@antoniod84162112did you find a solution? I wanted to do the same but process is horribly designed resulting in easy confusion / duplication / deletion, especially if you have a lot of phone pics + professional work to manage. Unwilling to believe the illogical process I was being advised of* I spoke to several people at Adobe and found confusion and conflicting views on how it works. The upshot is the process I couldn't believe was real is indeed real. (Horrible workflow for profesional users - but effective means of railroading us into buying cloud storage).
I concluded the only safe solution was to do the following, which may/ may not work for you.
- Set up a new, dedicated LrC Lrcat for cloud sync / LR Web edits.
- Empty the cloud storage completely (making room for pending files / prevent later confusion as to what's located where).
- In main LrC Lrcat, use File > Import from Another Catalogue to manually select what I want from the cloud. (It brings all the edits but thankfully does not sync back to cloud b/c Sync only works with one catalogue).
- I'll never allow Cloud Sync in my working LrC LRCATs again; it's a two-way file sync which you can't stop or reverse*, with horrible implications:
- LR cloud / mobile / web (I'll call it LR Web for clarity) will always ingest ALL files from ALL LrC Collections into the cloud, stop syncing when full and and harrass you to buy more storage.
- Once LrC files have been synced - even if they originated in LrC on your local drive - you can't un-sync them. (You might imagine that clicking UN-sync in Collections would UN-sync existing files, but it doesn't; the two-way sync is a one-way ticket.
- Worse, if you delete from Cloud to make space, any photos in LrC catalogue that originated in the LR web (so 99% of my mobile phone pics) as opposed to local Lrcat will be deleted from LrC unless you have manually downloaded them. It's a great way to lose data.
PROCESS to safeguard images already in LrC
- Install Adobe LR Downloader App > download all from LR web to local drive for backup / to find files you are not yet aware you may have lost from LrC. (It respects date folder structure, but not groupings such as albums and folders made on tablet / mobile).
- LrC > Cloud > Pause Sync
- LrC > Library > Catlogue > All Synced Photos > select all
- LrC > make a new local / NAS folder adding all selected files. (Don't try to do other things while this is happening; a click in the wrong place and you're fried; LrC crashed 3 times whilst moving 13k+ cloud images...).
- LrC > Collections. UNSYNC every Collection (double arrow on left) to stop it syncing new files. (Don't imagine you can now turn Sync back on to download files that were stuck when Cloud full. See next).
- When download finished: select all files > R-click > Remove from All Synced Photos. At this point photos vanish from All Synced Photos in LrC. Next message indicates files will only be deleted from the cloud once LR Web once Sync resumes - but don't be misled!! If you resume Sync it will immediately re-ingest all the files you've just removed.
- Check LR Downloader app finished and you now have a copy of all web files stored locally.
- File > Import > go to LR Download and have it import all files with 'Don't import suspected duplicates'. This picked up a number of files that had been lost along the way.
- Close LrC.
- LR web > delete all files > permanently delete. You now have a clean slate from which to keep track of future uploads and downloads.
- Make new folder for downloading files from LR web and NEW LrC catalogue for use with LR Web.
- Point LR Sync to new folder and start syncing files stuck due to previously full cloud storage.
* It didn't used to be this way. Originally, you could just un-sync a collection in LrC and that was the end of it but at some point around 2016?17? Adobe changed this simple, logical process for the one we have now.
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