them to be, you should be able to use the Folders panel to move them to where you do want them to be.

K

Kobe377286151vimAuthor

Participant

Thank you for much for your explanation! It is very helpful!

I gathered that I’ll need to setup a collection on Lightroom classic and make that sync. But that would mean each time I upload the photos from iPad, I’ll still need to add all the photos to that collection and I can’t really have sub folders inside a collection right? Is there an easier way to batch download the photos from the cloud and move them to my external hard disk and import back into Lightroom classic later ? Or are you saying that I could potentially set it up so that it imports to LR classic catelogue straight?

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Conrad_C

Community Expert

I think it will take less work than you say. That’s because as soon as you enable sync, downloading originals is going to happen even if you haven’t done anything. Even if you haven’t created a collection, and even if you haven’t touched the sync settings.

Suppose you enable sync and do nothing else. This is what happens:

1. Lightroom Classic starts syncing with cloud photos. From the local catalog side, if you haven’t enabled any collections for sync, nothing gets uploaded. (If you have enabled any collections for sync, Lightroom Classic uploads those collections and Smart Previews of the images in them.)

2. If Lightroom Classic sees any originals in the cloud that the local catalog does not already have, it will download those originals.

3. The originals are downloaded to the current location in the sync preferences.

In the catalog, those downloaded originals can always be found in two places:

In the Folders panel, under the folder indicated in sync preferences.
In the Catalog panel, under All Synced Photos. (All Synced Photos is one of the automatic Smart Collections in the Catalog panel.)

What this means is that even if you do no setup before enabling sync, any originals that Lightroom Classic finds in the cloud (uploaded by the iPad/iPhone/web clients) are downloaded to a default local folder, added to the catalog, and can now be found in the All Synced Photos collection. So, you don’t necessarily have to think in advance about making and syncing collections, and you don’t have to think in advance about how to batch download. All that stuff already happens when you enable syncing.

If you ever see a photo in the catalog and you want to know where it’s actually stored on your computer, select it and choose Photo > Go to Folder in Library, or Photo > Show in Finder (macOS)/(Explorer Windows). That second command switches out to your desktop and pops open the window for the folder containing the photo, with the photo selected.

jane-e

Community Expert

@Kobe377286151vim

I've moved your post from Photoshop to LRC.

Jane

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