My iPhone is re-importing duplicates of every photo, how to reset it?

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
January 2, 2023
2 replies
1500 views

Lightroom on my iPhone has always been set to import photos from my camera roll. But yesterday it decided it should re-import all 5000+ iPhone photos. I checked and I was getting duplicates in my library of every photo I ever took on my phone.

How can I fix this? Every time I turn the feature back on, it continues on it's journey of importing the 5000+ photos and getting duplicates. I want it to import new photos I take, not all the photo's it's already imported.

Any suggestions?

iOS: iPhone

I

iane44284980

Participant

New iPhone is re-importing all device photos to LR. I need to have auto sync photos on. Abode support are telling me that every user who get a new phone has their library duplicated in LR if they had auto sync on. Surely this is an error.... Peole get new phones all of the time and I never recall having this issue previously.

(latest ios and LR software)

C

Charlie.D

Adobe Employee

Hello @iane44284980

Are you also syncing your camera roll photos to iCloud storage? If so, did you also opt into "Optimize storage?" This feature saves local device storage by keeping only downsampled copies of your images on your local device. I thought when Lightroom imports, it requests originals from iCloud to avoid apparent duplicates like you are seeing. Are you offline when letting Lightroom import images?

Can you confirm some details to help us understand this better:

your device model and iOS version installed?
do you have iCloud Phtoos sync enabled? With or without Optimize Storage enabled?
- more info: https://support.apple.com/en-us/108782
Is the device online and is Lightroom sync enabled when doing your importing?
if you can find an example image which now seems duplicated, can you confirm the file details (resolution, byte size, etc). This would

Thanks for any details you can provide!

Jim Wilde

Community Expert

Generally speaking, LrM doesn't just decide to import older images from the camera roll whithout something having been changed. The usual "villain" in this situation is using Photos with iCloud, i.e. if you've suddenly turned that on when it was previously off, or you have it set to manage the photo storage on the device such that it removes originals for the Camera Roll and replaces them with smaller previews (which then appear to LrM as "new" photos, so it starts importing them).

So, has anything like that occurred recently?

J

jabrahamAuthor

Inspiring

Yes, iCloud Photos is probably the culprit. Is there a way to reset LrM so that it only imports photos new from today? Would deleting the app and reinstalling it help?

Jim Wilde

Community Expert

Are you using the free Lightroom mobile version, or do you have a subscription? If you have a subscription all the photos should have synced to your Adobe cloud account, in which case deleting and reinstalling the app on your phone won't achieve anything, so you'd still need to select them in Lightroom and delete them from there. But if you have the free version, then deleting the app and reinstalling would delete everything from Lightroom....photos and any presets that you may have added.

Going forward, you'd still be at risk of it happening again if you continue to use iCloud for Photos (I have it deliberately disabled for that reason), in which case you might be better advised to turn off the "Auto-add" feature in the Lightroom Settings>Import tab and simply do a manual import from the Camera Roll when you want to import from there.

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