How do you prevent cloud sync in Lightroom?

[hardyc41707104]

If I move to Lightroom CC how do I prevent my photos from going to the cloud? I only use it on my desktop and don't want my photos uploaded without my explicit permission and decision. Should I just stay with classic or is there some way to disable the cloud sync feature?

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

You can click the cloud icon to pause the cloud sync. You'd miss out on the automatic intelligence search though.

[hardyc41707104]

Does the pause feature stay paused until I unpause it, even after restarts or updates? It would be nice if there were a checkbox somewhere that said "never sync".

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen · Accepted solution]

It definitely survives restarts. We haven't had an update to test that theory fully yet, but you could put in a feature request for your Never Sync checkbox here: Lightroom CC | Photoshop Family Customer Community

[V_Wells]

I’m having the same issues with Lr cc auto adding photos from iOS photos on my desktop, and I’m quite happy with iOS photos as they are.  I just wanted lr for editing selected photo.  So am I now tied into contract with Lr or will I be able to cancel and just stay with PS, if you are able to comment on this please?

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

https://forums.adobe.com/people/V+Wells  wrote

I’m having the same issues with Lr cc auto adding photos from iOS photos on my desktop, and I’m quite happy with iOS photos as they are.  I just wanted lr for editing selected photo.  So am I now tied into contract with Lr or will I be able to cancel and just stay with PS, if you are able to comment on this please?

You can turn off auto add by tapping the LR icon in Organize view > General > Auto Add Photos.

Whether you're tied into a contract depends on what you signed up for - go to the Adobe Website > Manage Account and it'll show your current subscription and any expiration date under Plans & Products.

[Conrad C]

hardyc42159841  wrote

I only use it on my desktop and don't want my photos uploaded without my explicit permission and decision. Should I just stay with classic

Yes, you should stay with Lightroom Classic and keep sync turned off. Lightroom Classic is designed around photos being stored on your computer, so it's what you want.

Lightroom CC uses the cloud as central storage for multiple devices, so although you could force it to not connect, that would go against how it's designed.

[MarcosDNYC]

The answer is to stay with Classic the whole point of CC is cloud support.

If you are not interested in that level of cloud storage stick with CC Classic it still has more features than the new CC, you can add on additional Cloud Storage for those images you do want to send up, and Adobe says that it will continue to fully support and develop CC Classic.

[forgottenrebell]

Incorrect. The whole point of CC is that's the only way to get Adobe photoshop anymore. Nothing more than that unless you drink the koolaid. Most major clients refuse to use anything hooked to internet / iCloud because of privacy for their advertising campaign. From Netflix to coke to miller beer, most any advertising clients require privacy and security period being paramount. 

[colinsdds]

I am in this boat as well: I am not a pro so I tend to shoot A LOT, that way out of 900 photos I might have 20-30 from a weekend trip to Colorado that are worth exploring, editing and sharing.  The others?  Well, I don't feel like paying for them to be stored on "The Cloud", whatever that means.

(Yes, I know what the Cloud is I am speaking from an Orwellian point of view as a dystopian skeptic.)

I am good with sharing the good ones.  I don't need 1TB of cloud storage for all my mediocre photography!

Okay, easy enough - use Classic and sync collections.  NOPE!  Apparently that no longer works.  Fortunately, I have a private server and I can provide my own "cloud" storage, so I will go that route.  Want more space?  Go to Wal-Mart and buy another 3 TB hard drive!  I think I like this option better than wimpy Lightroom CC.

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

colinsdds  wrote

Okay, easy enough - use Classic and sync collections.  NOPE!  Apparently that no longer works. 

That still works. They're not adding new cloud functionality to Classic, but what's there still works.

[northstar105]

Feeling very sad, LR CC has taken tons of my personal photo's and uploaded them into the cloud. I don't want all my photo's there only a select few. is there a way to undo this?

I have say 60,000 photo's from over the years, stored in my cheap cloud solution. I want to upload say 5000 to LR CC of my own choosing after I have identified the keepers. can I use the new LR to view my local photo's with out uploading them?

it'd be nice if I could have one storage for all photo's and just "tag" cloud selections.. like making folders and albums for sharing.

[Conrad C]

As we've discussed earlier in the thread, what you're describing is exactly how Lightroom Classic works, but not Lightroom (CC).

Lightroom is designed to use the cloud as the master storage area, so it will always upload all imported photos by default. You cannot prevent uploading of individual albums.

Lightroom Classic is designed the way you want: It uses your own local drives as the master storage, and nothing gets uploaded to the cloud by default. The only photos uploaded are the collections or individual photos you've marked to be synced to the cloud. Based on what you described, you want to use Lightroom Classic.

northstar105  wrote

LR CC has taken tons of my personal photo's and uploaded them into the cloud. I don't want all my photo's there only a select few. is there a way to undo this?

