Restore Missing Lightroom Albums After Classic Synchronization

[ty@tylonius.com]

I have used Lightroom CC (version 6.5) for the last several years and amassed over 27,000 photos. The bulk of these are real estate, organized by property address; and construction photos, organized by project and capture dates.

I wanted to move my artistic photos over to Lightroom Classic (version 12.5) because it has more and better editing features, so I set it up to synch with the cloud. I only wanted specific albums to synch, so I unlinked the others and removed them. I did not realize that removing them from LRC also removes the album from the cloud.

All of my photos are still in LR CC, but they are not longer stored in albums. I'm certain that the albums are simply an index file. Is there any way to restore that index?

I tried using Time Machine to restore an earlier version of my library, and for a moment, it appeared to work, but then the library strated syncing with the cloud and I was back to 27K photos and no albums.

Is there a way to push to the cloud maybe?

Thoughts? Suggestions?

[JohanElzenga]

I'm afraid not. The cloud takes preference over the local library, which is basically just a cache.

[Rob_Cullen]

If Lightroom v6.5 (Cloudy) is you primary image database, then whenever you turn on the Sync in Lightroom-Classic, LrC will download ALL image files (be that 27K) to the LrC catalog and local storage. As detailed in- SYNC SETUP IN CLASSIC

If you only want specific images (artistic photos) in your LrC library, then you would need to-

1) Not Sync LrC at all. Not Sync LrC ever.

2) Export Originals from Lr-Desktop to local storage.

3) Import these 'exporrted' files to the LrC Catalog.

[ty@tylonius.com]

Rob_Cullen, yes I realize all of that now. I was looking for a way to restore the album index.

Also, there appears to be some conflicting information on the Adobe side. The link you posted is different than the one I looked at: https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/sync-faq.html.

It does say that it is not recommended to sync both, but it's just a single note in the syncing from LRC to LR (attached).

I still feel like there must be a way to push back the album settings:

1. If I restore my LR Library, it has all of the albums intact (see attachment 2).
2. With LR sync paused, I make a change to the folder structure by creating a new folder called Recovery, and moving all of the existing folders into it.

3. When I resume syncing, it should recognize the desktop version as the most recently changed and push that index, but it doesn't. The albums all disappear. Not the folders or the photos, just the albums (attachment 3).

I believe that this may be because LRC is still connected to the cloud. I'm not sure how to break that connection and make LR CC the primary again.

Thoughts?

[JohanElzenga]

"When I resume syncing, it should recognize the desktop version as the most recently changed and push that index, but it doesn't. The albums all disappear. Not the folders or the photos, just the albums (attachment 3)."

Like I already explained, your local library is essentially just a cache. The cloud takes priority, so Lightroom will not look at the date of the cache and change the cloud accordingly if the cache is more recent. It will only check if you imported images that have not yet been synced, or made edits that have not yet been synced, but the organisation in albums and folders will not be pushed from the cache to the cloud, meaning you cannot restore the cloud from a local backup. This is a known limitation and 'as designed'.

[ty@tylonius.com]

See, that was what I thought as well, that if the local version were more current that it would be pushed to the server.

Modifying an image was the first thing I tried.  When that didn't work, I tried modifying the library structure. If you open the Library package, you can see where the various indices are kept (attached), and some of them do appear to have timestamp comparison instructions (also attached).

I hadn't tried adding photos until I saw your message, but that doesn't seem to have any effect either. The albums all promptly disappear.

Also, the new albunm I created shows up in the sync list on LRC. It looks like once you connect LRC to the cloud catalog, there's no turning back.

[JohanElzenga]

"I hadn't tried adding photos until I saw your message, but that doesn't seem to have any effect either. The albums all promptly disappear."

I think you misunderstood me. I did not suggest that adding photos would solve your problem with the albums. All I said was that the cloud takes priority, but adding or editing photos is something you can do when Lightroom is offline.

[Rob_Cullen]

I agree with the comments from @JohanElzenga 

You stated-

"It does say that it is not recommended to sync both, but it's just a single note in the syncing from LRC to LR (attached)."

That quote "Note:It is recommended not to use sync in both Lightroom Classic and Lightroom desktop." is specifically from a section referring to "Migrating" a LrC Library to the Lightroom-Cloud  Library- and I have no clue as to what the statement might mean in regard to syncing LrC Collections to Lr Albums.

 In your two screen-clips of the Lightroom-Desktop- the 'Folders' look the same, just that in the second clip, some folders have not been expanded to show the contained Albums. Are they missing entirely? (or am I wrong?)

[ty@tylonius.com]

Regarding the quote, yes, that was the point I was trying to make. If trying to use both is going to have that much negative impact, you would think it would be more prominently stated.

And yes, the folders are not expanded because the albums have been completely removed.

