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kodarr
Participating Frequently
August 1, 2018
Question

Help Lightroom CC is removing my photos with sync

  • August 1, 2018
  • 4 replies
  • 922 views

Is there a way to edit photos in Lightroom CC and disable the syncing?  I have more photos than cloud storage space and today it decided to auto sync to the server and deleted all photos no currently on the cloud.  I lost over 100,000 photos.  Now I always keep back ups of the originals but all edits and tweaks I made on those photos are now gone!  This is horrible and makes me want to start looking for another photo editing software.  That is so much time just gone now.  Sync is a horrible feature especially when it does it by itself.  This is not acceptable and who is this program designed for?  I feel like this is to screw people over that don't buy extra storage.

Sorry for the rambling just please someone tell me how to get rid of the sync or what software should I use instead.  I know there is Lightroom Classic but from things I read that won't always be supported as things are moving into Lightroom CC instead.  And if I'm going to learn a new workflow I want to make sure I'm not learning a piece of software that only has a year or 2 left on it's lifespan.

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    4 replies

    Abambo
    Community Expert
    AbamboCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    August 2, 2018

    Please see here:

    Lightroom CC or Lightroom Classic CC - Which Workflow is Best for You? - YouTube

    and

    here: https://www.lightroomqueen.com/community/threads/now-i-understand-cc-vs-classic-cc-i-think.34141/

    and here https://www.lightroomqueen.com/lightroom-classic-end-life/

    There is no chance that Lr Classic will disappear somewhere soon but Lr CC will catch up and will probably extend to features that can be hard to implement in the Classic branch. However, despite the similar name, the programs are quite different in their workflow. If you use Lr CC you are aware that you need cloud space. I have around 3 to 4 Tb of picture files. I will invest in disk space, but probably not that soon in cloud space.

    I suppose that anytime "soon" (in a wider time range +- 5-10 years) both programs will merge in one product. I do not know about the masses of pictures I will take by then, but per shooting session I easily add 2-10Gb of data, and my camera is still "only" a 24Mp sensor camera... Get your numbers ready...

    ABAMBO | Hard- and Software Engineer | Photographer
    J
    Community Expert
    Jao vdLCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    August 2, 2018

    Very good points! The numbers are simply daunting. I easily fill up a few 16 GB cards on many of my outings and my main camera is also 24 MP. High quality hard drive space (even considering the extra disks you need for backup) is cheap. Cloud space at the multi terabyte level which is what I would need (and I am far from an exception) and it is far more expensive on a per year basis. Then realize that most people around the US have only a few megabit of upload speed and usually even less than that. 16GB of raw files takes 7 hours to upload on a typical cable internet connection. 1TB of data takes almost three weeks! This is all glacial compared to physical hard disks. Older SSDs do 300MBytes/s and recent machines will do >1 gigabyte/second (the newest MacBook Pro does an amazing 2.5 gigabytes/second!). That is over 1000 faster than uploading to the cloud. Typical external hard drives are 100 Megabyte/second. That is 160 times faster than uploading. Unless you are lucky enough to have access to fiber internet (top speeds of 1 Gbit/second, i.e. still 10 times slower than an SSD) the cloud is just not amenable to real-life shooting at typical pro or enthusiast volumes and I haven't even talked about the bandwidth caps that most internet providers now apply!

    Now add the constantly increasing resolution and dynamic range of cameras (the full frame Sony's produce files at least 3 times as large as my camera) and the increasing move towards also doing 4k video - producing massive files, and you see that it will take a while. Fiber is just not getting deployed anywhere near the rate it needs to be for this to become realistic in the coming few years.

    Abambo
    Community Expert
    AbamboCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    August 2, 2018

    https://forums.adobe.com/people/Jao+vdL  wrote

    I easily fill up a few 16 GB cards

    My cards are 128Gb... ;-)

    https://forums.adobe.com/people/Jao+vdL  wrote

    Fiber is just not getting deployed anywhere near the rate it needs to be for this to become realistic in the coming few years.

    I have fiber in my house for 3 years now, it's lacking the  connection on the other side, so I'm still with copper on a 30/10 connection. Very fast (when I started with computing, Ethernet was 10Mbps) but not fast enough... But to be honest, it's a price tag, not exactly a speed tag. I do not download a Tb of new data a day.

    The drawback is that you need to care about your own back-up and disaster (fire, water, thieves) management.

