Removing photos from cloud

I think the moral of the story with all of this is, IF SOMEONE DOESN'T WANT CLOUD BACKUP, it's too hard to figure out how to get rid of it. Even the damned "Lightroom" name is confusing.

And Adobe does it on purpose. 

Quit! It pisses people off. Name it "Cloud" and make it optional and quit with the messages saying you'll delete ALL photos if you delete off of the cloud. 

We're sick of it. 

Ok. I've been battling with this for a while. LRCC ate up all of of my storage and crippled my whole Creative Cloud usage.

BUT I'VE JUST FIGURED IT OUT!!!

In LR Classic, under the Catalogue section should be "All Synced Photographs".

Open that and select everything. Right-click on one of the photos and near the bottom should be "Remove from all synced photographs". Select that. A very reassuring dialogue box will pop up. Click OK.

Open LRCC in your browser and refresh the page periodically. You will see all the photos drain out of there leaving them untouched in LR Classic. 

Honestly I'm over the moon to have worked this out. Hope it helps you guys too.

Peace

This has been a somewhat terrifying experience, dealing with LRCC and LRCCC. Adobe has royally screwed this up, and I mean royally.

I synced my LRCCC library when LRCC was new. Got the 1TB plan, and was looking forward to having my whole library available on all my mobile devices whenever I wanted. Lots of photos uploaded. Played with LRCC desktop for a bit, played with the apps a bit, discovered that the app is an abomination unto the Lord, and deleted it, changed my sub back from the 1TB plan.

It was difficult to find out how to remove the photos once that was done. It was difficult to figure out if deleting the cloud versions would delete my local LRCCC versions, seeing as I had attached it to LRCC. Utterly ridiculous.

So much having to do with syncing in LRCCC that has no UI, once it got started within LRCC. The Synced Photos catalog does not behave like other catalogs, so you don't know how it will react by doing things you would be confident doing to other catalogs. Adobe Creative Cloud shows me having nothing in the cloud, yet my storage is full (10x full, in fact). Finding the post showing me how to access my LRCCC synced photos via the browser was the only way to see my cloud data, and deleting it all took a lot of selecting and scrolling, for which the UI is near invisible, completely unhelpful, and incredibly annoying.

Extricating myself from the clutches of LRCC, to get my meagre Cloud Storage freed up, was a white knuckle experience. As a software professional myself, I am sympathetic to devs with new, in-process apps getting a few things wrong, or underdelivering initially. This is the first time I've been actually angry at the UI design, and the application's communications with me. It's like the team is malevolent.

Horrible, horrible app. Horrible experience. Would like the design team to suffer through long, boring user experience lectures about how bad their app is. Would like LRCCC, LRCC, and ACC devs to all get together and be told how badly they've done in getting their apps to work together. No sympathy here, from me, at all.

I'm having the same problems as original poster here. The design and workflow of Lightroom CC is horrible. I just opened it and imported 500 images from a shoot, thinking I could work on them and export and save the ones I wanted. Now, 20 minutes later I'm still trying to figure out how to remove ALL the photos that I imported into Lightroom simply to work on and edit...because it automatically stored them ALL in the cloud. Prompting a notice that my storage was almost full.

This program really sucks. I've read a bunch of the replies here, and have found no select button, the "select all" button is not available to select... This is the opposite of intuitive.

Here's what I did:

0. Backup original source photos, just to make sure.  I just made a duplicate on another HDD and then compared to the original once the delet was complete.  If your original is deleted, then just move the backup into the ruined directory when you are all done.  On mac, I backed up using Terminal:  rsync -avr --progress originalDir backupDir

1. Open Adobe Lightroom CC > Click "All Photos"

2. Click on a single image > Go to Edit in the Menu Bar > Select all (this should select all of your photos)

3. Right click (two finger click on Mac) any of your images that are selected > Delete # Photos (one of the last options, toward the bottom)

4.  Pray (also note the warning Adobe gives you keeps the deletion to Lightroom, Albums, and Devices--not directories or copies of directories).

I have a VPN where I can share ALL my files with myself remotely without paying anyone.  I suggest everyone look into that as it is a viable alternative, although you have to set it up correctly to be secure.

As I am an advanced amateur I do plan to use the syncing capabilities, for example to hand my Mom my Android so she can thumb through photos of my kids' birthdays (ten or so decent ones), or post - UGH!! - to Facebook because let's face it Baby Boomer relatives still use this monstrosity.

There are occasions where I do NOT want to log into my VPN to access some low-quality versions of my photography, but I might want to show a friend that cute picture of my kid riding a camel, whatever.  It's low quality anyway, I have the RAW file on multiple hard drives, password protected and firewalled.

Want to steal my JPG's and go and publish some award-winning book of my photography?  Knock yourself out.  I'd love for someone to do the work for me, make a million dollar book and then hand me a golden opportunity to sue their butt and collect on my intellectual property.  In fact, that would be awesome!  Unfortunately, my photography is amateur work, so I'm not really expecting that to happen.

Couple of additional notes: I deleted all photos from cloud by visiting the cloud uploads. But first I uninstalled the program.

Then I found that there was a separate folder that CC had created containing gigs of photos to be uploaded. I was surprised by that because it wasn't the original folder for my photos (D:...)... it was in C:... so look around your c drive for this. I recovered tons of space by erasing THAT folder, not the original folder. But you might need to be careful if your organisation is different or if you selected different import options...

C:\Users\(YourUserName)\AppData\Local\Adobe\ is the location. LRCC creates a separate folder or two in there.

Hi there,

Not sure if you've resolved this already but I just had the same problem and found the solution through Lightroom Classic.

Go into Lightroom Classic, select preferences> lightroom sync tab > select 'delete all synced data', it will open chrome then you can delete the lightroom library online, this will not affect the files stored on your hard drive. To be safe, perhaps just move the originals from the folder they are currently in to something with a different name. Will post screenshots of the process below.

I guess they want everyone to upgrade their cloud storage accounts to host the files so they are making it super difficult to find the delete option. surely they are aware that the majority of photographers use terabytes of data for their library?

I'll be sticking to external hard drives until cloud storage matches the price of physical hard drives!

hope this helps.

Hi!

Must say this syncing is EXTREMELY confusing for me. Todat installed Lighroom (used 6 before on another system) and it immediately began syncing thousands of photos to the cloud. Not practical because I have only 20 GB storage space and don't plan to make much use of this option in the first place. The thing is: I have now a bunch of greyed out photos at adobe cloud that I can't remove in any way. They re just grey rectangles with a cloud symbol in it. I do not want to reside those photos there, useless. Also stopping the syncing seems to be difficult. Tried to swith off the sync option in Creative Cloud, but it just stubbornly keeps uploading hundreds of photos. Pausing is an option, but I want a permanent solution for this problem. If there is not, I'd like to cancel the subscription to Lightroom, it just doesn't work for me then. :-/

Greetings,

Ronald.

Jeez people. I wanted Lightroom and Photoshop. No cloud backup. But adding files to Lightroom, it puts 18% (4,000+ photos) of my photos on the web.

Then says I'm out of room.

I didn't want them there in the first place. Now I can't just click a button to delete all? I have to wait for resyncing? I'm doing this from my work computer instead of my home one, because I'm not 100% it won't try to delete from my desktop.

So, I'm waiting... Hours for syncing. And I still have to go through album by album and delete? No delete all?