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LR classic to LR migration

New Here ,
Apr 09, 2022 Apr 09, 2022

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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

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Community Expert ,
Apr 09, 2022 Apr 09, 2022

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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?

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New Here ,
Apr 09, 2022 Apr 09, 2022

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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

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Community Expert ,
Apr 09, 2022 Apr 09, 2022

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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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Community Expert ,
Apr 09, 2022 Apr 09, 2022

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BTW, if I remember correctly, the migration should produce a report. Did it, and if so did you examine it?

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New Here ,
Apr 09, 2022 Apr 09, 2022

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heya, thanks.

please see the migration report attached. and i am aware of the 316 files not migrated due to missing original. i will follow up with screenshots of both LR and classic once i get back home.

cheers, mark

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Community Expert ,
Apr 09, 2022 Apr 09, 2022

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Thanks for that report. If you login to your account via browser at lightroom.adobe.com, what number of images is reported in All Photos there? Do you see a "Sync Errors" item below All Photos? If so, how many images reported there?

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New Here ,
Apr 09, 2022 Apr 09, 2022

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in the web version i also see only 17 pics overall and no error message at all.

 

attached screenshot shows current status of LR desktop. LR classic currently still shows an overall of 85k pics, and 17 synced.

 

does this tell you more?

 

i just dont get what happened, nor what to do next...

 

Mark

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New Here ,
Apr 09, 2022 Apr 09, 2022

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last but not least, attached screenshot shows current LR classic status.

 

i hope that helps to get the picture and any advise on how to move on is very appreciated.

 

i dont fear spending time on this, my problem is that i have absolutely lost track of where i am and how to proceed 😉

 

cheers, mark

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Community Expert ,
Apr 09, 2022 Apr 09, 2022

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I'm mystified, I'm afraid. Everything appears to have worked apart from the fact that some 85k images haven't actually migrated. Out of curiosity, check the location that you specified for local originals in the Lightroom Desktop Preferences>Local Storage sync, then look at that location in Finder to see if those 600+GB of images are stored there (migration first copies the incoming files to a local hard drive location in preparation for the subsequent upload). It would be interesting to see if that stage completed successfully.

 

Unless anyone else has a bright idea, I think we need to wait for Adobe to have a look at your cloud account to see if they can figure out what might have happened. I'll ping an Adobe contact to alert them to the issue.

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New Here ,
Apr 09, 2022 Apr 09, 2022

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Hi Jim

Thanks for you efforts.

The location specified for local storage of originals (which I defined on an external SSD) is empty (besides the 17 pics taken on mobile after this migration attempt). Not sure you mean this folder but thats were I expected to find originals after migration.

There is also  "lightroom Library.lrlibrary" folder I found on my macbook internal hardrive, located within pictures directorey (Bilder), which has some subfolders regarding migration and reports etc. But I believe this folder is used for smart previews (at least thats what I defined in lightroom) and anyway its size is minor.

So all in all, up to now I still have no clue what went wrong (there was no error message) and specially I dont know at what point something went wrong (as Lightroom reports seemed aok).

I am meanwhile thinking of going back to my previous setup (Lightroom only for storing pics from mobile devices in the cloud and syncing them to Lightroom Classic, but storing my pics taken by camera locally only, and using primarly Lightroom Classic to edit all kinds of pictures.) I am just not sure how to overlook the current status without knowing what went wrong at which point and how to move on without ending up in a bigger mess. Actually I guess I am not far away from where i was, in LR classic everything seems as before (except broken links to mobile devices) so I guess I could just consider this migration attempt to Lightroom as never happened and move on as before. But I'd like to be sure of what I am doing and therefor want to understand what went wrong.

You are right, I likely need someone from Adobe to look into this and hopefully re-engineer what happened (maybe I did a mistake at some point and didnt realize, maybe it was a system failure, who knows...).

Thanks for pinging Adobe, I would really hope to hear from them and get support on this.
Thanks Jim.

Cheers, Mark 

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Community Expert ,
Apr 09, 2022 Apr 09, 2022

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Mark, the way I do this is to NOT migrate and I use both Classic and Cloudy. For those images I want avaiable in the cloud, I first sync them from Classic so that a smart preview gets sent to the cloud. Then I open up Cloudy and the images appear. The trick is then to simply import the full raws for just those images in Cloudy and they will get matched with the smart previews already present and will sync up to the clud in full quality and Classic will still sync them back and forth. This for me gives the best of both worlds. I also use a iPad mini in the field where I just run Lightroom and import images using a usb-c card reader and I can edit on the iPad. They nicely sync to the cloud and down into my Classic library on my machine at home. Editing is actually faster on the iPad than on my then (2019) top of the line i9 Mac Book Pro. Of course Lightroom on the iPad is by far not as full featured as what I need so it's great to just get all the images already there on my machine at home fully edited for some real work. I often need Topaz plugins (I like shooting wildlife so often have very high ISO images) to finish my images and you can really only do this well from Classic.

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New Here ,
Apr 09, 2022 Apr 09, 2022

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Hi Jao

Thanks for your description which fully matches my need.

There we go, my sudden desire to migrate (for backup of original RAW's taken by camera, so not auto uploaded to LR) was a mistake and caused lots of extra work (as I now need to figure out how to get back to where I was). Unless I am overseeing something, I guess i will just ignore this "unlucky" migration, delete this Lightroom Catalog folder in LR (created during migration, empty anyway), try to tidy up LR Classic (repair/recover links to mobile uploads) and then continue as before (plus using your advise for RAW upload to Cloud).

