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Question

LR classic to LR migration

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
April 9, 2022
2 replies
1792 views

Hi,

I decided to risk migrating from classic to LR as i want all my original files in the cloud. migration was confirmed completed (85k elements, 660GB).

to my surprise LR shows only one and empty folder (lightroom katalog...migrated) and folder for local storage of files is also empty.

i first thought that it just needs time and there is some background process ongoing (cloud upload). but i am starting to be curious as i cant find any indication of process, and LR states to be synced.

i am tempted to delete all and start over from scratch. althoug my fear is a total mess, as the migration of a catalog is said to be a one-time-step (why that?!).

does anyone have experience with this migration and can tell me if i d rather be patient and wait (as this just takes days...), or if it sounds like a bug or hanging migration and i should risk starting all over?

thanks, mark

macOS

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J

Jao vdL

Community Expert

Do you actually have 660 GB free on your startup disk? You need enough space there to temporarily store a copy of all the images for the migration to work. The first stage of a migration is to copy all files in the LrC catalog over to this temporary storage. This trips up a lot of people because most people do not have this much free space and worse they are migrating to Lightroom Cloudy because they don't have enough space to store all the images. It should warn you if that is the case and just abort the migration though.

M

Mark23968760rxmuAuthor

Participating Frequently

Hi Jao

No, of course not! Interesting point though as when I started migration first (not beeing aware of the need for so much space on my internal disk), I got the error message. I would have thought that free space on an external SSID would have done the job but obviously no (or can someone tell me how to set that?).

Lightroom was asking for something like 100 GB to be freed so I freed my internal HD by moving my entire pictures directory including Lightroom folders to an external HD (as this was the only folder big enough to achieve that amount of free space). Looking back that likely I am now thinking this may have cause the muckup but thats where I am.

Anyway, your point makes no sense in my case as my internal HD on the macbook is only 500 GB (that is why i use external disks and wanted to migrate to Lightroom Cloud. So even freeing the demanded 100 GB would not get me to the free space needed (besides all my other occupied storage). But guess what, Lightroom was happy and after I had freed the 100 GB, the migration continued (with maybe 300 GB free at the time migration started) and I got the successfully completed message at the end. So far so good, except it seems the migration didnt really happen! But how come no error message? Sorry, but something is really wrong here (I will not hop on the discussion why its not simply possible to store Lightroom Classic originals to the cloud without migration to Lightroom) and this is not only a loss of time, but really annoying.

So now here I am, if I try to migrate again, I get that "catalogue has already been migrated and this can be done only once" message, but actually it seems the migration did not happen. My sync to mobile devices is f...cked up and I will probably spend hours trying to get back to where I was two days ago (actually that was a very good status, I was simply looking to get my original camera pictures into the cloud besides all my mobile uploads).

Still hoping someone can can enlight me but thanks for all input upto now!
Cheers, Mark

J

Jao vdL

Community Expert

Well that is what happened! When you moved the images you probably did not tell Lightroom Classic they moved and when you then migrated the references to the images were all pointing to the old location. So it had nothing to upload in the migration. Migration only works when the images are actually in the location defined in the catalog file. Make sure you first fix your Classic catalog so that all the images can be found again.

Unfortunately the migration mechanism can only use the internal hard disk for the temporary storage. This means that if your Lightroom Classic Catalog contains more images than you can hold on your internal hard disk, you simply cannot migrate. There is no way around this and setting Lightroom Cloudy up to store local images on an external disk does NOT help. It still stores the temporary to be uploaded images on the local disk. The algorithm seems to not be very smart in determining how much space it actually needs too.

So this means that with a 500 GB internal SSD, you cannot migrate your 660 GB Classic catalog without tricks. You can either do the manual migration as I described above, or you can export smaller subcatalogs (for example go by year) from Classic and migrate each of those individually to Lightroom Cloudy. Then wait between successive migrations for the images to get totally uploaded. This is a giant pain indeed and Adobe really did not think this through very well.

Jim Wilde

Community Expert

What number of images are reported in All Photos? If you click on All Photos do they appear in the grid?

How many collections did you have in your Lightroom Classic catalog prior to migration (each collection should appear as an album in the LR app)?

Perhaps post a screenshot of the LR desktop screen?

M

Mark23968760rxmuAuthor

Participating Frequently

hi jim, thanks for answering.

total number of images reported in LR all fotos is 17, which are images taken by mobile and auto uploaded since migration.

my LR classic has somewhat like 20 collections. BTW i see no change to LR classic since migration, although i expected it to sync back from LR (again wondering if it just needs time....).

i had been using LR and LR classic (synced) for years and before migration deleted all synced pictures (via web) as i thought that was a clean start and would avoid doubles.

cheers, mark

Jim Wilde

Community Expert

When you migrate a Classic catalog, syncing is automatically turned off as migration is designed as a permanent move from Classic to Lightroom. Turning sync back on in LrC after migration risks unexpected problems.

But if All Photos only shows 17 images, something has seriously gone wrong during the migration, so it might be prudent to wait for an Adobe engineer to have a look. They may be able to figure out what's happened.

That screenshot I asked for might still be a good idea, as it might offer some clues.

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