Adds a suffix -2 to uploaded images.

[Errol Heywood]

This 'may' be a seperate problem to my earlier post and so I have posted it as a seperate topic though included some information from my previous post for comleteness.

I recently changed my AdobeCreative Cloud type from LR+PS+20Gb of Cloud data to just LR+1Tb of Cloud data with the intention of going completely online with my post-processing and image library. (I did have Lightroom Classic installed on my laptop but as this was no longer accessible to me after I changed CC plans I deleted it from my hard drive).

I then added images from an external drive using the 'File/Add Photos' menu option and waited for them to load into LR. Later in the session I then closed LR and disconnected the external drive.

During subsequent editing sessions I notice that the images I have worked on have been given the suffix '-2' both in LR and on my external drive and it is these suffixed images that now contain valid image with the original image name now appearing as containing 0 bytes. I have upladed an images of the files on my hard drive to show this.

Can anyone shed any light on why this may be happening?

[Jao vdL]

Have you by any chance set the local storage location to the external drive? (Preferences->Local storage->Storage Location for Originals)

[Errol Heywood]

No, it is set as shown in the attached image.

Should I set it to the external drive and if so which one as I have two? Either one or both may be connected at any one time.

[Jao vdL]

What is "Other"? This definitely looks wrong and like it is set not to the internal hard disk. The path you see here should look like /Users/<username>/Pictures/Lightroom Library... etc.  Even worse if this location is on a cloud service drive that will cause major issues!

[Errol Heywood]

'Other' is the attached drive where my originals are stored. It does not have to be on the same drive as my Lightroom library,

[Jao vdL]

This is the problem. The drive has originals on it that it is not aware of yet and you probably set the location for copies of originals to the same location where you already had your originals after you migrated. This does not work and Lightroom will start creating duplicates of your images in that location as soon as it downloads them from the cloud because there already is an image with the same name there and it will not use the existing image because it doesn't know about it and will just rename the newly downloaded image. I think this is the issue you are running into. If you don't want to have copies of every original image locally all the time, you should just hit reset on the location and just use the default which is on the startup disk. The importat thing to realize is that Lightroom Cloudy considers the cloud copy of the images to be the authorative original. The local copies are just locally cached dummy copies for rapid access. This is fundamentally different from Classic which considers the local copy the authoritive original. Lightroom Cloudy automatically manages the local storage and will delete the local copies when it no longer thinks it needs it.

Also, just a heads up but you REALLY do not want to use special characters in disk names such as ", /, colons and semicolons, commas, etc. This is a recipe for very strange unexpected issues.

[Errol Heywood]

Thanks for the analysis I will have to go through what you said and do a bit of investigation.

BTW the inverted comma's around "Other" have been inserted by LR as none of my file names have special characters for the reason you mention.

[Jao vdL]

Ah! that makes sense then. They used to display external disk names as /Volumes/<Disk Name> but they now apparently do the name between quotes. Interesting.