Thanks, Mark

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Community Expert ,
Apr 10, 2022 Apr 10, 2022

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quote

Hi Jao

Thanks for your description which fully matches my need.

There we go, my sudden desire to migrate (for backup of original RAW's taken by camera, so not auto uploaded to LR) was a mistake and caused lots of extra work (as I now need to figure out how to get back to where I was). Unless I am overseeing something, I guess i will just ignore this "unlucky" migration, delete this Lightroom Catalog folder in LR (created during migration, empty anyway), try to tidy up LR Classic (repair/recover links to mobile uploads) and then continue as before (plus using your advise for RAW upload to Cloud).

Thanks, Mark


By @Mark23968760rxmu

 

Be aware that using a "hybrid" solution such as the one that Jao uses (I also use a hybrid solution in which I have all my Classic images also stored as originals in the cloud) is actually not recommended by Adobe, which means that if you encouter "bugs" in your hybrid workflow it's likely that they would not be addressed by Adobe. Adobe's preference is for the user to use Classic (syncing Smart Previews only to the cloud) OR Lightroom Desktop (syncing Originals to the cloud), but not to try to do both together as Jao and myself do.

 

One thing to be aware of when importing originals to the cloud which are already cataloged in LrC is to ensure that before you import them to Lightroom Desktop you must make sure that the corresponding image in LrC has already been synced as a smart preview. If you import an original to the cloud which exists in LrC but has not been synced from there that will likely result in a Virtual Copy appearing in LrC, with the VC being the synced asset and the original remaining unsynced.

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Community Expert ,
Apr 10, 2022 Apr 10, 2022

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quote

heya, thanks.

please see the migration report attached. and i am aware of the 316 files not migrated due to missing original. i will follow up with screenshots of both LR and classic once i get back home.

cheers, mark


By @Mark23968760rxmu

 

Did you examine the associated log file? Possibly that would have included additional information which might have explained what went wrong.

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Community Expert ,
Apr 09, 2022 Apr 09, 2022

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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.

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New Here ,
Apr 09, 2022 Apr 09, 2022

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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 

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Community Expert ,
Apr 09, 2022 Apr 09, 2022

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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.

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Community Expert ,
Apr 10, 2022 Apr 10, 2022

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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.

 

 

Jao, where did you get this information from? I ask because I think it is incorrect...if you switch the location for locally stored originals to an external drive in Lightroom Desktop, BEFORE starting the migration of an LrC catalog, the migration should honour that setting and store the migrated assets in that specified location. I've just testing it again this morning and can confirm that happened as expected (that was on a Win10 system, but I have no reason to think it would be any different on MacOS).

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New Here ,
Apr 10, 2022 Apr 10, 2022

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Hi Jim

What you describe is the behaviour I would have expected.

In my case on a macbook:

- I wanted to migrate 660GB using a 1TB (100% free space) SSD, which was defined as directory for local storage of originals in LR.

- After starting migration, the migrator complained lack of about 1xyGB storage. Means the migrator was obviously not looking at my SSD but at my internal HD on macbook.

- After freeing my internal HD, the migrator was satisfied and migration was able to be continued (but as we now know, failed for likely other reasons).

I guess what I am saying is that in my case migration via external disk was not possible, where what you describe would be what I was expecting (and one would expect to be possible).

Cheers, Mark

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Community Expert ,
Apr 10, 2022 Apr 10, 2022

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Lightroom would still require a good chunk of space on the system drive for the local library (catalog and previews), and that location cannot be changed. My own library occupies 28GB on my MacHD (originals are on an external drive), and that's for only 23k images. With 85k images it's not unreasonable that your local library would be well in excess of 50GB, and then there's also likely some temporary working space needed (also on the system drive). So perhaps the message wasn't specifically referring to space on the system drive for storing the originals?

 

I can run a test on my Mac system, probably this evening, but I'm pretty sure it will work as expected. If it worked as Jao describes, those users who migrated multi-TB catalogs (and yes, there are some who have done that to my certain knowledge) would never have managed it.

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Community Expert ,
Apr 10, 2022 Apr 10, 2022

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Hey Jim, to the best of my knowledge this is still how it works. I was told by adobe that this was by design because they could not count on external storage being available during the migration process and they only copy images to the designated local storage location after them being migrated. This indeed led to it being impossible to migrate very large libraries. It is possible they reneged on this design as indeed it led to major problems all around but I don't remember seeing it mentioned

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Community Expert ,
Apr 10, 2022 Apr 10, 2022

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I ran another migration test this evening, this time on my MacOS system. Once again, with an external drive set as the location for locally stored originals, the migration process copied the images straight to that external drive. Nothing other than very small previews was written to the Lightroom library on the system drive. 

 

So basically migration on both Windows and MacOS worked exactly as I was expecting, and contrary to what you were told by Adobe. Frankly I would have been shocked if it had worked as you were told, that would make no sense to me at all.

 

That still leaves us unable to explain what went wrong with Mark's migration attempt. It would perhaps be useful to get a look at the log file that should have been generated by the migration process.

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New Here ,
Apr 11, 2022 Apr 11, 2022

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hi jim

i can provide information if you could tell me what file we are talking about. i see various files within a folder called "migration". all rathet cryptic to me so not sure what to send. there is some file called "MigrationFinalReport...", is this what you mean? besides that there are numerous other and more detailed txt files, i am a bitnlost looking at them.

If you are interested to continue, let me know.

I decided to tick of this story and complete migration to LR, so i am now recovering what can be and will turn back to a hybrid workflow...

cheers, mark

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Community Expert ,
Apr 11, 2022 Apr 11, 2022

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Mark, just keep those files handy for now in case an Adobe engineer wishes to look at them.

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