Photos severely downsized after cloud sync

[Old Man James]

On a recent trip I loaded a couple hundred photos from my camera (RAWs) and phone (JPGs) into Lightroom on my iPad and I began to sort and edit them. This was done all off-line. 

Once I returned home and had access to the internet again, I turned sync back on and a little while later I noticed that all the JPGs I had imported from my phone were severly downsized to 500x377 pixels. The edits also appear to be gone for the JPGs, but all the RAW files and edits are uneffected and are fine.

This happened once before but I can't rememeber how I resolved it and my old posts seem to be gone. 

Is there a way to recover the original images and edits or do In need to re-import from my phone? Is there anything that can be done to stop this from happening again?

[Charlie.D]

Hello @Old Man James 

It sounds like you may have had iCloud Photos sync enabled, and since you were offline the originals could not be fetched for import and so only downres copies were accessible.

If this is the case, and you are now able to sync to iCloud, please enable "Download and Keep Originals" in iCloud > Photos settings, to ensure the original images will be available to Lightroom.  Then reimport the relevant images into Lightroom.  

[Old Man James]

I do not have iCloud photo backup enabled. 

[Charlie.D]

If you had connected your camera or SD memory directly to your phone, Lightroom will always import original images if available.  Lightroom would not create images at 500x377 pixels, so they must have come from somewhere else.  Do you use any software either from your camera manufacturer or a 3rd party that would have transferred images onto your phone?  This small pixel dimension makes me wonder if the JPGs that got transferred to your phone are some kind of thumbnail representations of originals that did not actually transfer to your phone.

[Old Man James]

Charlie,

I imported the photos from my camera via an SD card reader directly into Lightroom. These photos have not been affected (they are all RAW files).

I connected my phone (Pixel 7) directly to my iPad via a USB-C cable and Lightroom treated it like a camera so I was able to import directly from the phone into Lightroom. These images initially were good, full resolution with correct meta data. But once I turned sync back on, the original full sized images seemed to be gone.

A few more observations I have made:

• Not all photos from my phone were affected, only about 50 of them.
• The meta data and file names have also changed, all the affected photos now have a date range from January 1, 2024 3:01 pm to January 1, 2024 3:03 pm. The photos were orinally shot between December 14 and January 2.
• All other EXIF data has been erased.
• The file names have also changed from PXL_20231231_162820797.jpg to 1000002551.jpg (example). FYI: the Pixel’s naming convention is a date and time code.

Thanks for looking into this for me, I appreciate your time.

[Charlie.D]

I don't see how Lightroom sync could downsample images to such a tiny resolution.  I'll see if I can validate this poor experience with my own devices.  

Is there any reason why you don't just sign into the Lightroom Android app on your Pixel, and import and sync from there?

[Old Man James]

I was mostly offline so I was loading everything via direct import. I do all my editing on my iPad and getting both my phone and iPad online while traveling offline is a bit of a hassle. But definately something to try in the future. Honestly, I'm surprised direct import from my (Android) phone to (Apple) iPad into (Adobe) Lightroom works at all. 

Perhaps finding a better workflow would be more useful than trying to get this one to work. Towards that end, what would your recomendation for transfering photos from phone to iPad be, Lightroom cloud sync? And if offline, would it be better to import the photos into the iPad's photo library rather than importing directly into Lightroom?

[Charlie.D]

Airdrop makes it relatively easy to copy images from one iOS device to another, if you prefer to consolidate images onto one device.  It's been a while since I personally traveled anywhere without robust wifi, so I have been able to enjoy syncing images to Lightroom cloud storage almost daily.  (And once synced, I perform 'Clear cache' in the LR iOS app settings to recover device storage space.)

In the past, traveling with DSLR cameras etc while not having access to robust wifi, I always personally chose to use redundant SD card storage inside my camera (record to 2 chips at once), and bought lots of SD cards.  And then when I had the chance I'd either import from SD memory into Lightroom Mobile and sync, or if I was able to borrow a trustworthy computer, I'd plug in my SD card to the computer via card reader, and upload to my account via https://lightroom.adobe.com/ using a desktop web browser.  Uploading via the web app is fast because it doesn't need to import into a locally indexed structure before syncing like the mobile and desktop apps.  I'm always eager to upload photos any chance I get, in case loss or damage etc occurs while traveling.

Others here may have better advice to share.