is it possible?

[david6C19]

ok.  i have my entire photo library on an external drive.  over the past few months, i've uploaded the entirety to cloud storage.  i then went through the entire thing, deleting junk photos and such, and editing a bunch more, colors and rotating and so on.  is it possible to apply all the deletes/edits back to the original external drive that i uploaded it all from?  or must i now download/export the whole thing to a separate drive, thus preserving the photos i've kept and edited?  what happens to all the face recognitions and keywords that i've applied throughout the whole thing?  or, if i export back to the original drive, will all the changed photos overwrite the originals in their original locations?  that wouldn't solve the problem of all the deletes.  if anyone has input, it's welcome.  and now i realize i probably have answered my own question, exporting to a new drive.  200 thousand photos.  ugh...

[Jim Wilde]

When you import images into Lightroom from an existing hard drive, those images are first copied into Lightroom's own designated space, from where they are then (slowly) uploaded to the cloud. Those original images on the hard drive are now completely outside Lightroom's remit, they are totally ignored and forgotten about by Lightroom. So there in no way to have Lightroom update those original files, or sync your deletions to them.

Also understand that Lightroom is a non-destructive editor, so any changes you make in Lightroom (edits, keywords, face tagging, etc.) are only stored in the Lightroom catalog, not applied to the original images. If you require a copy of those images to include the edits and the metadata, you have to export them.