If you still have all of those photos safely stored on your own local storage drives, you can just delete all of the photos in the cloud using Lightroom or Lightroom Web. (Or Lightroom Classic although it's not as straightforward to do it from there.)

[northstar105]

Conrad C,

Thank you, it does make me sad they would build such a divide from cloud to desktop. I personally will never post all my photo's on the cloud at the cost they want. AWS is free, and Onedrive is $7 / tb / year. Adobe would get 10 x the users if they priced in line IMO.

Thank you for the quick response, I'll make a copy once again of all my photo's (getting sick of doing this with Adobe), and only import the good one's I want into LRCC Cloud

[Southeaster]

If I delete the photos on LR CC - how would I prevent the system to start synchronising from scratch? I only want the collections of LR Classic to synchronise and the photographs I am taking via LR on my new iPhone, but not the folders.

[Nate6C1C]

I am a bit disappointed with LR CC. I added in all my photos stored on external hard drives to tackle the issue of organizing almost 20 years worth of family digital photos. Little did I know that any metadata changes made to photos within LR CC (automatically uploaded to CC) don't get synced to the local versions. Will definitely be switching back to LR Classic and deleting my almost 80gb worth of family photos from Adobe's "cloud". All the energy of leaving the computer on overnight for almost two nights of uploading to Adobe's servers now rendered worthless... oh well.

[Nate6C1C]

Just as a follow up, I do see the market for whom LR CC is best: Professional or even aspiring photographers who take photos using RAW format and have carefully sorted through which RAW images they want to work with within LR. The features that LR CC is perfect since RAW files are huge and LR CC is coupled with Photoshop CC - a perfect pairing. However, each product used to be utilized by larger swaths of people who take photos (mostly lots of low res crappy ones just for our own entertainment) and just want to be able to sort through the huge collections in an effective manner. Seems like the original spirit of the origins of Photoshop (which also has/had larger swaths of users than just professional or aspiring professional photographers) and Lightroom have either been left behind, or are being fulfilled and new markets are opening for software development in the photo organization world. Photoshop users has died down for this reason - old photoshop users used to include those who have now switched to browser based AI based products such as Canva). And while LR's photo organization features had competitors (anyone remember Picasa photos now replaced/usurped by Google Photos?) once LR found its niche, it appears that is where it will go.

If ever LR CC were to change into including synchronization with my personal cloud, then maybe I'd be down to offer all my photo information to Adobe's algorithms and Facial Recognition AI. But til then, I'm going back to my private offline maintenance and editing of my photos.

[ryan_ruark]

I uninstalled Lightroom CC and I'm not looking back. The application is slow, it gets colors all wrong, and this 'mandatory' cloud sync thing is finally pushing me over the edge.

I don't have a problem with using the cloud. I have a problem with being forced to use YOUR cloud. It completely disrupts my workflow and in fact makes me less productive becuase my bandwidth gets consumed by a service I never opted into.

Adobe, you really screwed up with this one. You were better off adding a cloud sync backend to Lightroom. Pros rely on these tools, and over two years after you launched CC, it's nowhere close to being ready to be the flagship. This is embarrassing.

[Yakou]

Same for me...

2 TB of photos that have to be saved on a 0.1 TB cloud?
And, once filled up, that prevents me from using any other sync and reviewing features of the other softwares?
And I would have to pay 800 € for a 2TB space at Adobe's, when it is available at 60 €, for instance with Infomaniak's kDrive?

Of course I won't use this Adobe solution, and uninstalls Lightroom CC immediatly.

[alderman swe]

As have been mentioned here in the answers - the LR classic would be your best friend in this. The downside to that, in my experience is that if you have LRC on multiple units (say a stationary and a laptop) you would have to move your library between them. Which can be dreadfully timeconsuming. 

However, if you want to stick with the "cloudbased lightroom" you can disable syncing via the Creative cloud app. That way you can pause the syncing before opening LR and it won´t sync your photos. After closing LR you can enable syncing again (in case you are using other adobe apps across platforms)

Hope that helps !

 

[ozelen]

My solution was to edit Privacy & Security settings on my iOS devices and limit the access of Lightroom to my camera roll to specific albums.

Now, I'll tell my user story to Lightroom product managers if they ever read it.

I'm using Lightroom for professional usage and have it on my iPhone and IPad for a quick edit. And it's pretty annoying when personal photos from my phone's camera roll get uploaded and fill in plenty of space in my Lightroom DB storage by default, and no way to turn it off from within the app. What would be much more valuable for me is the possibility of integrating my

central storage on a NAS into a "hybrid cloud," with the ability to back up, edit and share some of them on demand. This would be a unique feature, unlike just selling gigabytes of mobile sync, as everyone else does as well...