P: Lightroom Mobile: iOS local storage

[lemerv]

I have a 128gb iPhone 11.

You can see my settings for Lightroom in the screenshots. You can also see how much local storage is being used by Lightroom - it is using 56.07gb of local storage. As a result, I am constantly getting the "Your iPhone storage is full" message, which makes my phone unusable for doing things like....taking photos. The irony!

I have already tried deleting the app completely and reinstalling, but the end result is the same. Am I missing something here or is this a bug of some kind?

Thanks

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[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

It looks like you have some albums marked to "store locally", which you'll find in the albums' ... menus in the library view. Go through and turn those off them come back and hit that clear cache button to clear space.

[greule]

From your screenshot it looks like that you have "store-locally" enabled for an album. But as you mentioned that you were seeing this after a clean re-install I'm wondering if that is the case. Could you you double check and let me know. - Guido/ Lr Mobile QE

[lemerv]

Thanks both for the replies. I have double checked and cannot find any album marked to Store Locally. And as G_Reule pointed out a clean install should have removed that setting. 

51gb is close to half a third of my library and I don’t have any albums nearly that big. 

What else could be causing this?

[Rick Spaulding -]

It looks like your phone is running out of storage in general. Here is an Apple article on managing your phone's storage.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201656

[lemerv]

Hi Rick, I'm not sure I understand your suggestion? When I look at my iPhone Storage (under iOS settings) I can see that Lightroom is taking up 63.68GB of space.

By comparison, my iOS photos library (which is identical to my LR library) is only taking up 5.4GB of space.

So yes, my phone is running out of storage as a result of LR using 63GB of space. I don't want it to use so much space and it should not be using so much space. 

My question is, how do I stop it using so much space? It is a cloud storage solution, so in theory I should be able to say "don't use any space locally except for the application itself". How do I do that?

[Rick Spaulding -]

@ben_merven

_7824011 In the Library do you have albums with this symbol?

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If so, click the three dot menu to the right and turn off this setting:

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That will free up the space of the "Locally Stored Copies" in your second screenshot. Go ahead and click "Clear Cache" when you're done.

That should do it!

[lemerv]

Thanks @Rick but I do not have any locally stored albums.

[Rick Spaulding -]

Does clearing the cache help?

[lemerv]

No it does not unfortunately

[Ignacio B.]

@ben_merven_7824011 could it be that you have used several accounts on that device? E.g. if you have used and imported images with user A, and are now logged in as user B, that could explain the issue.

If you connect the device to a Mac and e.g. look into Finder on an app level under Files, how many folders do you see there? 

[lemerv]

Hey @Ignacio_B I have only ever had 1 Adobe account (if that is what you mean?)

I have done as you suggested and under the Lightroom App I see 2 folders:

- One is named a random long string of letter/numbers and is 61.34gb in size

- One is named "DepthFiles" and is 1.8mb in size

[lemerv]

A quick update:

I spent hours on chat with Adobe support and after some very (sorry to be so frank) silly suggestions of what could be taking up so much local storage space, they took my details and said they would call me back. That was three days ago and I haven't heard anything. So thanks Adobe for an exceedingly poor customer experience.

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Anyway, I have done some more digging and this is my best theory:

When you set the mobile LR app to import from the camera roll, what I think happens is that the app is making local copies of the images into a folder under the LR app. These images then sync to the cloud. However, these local copies are simply left there forever it seems, hence them taking up so much local storage. 

For context, my camera roll (standard iOS photos) is identical to my LR library and it is only taking up 5.3gb of space. I have iCloud Photo Library turned on so all my full res photos are in the cloud.

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

You're right that it creates local copies, but they should be automatically purged once they're uploaded to the cloud if you're running low on space, or manually purged using the Clear Cache button - in both cases, as long as the albums are not set to be stored locally. The mystery is why Lr thinks the albums are set to be stored locally, especially after you've deleted the app and reinstalled.

[Ignacio B.]

Kind of, if you'd have had more account on that installed version of Lightroom on that device.

Thanks for confirming, this means that you indeed only have one account on that device.

If you tap on the cloud icon, are you still uploading anything? 
That could explain the issue.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Ben,

It happened to me too. What I found is that you can delete all the Lightroom photos in the app and free the space on your phone. Go to Lightroom > Library > All Photos > Select the three dots to the upper right > Select > Select All Photos > Delete. I don’t use the cloud service, so check if there is a different folder for those to be apart. You can also take a test picture, upload it to LR and the cloud backup. Then delete from LR folder to check of the backup one remains.

That’s the only way to get rid of them. The app is just automatically importing them. Your original photos will remain in the phone. 

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

 Updates to Lightroom Classic and the Lightroom Ecosystem products for Desktop, Mobile and Web were released today and contain a fix for this issue.

Please refresh your Creative Cloud application and install your update when it becomes available. Thank you for your patience.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Or you can "CLEAR CACHE" in the Local Storage setting, which is found in the App under the main settings gear icon from the main page.  How did I find this?  Because I didn't know either, and your post had me looking for a better option than trying to go through each individual album.  Cheers

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I have the same issue ! Clear cache doesn’t work, the update don’t fix this problem... so what should I do ? 

Please help me... 😭

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Go to Lightroom > Library > All Photos > Select the three dots to the upper right > Select > Select All Photos > Delete.

[lemerv]

It was a simple fix in the end. Assuming you have a Mac, connect your iPhone and then go to your iPhone in Finder.

Select your iPhone, then go to the Files tab, and then find the Lightroom app and expand the arrow (it takes a little while to load).

Then you should see a folder named a random string of letters and numbers. If you look at the size of this folder it will be roughly the same as what your LR iOS app says it is using in local storage.

I was so fed up with the lack of a solution I just went ahead and deleted this folder using Finder. Lo and behold, it worked. All my phone storage was freed up and there was no impact on my LR library.

DISCLAIMER: I only did this one time and it worked. I have no confirmation if this is the correct way of doing things and whether there is any risk to your photos. Maybe someone from Adobe can weigh in here to confirm?

[lemerv]

I would be very careful about doing this as it sounds a lot like actually deleting photos from your library. If you have the cloud sync turned on then you might lose photos.

[lemerv]

*Maeva_Vgr see my solution posted below

[kireto_a]

There is no way you can find locally stored photos. Simple as that. If you import photos from the camera, they are stored as local. The album is not marked as such. The only way to get rid of these is to reinstall the app. The same if you accidentally hit get original. There is also some “temp” space, which gets lost until reinstall if an import gets stuck. All of this has being the case since day one of Lightroom mobile on ios.