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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.
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.
However, I've tried to delete the photo I dont want on the ipad. I've noticed that even though its deleted from the cloud, it remains on my external.
By @Kobe326111902dj6
If you delete a file from Lightroom iPad, it’s actually deleted from Lightroom cloud photos so it is no longer accessible to all non-Classic clients. However, Lightroom Classic downloaded and cataloged a local copy of that original, and any non-Classic form of Lightroom (desktop cloud, phone, tablet, web browser) knows nothing about Classic local storage, so it is not deleted from local storage.
This can be confusing. It all makes sense for those who only use Lightroom Classic (deletion removes local file), or who only use the non-Classic cloud clients (deletion removes cloud file). It’s only confusing for those who use both systems, which are unfortunately a lot of us.
So does that mean edits from the ipad doesnt get passed through to the copy synced to the external hard drive?
By @Kobe326111902dj6
Some things sync, some don’t. For example, Develop edits sync completely between Classic and cloud Lightroom. But not all metadata edits sync (keywords don’t), and file management does not sync (e.g., membership in collections/albums sync because those are virtual, but cloud file deletions don’t affect originals downloaded to Classic). This is partly because of how the way local-based Classic works is different than how the cloud-based Lightroom system works.
Again, syncing is perfect among all of the cloud-based Lightroom clients; the inconsistency comes in when adding Lightroom Classic.
Classic came first in 2007 and was completely local, as was everything at the time, so it was built a certain way. The cloud-based Lightroom system came much later to support mobile devices, and Adobe claims the old Classic code is architecturally difficult or impractical to fully sync into the cloud-based Lightroom system that was built from the ground up based on the cloud, not on local file systems. That leads to why there are sync gaps between local Classic and cloud Lightroom.
These things can change. In last month’s Lightroom Classic 13.3 update was a major overhaul of the sync engine that made it more reliable and perform better. But we don’t know if Classic will ever be able to sync in more ways with the cloud Lightroom system.
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