P: Lightroom Ecosystem: Selective Sync

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I'm not a professional and have only used Lightroom for less than a year. I do love the redesign and I want to use it but I don't like the auto-sync. How hard would it be to implement an option that prevents auto sync and instead enables manual sync? 

My idea is to add a manual sync option in the settings and when you want a photo to be uploaded to the cloud you should be able to click on the cloud button and hit "Sync" or "Upload". Taking away people's ability to choose doesn't just scare away the pros but also the beginners. 
Also, some advanced features from the original Lightroom need to be added. One of them is the export function. The new export function is terrible. I only see "Small, Full Size, and Custom". The original Lightroom has a lot more export functions.

[jeremy_brown]

So, my work flow away from home, most of time, involves importing images off card on to iPad and culling images before going through in more detail on Mac at home. So I might take 700 RAW images, like yesterday, cull down to less than 100 with syncing to cloud paused, and then switch sync back on. Lightroom then spends ages and  huge amounts of processing power, and ultimately producers hugely excesses CO2 emissions, pointlessly uploading all of the files I have deleted as well as the ones I want. Lightroom is literally producing 10 times the amount of CO2 than it needs, wasting huge amounts of my time and bandwidth doing this. Utterly pointless, please fix it there is no need for this sort of pointless redundancy and waste.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Did you also purge them from the Deleted Items prior to reinitiating sync?

[jeremy_brown]

No but I shouldn't have to, why would I want to spend time on syncing files I've deliberately deleted and also have on the original memory card? It's madness to be wasting money and energy on this scale. Adobe's carbon foot print syncing trash files must be staggering.

[jeremy_brown]

This is beyond stupid. I use an iPad to download images from camera in the field and cull junk images with sync paused. This weekend I took 384 images, many duplicates etc. That I do not want. I deleted 300 of them with sync switched off but Lightroom still spends ages syncing the images I’ve laboriously checked and deleted when I turn sync back on. I also have back ups on SD cards there is no need for this waste of time, bandwidth, processing power and above all energy! Why are you wasting so much energy doing this, it’s scandalously stupid and wasteful, not to mention a total waste of your users time. Stop it ASAP.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

This thread is being merged into an existing authoritative thread for better tracking and response. Please review the official answer (if any) in the second post on the thread for more information. 

[jeremy_brown]

@Rikk sorry but there is no obvious way to do this in Lightroom mobile. I have 385 images with sync paused at moment. I only want 85 of them.

[jeremy_brown]

I dread to think how much energy Adobe wastes on this stupidity.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

@Jeremy Brown  Did you also delete them from the Deleted Items on the iPad? Delete is a two-step process

[jeremy_brown]

Hi Rick, I reject them, filter for rejected files, select all and delete them. I can't see them on the iPad, there is no obvious trash. I've been through every menu/setting etc. etc. still showing that it plans to sync 385 not 85 files. This should not be the default it's a massive waste of time and energy.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

At the top of your Albums list (left side) is a Deleted system album. (Between People and your First Album). You must delete them from that location after deleting from the active system. Did you do this? 

[jeremy_brown]

Thanks for your help but you guys need to rethink this as the vast majority of people will not be pausing sync before selectively deleting files and then going into the library file system to select and delete them all over again, and as a result uploading thousands files they never want to see again. There should at least be an option for this when you select and delete files. There must be gigawatts of energy wasted on this daily.

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

I would support a "delete everywhere" option, for exactly this kind of use case, but it shouldn't be too easy to do accidentally.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

@Jeremy Brown  Did my suggestion work for you?

[jeremy_brown]

Hi Rick, yes they did but it's not exactly intuitive. Many thanks all the same.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

The cloud syncing of Lightroom is an awesome feature, but I think that this would be a significant improvement and if it already exists, please let me know because the chat help agent wasn't useful.  I prefer to edit photos on my iPad but my new albums are not syncing because I am out of local memory  I have cleared cache, but what I'd like to be able to do is to select which albums are synced per device.  Maybe I want to have the "Apples" album on each device, but only push the "Oranges" album to my iPad, not my iPhone.  Or just to keep old albums on my Mac that has a ton of storage and memory.  Selective syncing would solve my personal issue and I would suspect that others would benefit from it greatly as well.

[tomjhun]

Pablo,

I was wondering if you are using the option to only download smart previews on the iPad? If you aren’t this would resolve your space problem and allow you to have all of your images available on the iPad. 

[t6erdzmqsxr]

Hi, I have Lightroom 4.3. Is there a way to use an only-local option to store images -- i.e., no copying to cloud? There seems to be a way to keep a copy locally, but not prevent copying to cloud. Apologies if this was already discussed/answered elsewhere. Thanks

[selondon]

Unless you pause it,  syncing to the Cloud happens automatically.

The option to store a copy locally, is a copy of the photos in the Cloud and its main use is for quicker and offline access.

[JP Hess]

Have you considered using Lightroom Classic? 

[JohanElzenga]

Lightroom is not designed to work only locally. You would not have access to Adobe Sensei, for example, which is used to search for images based on content. If you don't want to store your images in the cloud, then Lightroom is not for you. You could indeed better switch to Lightroom Classic in that case.

[t6erdzmqsxr]

@JohanElzenga @JP Hess @selondon : Classic solved it, thanks a bunch you guys! 🙂

[defaultnw1cujcax44l]

It is very anti-user that Adobe requires storing the image files in the cloud to use Lightroom CC. I have nearly half a terabyte of image files and it's constantly changing. That would take forever to upload with my 0.0000025 TBps upload speed.

[JohanElzenga]

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@defaultnw1cujcax44l wrote:

It is very anti-user that Adobe requires storing the image files in the cloud to use Lightroom CC. I have nearly half a terabyte of image files and it's constantly changing. That would take forever to upload with my 0.0000025 TBps upload speed.

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First of all, Lightroom only syncs its non-destructive edits, which are small text files. Once the image is in the cloud, there is not much not syncing anymore (until you upload a new image, of course). Secondly, there is nothing "anti-user" about giving many users an option they like. Even if that means that this option is not suitable to you with your slow upload speed. 

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

How hard would it be to add the function of only cloud-syncing photos that I have, for instance, assigned 2 stars and above?

My workflow is to store all of my photos locally and use Lightroom CC to pick out the good ones, work on them and then assign a star rating. I am then able to use the excellent search function to view the best ones.

However, as it stands, because my archive is waaay larger than my alloted 100gb, my cloud storage is full, mainly with photos I don't need or want. I have therefore disabled the sync and it isn't able to do its basic job, that of syncing the photos that I want to sync.

Just a simple option to choose which pictures to sync, along the lines of the search function would make a world of difference to the functionality and usefulness of this software. eg. only sync pictures with a star rating equal to, or above 2.

[default8jdmvq32ok3c]

Just another alternative- I use Bridge, edit in photoshop and download and save photos on an external hide drive. I back up to a separate external drive.