P: Enable removal of synced photos from cloud storage but not synced collections

[adann]

Running out of cloud storage when on the 20 GB plan is a common problem for my students who do most of their work in Lightroom Classic.

The most common recommendations to solve this in the Adobe Community and elsewhere are:

• Upgrade to the 1 TB plan.  That more than doubles the cost of the subscription, and most of my students aren't willing to do that.
• Delete photos from the cloud as soon as they are synced.  In my experience, very few Lightroom users remember to do this.  What's nice about syncing is that you don't have to pay attention to it. 

Removing photos from All Synced Photos works to remove the photos from cloud storage while retaining them in local disk storage but in doing so, you will also remove them from any synced collections they are in.

There is a workflow to avoid removing from synced collections but it is complicated and if done incorrectly can have serious consequences:

• Select each synced collection (must be done one at a time)
• Select All the photos in the selected collections

• Click on All Synced Photographs

• From the top menu, select Edit > Invert Selection

• From the top menu, select Photo > Remove from All Synced Photographs.

• Optionally: Refine the selection by creating a Quick Collection from the selection, removing the selection and then applying a filter like camera (iPhone in my case) or perhaps date ranges to select and remove a narrower set of photos.

I propose adding an additional option to the Photos menu: Remove from cloud storage.

With that option available, we could filter All Synced Photos on the Camera metadata field, select  phone and/or tablet devices and then remove them from cloud storage.  The caveat would be that this would apply only to originals in the cloud.

Remove from cloud storage: Simple.  Needed.  Will make many users happy.

[JohanElzenga]

You can obviously not remove a photo from the cloud, but not from a synced collection! Synced = Cloud. If you mean that you want to remove them from the cloud but keep them in a particular (currently synced) collection, then what you must do is unsync that collection in Lightroom Classic. And when Lightroom Classic asks you if you also want to remove them from 'All Synced Photographs', then answer positively.

[adann]

@JohanElzenga Thanks, Johan.  To clarify my workflow issue:

• In LRC, I can remove a photo taken with the Lightroom app on my phone by removing it from All Synced photos.  That photo will be removed from cloud storage but another copy of the original, previously synced to LRC, will remain on my hard drive.
• Removing a photo from All Synced Photos will also remove the photo from any synced collections.  I can solve that by unsyncing any collections the photo appears in and then resyncing the collections.  I have over 30 synced collections so removing any significant number of photos from All Synced Collections is quite burdensome.

The enhancement I would like is a way to remove a photo from the cloud, like I currently do by removing from All Synced Collections, but when doing so, the photo is not removed from any synced collections.

In effect, I would like to replace the cloud original with a Smart Preview.

This would help me manage my cloud storage better.

[adann]

Edit to my original post, reflecting my response to Johan below:

What I would like would be to replace selected originals in the Lightroom cloud with Smart Previews.  This would be done from Lightroom Classic.

[JohanElzenga]

Right! Because you can already do this by unsyncing and then resyncing the collection, and because Adobe has said (when Lightroom was introduced) that they would not add any new sync features to Lightroom Classic, I'm pretty certain this request will not be honored. But of course you are free to ask and hope they will change their mind.

[adann]

@JohanElzenga Thanks for your responses to my idea.   

Given that Adobe just did a major upgrade to the Syncing process in early summer, I would argue that they are still open to making improvements.

In my case, with over 30 synced collections, spread across multiple collection sets, the unsync/resync process is really time-consuming.  That's why a simpler solution would be beneficial.

I teach Lightroom and my students get so confused by the whole storage management process (outlined in my original post) that I now recommend that they not use syncing or the Lightroom app and just download from the phone via USB.  Tim Grey and Rob Sylvan at Kelbyone.com, respected Lightroom educators, both recommend against syncing now except for expert users.

Seems like a waste of capability.

[Califdan2]

@JohanElzenga  siad

> You can obviously not remove a photo from the cloud, but not from a synced collection! Synced = Cloud. If you mean that you want to remove them from the cloud but keep them in a particular (currently synced) collection, then what you must do is unsync that collection in Lightroom Classic. And when Lightroom Classic asks you if you also want to remove them from 'All Synced Photographs', then answer positively.

To Delete an image from Lr/Cloud you must remove it from the "All Photos" list (not just from albums). 

Removing an image from the “All Photos” list will also remove it from all Lr/Cloud albums it is in.  It will remove it from the LrC “All Synced Photographs” Special collection as well as all synced collections in LrC. 

However, in LrC it will remain in its folder, on disk and in any non synced collections it had been in.

It will also be removed from any Public/shared web pages it was on.  It will not affect the image in Portfolio.

If the OP is asking to remove an image from the cloud but leave it in "All synced photos" and any synced albums it may be in, that is a terrible idea.   It's like saying that when I look at my checking account activity on my phone I want it to show me different transactions than if I look at the same thing on my tablet.   The "All Synced Photos" is by definition a list of what is in the cloud (albeit bugs and swapping the sync catalog easily screw this up).  An image is either syncing or it is not.

If you want to keep track of what has been syncing but is not now syncing, create a new un-synced collection which is a copy of the "All Synced photos" at a point in time or make an un-synced copy of a synced collection before you unsync it.

But going back to the original post in this thread,  if you convert Lr/Cloud original images into Smart Previews they no longer count against your paid storage but will still be synced and show up in the "All synced photos" and synced albums.  There is a process you can go through to achieve this which is described in this article

https://www.danhartfordphoto.com/blog/2023/6/lr019-convert-lr/cloud-images-to-smart-previews