    ABAMBO | Hard- and Software Engineer | Photographer
    JohanElzenga
    Community Expert
    JohanElzengaCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    August 2, 2018

    kodarr  wrote

    Is there a way to edit photos in Lightroom CC and disable the syncing?  I have more photos than cloud storage space and today it decided to auto sync to the server and deleted all photos no currently on the cloud.  I lost over 100,000 photos.  Now I always keep back ups of the originals but all edits and tweaks I made on those photos are now gone!  This is horrible and makes me want to start looking for another photo editing software.  That is so much time just gone now.  Sync is a horrible feature especially when it does it by itself.  This is not acceptable and who is this program designed for?  I feel like this is to screw people over that don't buy extra storage.

    Lightroom CC is designed to keep the originals in the cloud. I think (also from the rant below) that you know this perfectly well, and yet you ran into troubles because you refuse to pay for adequate storage space. That is like running out of local disk space, refusing to pay for an extra hard drive, and then complaining that you can't save all your work. No, you can't disable sync, because that is the core of the system. You can run Lightroom CC without an internet connection for a while, but not permanently. And nobody is screwing you over to buy extra storage. You knew what you were doing when you decided to start using Lightroom CC, you chose Lightroom CC over Lightroom Classic, and you should have know how much storage space you needed. That's not rocket science.

    kodarr  wrote

    Sorry for the rambling just please someone tell me how to get rid of the sync or what software should I use instead.  I know there is Lightroom Classic but from things I read that won't always be supported as things are moving into Lightroom CC instead.  And if I'm going to learn a new workflow I want to make sure I'm not learning a piece of software that only has a year or 2 left on it's lifespan.

    It's very unlikely that Lightroom Classic will be gone any time soon. Adobe is still developing it, and the majority of Lightroom users (including most professionals, who are the core business of Adobe) is still using Lightroom Classic, not Lightroom CC.

    -- Johan W. Elzenga
    K
    kodarrAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    August 2, 2018

    The reason I chose CC over Classic was at a teaching conference we had someone from Adobe there and he said that within 2 years CC will have the features of Classic and Adobe will stop supporting Classic at that point.  I just want to edit the files locally and not be forced to use cloud storage.  I'm thinking I should just bite the bullet and learn classic until it's gone.  Just disappointed that CC did this with the newest update.  I been using it for 4 months now and it was fine but yesterday after I updated it decided to try and sync.

    J
    Community Expert
    Jao vdLCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    August 2, 2018

    within 2 years CC will have the features of Classic and Adobe will stop supporting Classic at that point. 

    Not at the rate they are going and that is very much contrary to Adobe's official stance. We're quite a while in from the first release of CC on the desktop and they have only added a tiny fraction of essential features that Classic has that CC misses and have even moved Classic significantly forward at the same time. At this rate it will take over a decade and at that point you might as well just have used Classic for all that time. CC is not hard to learn if you know Classic. CC is so far from being a Classic replacement hat there is no way Adobe can move away from it without a massive loss of users and especially the high profile folks. No doubt at some point it will be possible and at some point we will all move to cloud storage for everything but we are quite far from it because we lack the bandwidth and we lack the software tools to do it for real. Note that that is not likely to change anytime soon - nobody is building out the fiber networks that we'll need for this at any rate nearly good enough to get there even in a decade.

    CC is actually really useful in combination with Classic to ingest images on the go. I do this and import my images on trips and when I get back from my trip after some syncing all my images show up in Classic (yes Classic can sync with the cloud and can even just selectively sync contrary to CC!) on my main machine with some prelim edits already in place but ready for real work. This is probably the best use case for CC for anybody seriously doing photography at the moment. It in no way can even begin to replace Classic at the moment. If you're an iPhone or casual shooter and only ever share some images on Facebook or instagram (and even that is easier from Classic!) CC might be a great solution currently with your images showing up the same (if everything works right) everywhere. For everybody else it doesn't even begin to be ready.

    J
    Community Expert
    Jao vdLCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    August 2, 2018

    I know there is Lightroom Classic but from things I read that won't always be supported as things are moving into Lightroom CC instead.  And if I'm going to learn a new workflow I want to make sure I'm not learning a piece of software that only has a year or 2 left on it's lifespan.

    This is  simply false. Lightroom Classic is not going away anytime soon. Lightroom Classic will remain superior for very large amounts of images (i.e. any professional photographer) and local workflow for a very long time and will remain to have many essential features that CC doesn't have (printing, export to anything but sRGB jpeg, hierarchical keywords, export services, etc. etc.). Adobe keeps adding features to Classic that they are not adding to CC anytime soon.

    Abambo
    Community Expert
    AbamboCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    August 1, 2018

    moved from Adobe Creative Cloud​ to Lightroom CC — The cloud-based photo service​

    ABAMBO | Hard- and Software Engineer | Photographer
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