Navigating Adobe’s discontinued Creative Cloud Synced files

Report · Apr 18, 2025

If you were a user of Adobe’s Creative Cloud Synced files (CCSF), by now you are aware that they discontinued that facility starting February 4, 2025 (originally February 1, 2024). In their post about this change, they advise that sync’d files left on CCSF after the date will be deleted and no longer accessible using the Creative Cloud Desktop / Asset manager. See Discontinuation of Creative Cloud Synced files. They kindly renamed the local directory to Creative Cloud Files + <account type> + <profile_name> + <email> + <GUID>, and left any files in that directory intact.

I was an early adopter of the CCSF facility, to support my Lightroom Classic usage. Some of you Classic users apparently stored your catalogue in the directory (based upon my research). I didn’t do that. Instead, I guess I did something unexpected. I put my entire image directory in the CCSF directory. Yep, all 792 GBytes of 72,207 images. It worked fine! As many have pointed out, it was like using OneDrive, DropBox or Box. I did have to upgrade to a 1 TB storage plan, which I did in 2023. I remember being able to access those images using the Creative Cloud Desktop -> Files -> Photos (or Assets, don’t remember exactly). I had to in order to permanently delete “deleted” images so they wouldn’t count towards my storage usage.

Okay, so what’s the problem? My reported cloud storage usage. If Adobe deleted those images in the cloud, as they suggested they would, that hasn’t been reflected in my reported storage usage. I showed ~837 GB of 1 TB used BEFORE the February 4 deadline, and ~837 GB of 1 TB AFTER the February 4 deadline. Over the last two years I’ve started experimenting with Lightroom Web / Mobile / Desktop, and have 11,710 photos “in the cloud”. Given those photos are my only usage of cloud storage now, that would suggest that each image from my phone is, on average, 71 GBytes in size. For those of you familiar with iphone photos, that’s laughable. As I have all Lightroom Web / Mobile / Desktop images sync’d to Classic, I confirmed that all 11,710 images in the sync folder take up only ~50 GBytes on my local drive (yes, I download full-size images). Something fishy here – we’re talking orders of magnitude differences.

Does Adobe know? We’ll I’ve tried explaining the issue to their support team on four occasions. I can’t get past “I stored my photos on the CCSF facility”. They insist the ONLY way to get Classic images to sync to the cloud is by creating a collection and sharing it. While that might be true now, it certainly wasn’t in the past. They are unable to grasp that I used an Adobe CCSF facility to store images. I tried a different tactic – asking them to explain my cloud usage by application, hoping to expose the issue. Nope, can’t share that . . . that’s too granular a level of detail. When I ask to have my call escalated to someone familiar with the CCSF sync facility, they hung up on me. When I try to explain my calculation of 71 GBytes per cloud image calculation, they say it all depends upon what the file contains. When I try to explain basic image size fundamentals, again support hung up on me. It seems Adobe has provided limited training on this recent change to sync files.

So, here I am paying for a 1 TB plan to store images that should have been removed, but appear to have stayed put. I can’t get anyone in Adobe to appreciate the issue or investigate. Anyone else having problems reconciling their before and after storage usage after the CCSF sync change?

Report · Apr 24, 2025

Hey @rodcharris,

Welcome to the Lightroom Community. I understand how frustrating your journey has been, and I want to ensure that you are connected with the right teams. I will move your post to the Creative Cloud Services board. The team that manages this board has been informed of your situation and will do their best to help answer your questions.

^CM

Report · Apr 24, 2025

Hi @Rod

Sorry to hear about your difficulties. This sounds like either you have storage use you're not aware of or there is some kind issue with your account. A a few clarifying questions (apologies in advance too if you've already covered some of these).

- Do you have a local copy of all your Lightroom Files and images outside of what was previously in the Creative Cloud Files folder?
- Were you able to empty the Deleted Files folder successfully? https://adobe.ly/4jOOfZI
- Have you checked files in all these locations? If you have files here these could also account for the storage use

https://adobe.ly/4cJ3Pn4

https://adobe.ly/4jSUgVf

https://adobe.ly/3RxTD7j

- You mentioned 837GB being used, what is the correct amount that should be used?

Please get back to me when you get the chance.

Thanks,
Dave

Report · Apr 24, 2025

See my notes in red below.

