Desktop to Laptop syncing RAW files are now JPG

[Christina22289075lcac]

I orginially installed lightroom on my desktop computer and recently bought a laptop. While I was syncing all photos from desktop to laptop lightroom, all of my RAW files on the desktop were changed to JPG on my laptop. Please give me any and all suggestions on a solution!

[Jim Wilde]

Please explain what process you followed when "syncing all photos from desktop to laptop". Also please confirm which version of "Lightroom" you are using (do Help>System Info and post the first 10 lines of the resulting display).

[Christina22289075lcac]

Hi Jim,

I clicked on the cloud on my desktop to sync all photos to the laptop. Here is the other info:

Lightroom version: 5.1 x64 [ 20211204-1710-0e71941 ] (Dec 4 2021)
NGL Version: 1.28.0.8
WF Version: 4.0 0d53932
VF Version: 0.1.36.2
HIL Version: 40400
Operating system: Windows 10
OS Version: Windows 10 Home (2009)
Application architecture: x64
System architecture: x64
Computer model: LENOVO 82BJ / 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-1165G7 @ 2.80GHz

[Christina22289075lcac]

I have changed the import settings to camera settings rather than adobe default seeing if that works, computer is slow so I cannot tell yet.

[Jim Wilde]

Changing the default develop settings is not likely to be related to the problem that you think you are seeing.

I'm not fully understanding your syncing description, as the apps do not sync to each other, all syncing is done via the cloud.....i.e. if you import images on your desktop they will automatically sync to your catalog on the Adobe cloud servers. If you then launch one of the Lightroom apps on another device, using the same cloud account details, then all the existing images in your cloud account are automatically made available to that new device. This is the mechanism which allows us all to have all our images with us on all our devices at all times.

So in your case, provided you do not have syncing paused on either the desktop or the laptop, all your images should now be available on both devices. There is only the one master set of the original images in the cloud, though local copies can be downloaded on all connected devices, but they would be exact copies of the original images. So what makes you think that your raw files are being changed to jpeg? If you can post some screenshots which demonstrate the problem, that would be very helpful.

[Theresa J]

Which Lightroom are you using on your desktop? If you sync images from Lightroom Classic smart preview jpeg images are synced to the cloud, not the original raw images.

Which Lightroom are you using on your laptop? Do you understand the difference between Lightroom Classic and Lightroom and how the sync system works? It's very likely that things are working as they are supposed to. It's confusing at first but it's a great system when you understand how to make it work for you.