Confused | Lightroom | How catalogs and syncing work between devices

Report · Sep 30, 2019

Hello! I have done a considerable amount of research on this topic and am still having trouble figuring out how to best use Lightroom on my Mac. I fear I have 100's of duplicated images and I just cant wrap my head around how sharing works.

I often get this warning when switching between devices "Another catalogue (Lightroom Catalog.lrcat) has started syncing with the Lightroom CC catalog. Repeated switching between desktop catalogs can produce unexpected results. This is not recommended." I received it last night when on my mac. I went ahead with the syncing because I want the mac to be my main hub. (I am guessing it was previsously syncing with the Lr catalog on my Dell laptop) In the past I would sometimes import photos directly to my laptop and I ended up with some photos on my latop and others on my PC. I didn't know if photos were being duplicated. It just felt like a mess. I have moved all the photos from my laptop to my mac (main hub) and deleted them all from the laptop and uninstalled Lr Classic so I could start fresh.

I am confused as to why on my mac it has all photos (12,000+) in the "All Synched Photos" when I only wanted to sync the collections I chose.
If photos are in iPhoto (iCloud) and Lr are tehy duplicated on my hard drive? Please help!

Here is what I would like my work flow to be like:

To use Lightroom Classic on my mac and this to be my main hub..where all my photos are stored on the disk.
To download/use lightroom Classic on my laptop which is Windows (Dell) but I DO NOT want Lr to upload/import all 12,000+ images that are on my mac at home. I would like to only have access to the Collections I have chosen to sync
The same on my iPhone (I DO NOT want Lr to upload/import all 12,000+ images that are on my mac at home OR from my camera roll. I would like to only have access to the Collections I have chosen to sync)
I plan to use iPhotos iCloud to store all my finsished images so I have access across devices. and would then remove them from Lr but I do not want to duplicate images on my hard drive.

Report · Sep 30, 2019

I apologize, I'm having difficulty following everything you are trying to do. I will only make one comment about your situation. Others will have additional suggestions for you. It is only possible to synchronize ONE catalog. Choose a catalog from which you want to synchronize collections, and designate it as your main catalog. It will be the one to which you will import images that you will organize into collections that you choose to share. It will be the ONLY catalog from which you will be able to synchronize collections. Any other catalogs will be for other purposes, but will not be able to be used for synchronizing images. Any other suggestions will have two come from others.

Report · Sep 30, 2019

Shannon,

Lightroom Classic isn't a full member of the Lightroom Cloud Ecosystem. As such, sync behaviour, in particular, can be extremely confusing/frustrating.

When Lightroom Classic is connected to the Adobe cloud for the first time, all photos already in the cloud will be synced to the Classic catalog. If they photos were not already in the Classic catalog, then you'll only have the synced copt. However, if the photos were already in you Classic catalog then you will see Virtual Copies rather than the original photos. Either way, there is a potential for mulptiple copies of the same photo. Unfortunately, there is no way of preventing this behaviour.

The iCloud and Adobe Cloud are two completely separate ecosystems. Neither system has any link to the other. If you don't wnat duplicates, then you'll need to decide which system you're going to use otherwise duplicates could well occur.

Report · Sep 30, 2019

Just to add to the conversation Shannon:

I'm Syncing 2 Collections from the one Catalog as per the screen shot:

You can probably see the active Sync icon on the left of both Collections.

These appear in my LR Web app on both iOS tablet and phone . . .