Albums Dissappeared Not in Deleted

[GavTan]

I installed Lightroom Classic on my machine, I turned on sync and at once it tried to sync everything, so I unchecked all the albums to stop it from syncing all except 2 albums that I wanted to work on.

Next thing I know, all the albums in Lightroom CC is missing, I cannot find a way to recover.
I have re-selected the albums in Lightroom Classic but nothing is working, I've lost a lot of data.

Someone please tell me there is a way to revert back? 

[GavTan]

Realised that possibly what happened was that when I unchecked an album from syncing on Lightroom Classic, it will delete the entire album from Lightroom Cloud - this is terrible. There is no way to recover from this?! I've got an entire years worth of photos gone.

[Jim Wilde]

Yes, unsyncing a synced collection in Classic will delete the album from Lightroom Cloud (there is a warning dialog that appears in Classic when you do that, did you not see or read that?). However, only the album is deleted, the images are not deleted (check All Photos to verify). It should be possible to resync those collections in Classic and they should reappear back in Lightroom. The only thing you may have lost would be any folder organisation in Lightroom, i.e. if an album that was removed by the initial unsyncing of the collection was in a Folder in Lightroom, resyncing the collection in Classic will create the album anew in Lightroom....but it would not appear in the original folder, so you would have to sort that aspect out manually.

If what you are seeing in Lightroom is different, we'll need to try to figure out the actual sequence of events. Start by telling us what the All Photos count is in Lightroom, and if that differs significantly from what you expected.

[GavTan]

Thank you, you're right I must have missed it.
The photos all ended up in "The All Photos" collection, I had to search for all photos not in an album and painfully redo everything into collections again.

One very painful part, how does one initiate a sync in Lightroom Classic without it trying to sync down 500GB of data? I want to just start a sync and then select only the Albums in Lightroom CC I want to work on.

[Jim Wilde]

One very painful part, how does one initiate a sync in Lightroom Classic without it trying to sync down 500GB of data? I want to just start a sync and then select only the Albums in Lightroom CC I want to work on.

That's not possible, I'm afraid. Although you can selectively sync photos FROM Classic to the cloud, you cannot control what syncs TO Classic from the cloud. So if you enable sync in a Classic catalog, any images already in the cloud will download into Classic and will be stored locally on your system.

If you prefer to store all you images in the Cloud, and use the Lightroom apps to organise and process them, but also want to be able to work on some selected images in Classic, the typical procedure would be to export the selected images from the Lightroom desktop app to a drive on your local system, using the "Original + Settings" export option. Then import those exported images into a non-synced Classic catalog to do whatever it is you wanted to do there. Once you have finished with the work in Classic, and if you need those updated images back in the cloud to replace the originals there, first select them all in Classic and do Cmd/Ctrl+S to save metadata to XMP. In Lightroom, remove the originals from the cloud then re-import the exported and updated image files from the local hard drive. Note that if the cloud originals were in Albums, you'll need to re-file them back into the albums when you import the updated versions.

Yes it's clunky, but I don't see it changing. Adobe's expectation is that you would use either Classic or Lightroom desktop to organise or process your images, and not try to use both.