[ty@tylonius.com]

Adobe Support has been nonexistent. I've received multiple messages that simply ask me to set up a callback time, which I do, and then no one calls me. Also, despite providing them with a detailed explanation of the issue, no one has addressed or even acknowledged it. It's just the same copypasta over and over: 

We can set up a call back for tomorrow. 

Please share a call back time.

We will set the call back accordingly. 

Thank you.  

And yes, it was sent that way, with the previous message copied and pasted as a quote.

And Adobe used to have stellar support. Sad.

[peter-b]

Unfortunately, we have no way of recovering deleted album data.  There is not a single index file as you've speculated here.  I will reacch out to you directly to confirm some information, and see what we can do here to help.

-Peter

[ty@tylonius.com]

I'll be interested to see what that looks like.

[ty@tylonius.com]

This was the most recent message I received:

Your Adobe Customer Care Case Is Scheduled To Be Closed

Dear Ty,

We recently sent a couple of reminders about your open case. If you still need us, we are here to help.

Here are some details about the request you submitted:

• Case number: ADB-30940218-Z0Z8
• Issue: Performance 

[PeterB2]

Sorry about that - know that we are working on this still on the Engineering side.  I will be talking to the Support Team about this case as well.

-Peter

[ty@tylonius.com]

The album data is there. I can see it in my local files. This shouldn't be that hard.

However, the situation itself has been eclipsed by Adobe's stellar support failure. It's really inexcusable.

[MichaelMoretti]

I believe I am having the same issue as Ty. I have been using both cloud LR (mobile and desktop) and classic (LRC) since the product bifurcated a few years ago. I have since been primarily importing and organizing my photos using my iPad (mobile LR). It seemed natural to keep Classic at the same time, as I used it to select and prepare images from my trove for printing on my Canon Pro 1000.

Over the weekend, in the interests of solving my storage issues on my MacBook Pro, I realized that all of my cloud photos were being downloaded and stored locally on my laptop. I could see all of my mobile albums appeared as collections in classic so I turned off syncing on all of them, expecting that the images would be removed from my local storage. I was caught off guard when I observed years of file organization disappear in mobile LR when all of the albums were moved out of their parent folders and became simply empty albums (showing a count of 0), alphabetically arranged below the parent folders in the mobile library.

All of my photos are still in the cloud, appearing primarily in three folders: All photos, My edits and Unedited. At the same time, all of those same albums remain in the classic Collections list with their original images (i.e., they are not empty in Classic), as I quickly restored syncing as soon as I saw what was happening in the mobile LR, though apparently I was not quick enough.

How, then, can I go back to my original state? Is this even possible? Can Adobe restore order from their server backups as of last Saturday? I'm completely disheartened at this point with the entire process, regretting ever getting on this LR/LRC pony. I love how the app works as an editor, but as a file organizer I'm frustrated more than ever.

I'm talking about 20,000+ images, to which I have had hopes one day of migrating more images from a much larger collection stored in the Photos app on my Mac dating back to the late 90s.

Should I have hopes of a fix for this, or resign myself to manually reconstructing my album ordering?

[peter-b]

Unfortunately, we don't have a straightforward solution for deleted album recovery.  We are looking into what it would take to do this in the future, but at this moment, it is not something we can do.

-Peter

[MichaelMoretti]

Thank you for the prompt response, Peter. In the absence of a 'straightforward solution', is there, perhaps, an indirect solution you might share?

[PeterB2]

Resyncing a collection should work in your case, though you will again run into the local storage issue.   Note that Lr Classic really expects to have all data locally.  I would expect you could move some of those files to another storage device as needed -- will let the Classic team give more guidance on that if you need it.

If your collections are date based, Search can often be used as an alternative to having an album.

-Peter

[MichaelMoretti]

Hi Peter... I've updated my LRC settings so that the images are now stored on an external drive, so plenty of room to work with now. How do I restart syncing? I'm using LR/LRC on macOS 14 and mobile LR on ipadOS 17.0.2.

[PeterB2 · Accepted solution]

Use the Classic syncing capabilities as described here :

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/help/lightroom-mobile-desktop-features.html

Try one collection at a time to make sure it's doing what you want.

-Peter

[MichaelMoretti]

Thank you for your continued support on this issue, Peter. The problem was not resolved after following the instructions in the link you provided above. Basically, when I briefly turned off syncing of all of my albums in LR Classic, all the corresponding albums in LR mobile were removed from their parent folders, emptied and organized as a list as they appear in LRC. Now, the albums can be view in LR Classic with their constituent images, but not in LR mobile. Please see the attached screenshots.

Michael

[ty@tylonius.com]

What you tried worked splendidly. Thank you!

[MichaelMoretti]

Good to hear it worked out for you! Seems my issue may have a different etiology... 😞

[PeterB2]

Not sure I follow.  If you resync a collection fromo Classic, do you not see it repopulated in LrMobile?   Or  is it that the folders are not restored?