From: Adobe Community Mailer
Sent: Thursday, April 24, 2025 2:03 PM
To: rc.harris@outlook.com
Subject: Re: [Lightroom ecosystem (Cloud-based)] Navigating Adobe’s discontinued Creative Cloud Synced files

[Adobe Community]

Adobe Community

David__B just posted in a community you follow.

________________________________

Apr 18, 2025 09:42 AM in Lightroom ecosystem (Cloud-based) Discussions<>

Re: Navigating Adobe’s discontinued Creative Cloud Synced files<>

Hi @rod

Sorry to hear about your difficulties. This sounds like either you have storage use you're not aware of or there is some kind issue with your account. A a few clarifying questions (apologies in advance too if you've already covered some of these).

- Do you have a local copy of all your Lightroom Files and images outside of what was previously in the Creative Cloud Files folder?
- Were you able to empty the Deleted Files folder successfully? https://adobe.ly/4jOOfZI

Yes, all “deleted” files permanently deleted.

- Have you checked files in all these locations? If you have files here these could also account for the storage use

https://adobe.ly/4cJ3Pn4<> Yes, all files have been deleted

https://adobe.ly/4jSUgVf<> Yes all files under “Deleted” have been deleted permanently

https://adobe.ly/3RxTD7j<> No, I have no files under Recent, Starred, Shared or Agreements. All empty.

- You mentioned 837GB being used, what is the correct amount that should be used? At last count, I had 792 GBytes from 72,207 files that were in my “Family” folder that was previously sync’d to the Adobe Cloud on the Files/Assets side (that was removed from syncing). Those represented the images I had imported into my Adobe Lightroom Classic application. I have those on my hard drive and also backup. If I subtract that figure from the current amount Adobe shows for my cloud usage of 837.3, I suspect I should be around 45.3 Gbytes.

Separately, I investigated the “Clean-up” files under your pilot feature. It listed several photos as duplicates (from my iPhone), but when I went to the All Photos view and filtered for that file name, only one copy of that photo showed on screen. There was another photo with the same name (from Karen’s iphone camera), and another different folder with the same name but with a “-2” affixed to it (also from Karen’s camera). So at present I’m reluctant to do anything with photos in the Beta version of that feature.

Please get back to me when you get the chance.

Thanks,
Dave

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Report · Apr 29, 2025

Thanks @rodcharris

It looks like you responded via your email client rather than in the community directly, so I wasn't able to see all the formatting you mentioned, but I think I understand well enough to proceed. I've reached out to our developers about this. I'll have to work with them to get the issue sorted. This process generally takes some time to complete, but I've started the process and will update you regarding our progress.

Best,
Dave

Report · Apr 29, 2025

David:

Sorry about confusion. I now know to reply within forum! When I discovered the error, thought it might cause more confusion to create a duplicate post with the highlights. Anyway, appreciate you "reading between the lines". If you find that you need to delete the entire cloud storage in order to accomplish a reset, please advise. I'll try to prepare for having to recreate my Lightroom Web library, and safeguard my Lightroom Classic sync'd photos. I have notifications on for the community so I can act fairly quickly.

Thanks,

Rod

Report · May 06, 2025

Here's the update to the above challenges. Want to thank David from technical support as well as the Adobe "back office" technical team for the final solution. There was, indeed, a glitch with the Adobe Cloud - more specifically in the Assets, My Documents. Apparently when Adobe went to decomission the synchronization of Assets, My Documents, the delete function on the back end did not go to completion. It left some 790 Gbytes "hanging". We confirmed there was no file usage and that reading was wrong. We suspected my Lightroom Web/Mobile usage was no where near the 790 Gbytes level. Adobe backed up up my Lightroom Web/Mobile to a separate account I had, confirming that usage to be only around 45 GBytes (I had calculated around 46.9 GB of usage). They deleted by Adobe Cloud account, which zeroed out my errant 790 GBytes. They then restored by Lightroom Web/Mobile back to my original account, leaving now some 45 Gbytes of usage in Adobe Cloud in total. The restore worked fine (all photos were intact and kept their album asssignments. Moreover, the sync file between Lightroom Web/Mobile and Lightroom Classic stayed intact (it did not have to rebuild the sync file). All is now well in Adobe land. Thanks to David for believing me when I explained prior Adobe Cloud Asset / Document usage, and in sticking with me and overseeing the corrective actions.