Inspiring

Question

stop lightroom mobile from syncing all photos

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
March 30, 2018
14 replies
87162 views

Is there a way to stop lightroom mobile from syncing all photos on my phone? And to remove all the photos it's already synced without deleting them from my phone? I only want lightroom to sync photos i specifically tell it to sync. It's already uploaded a batch of photos I didn't want it to, and if i just try and delete them from lightroom.adobe.com it says it's going to delete the photo from all synced devices as well. (who is the genius that thought it's a good idea to delete photos everywhere without giving the option to only delete locally?)

I just turned off auto add in the preferences so I'm guessing that will stop LR from adding any more photos. But how do i remove the ones it's already synced without deleting them from my phone?

Show previous replies

md0724

New Participant

Just ran into this problem as well - supremely aggravating, especially because it never confirmed a choice to sync all old photos, and as others have mentioned it does not stop syncing even when turned off. The problem is I now likewise have thousands of duplicate images in my Lightroom desktop library and if I go to edit or change one, I can't be sure which version I may be working on, cloud or desktop, without having to check and verify this for every image, and risk putting a cloud image into a collection and then having it potentially disappear at a later date due to any bugs with cloud syncing. I don't trust having one copy of an image that exists only in a cloud managed collection as that seems to be asking for trouble if some bug in the cloud software decides to delete or move around images and then having to track that down. I prefer to know where I put all my images manually and then sync selective collections with the cloud for only a small subset of images that need to live across devices for reviews, current work, etc.

J

Jao vdL

Community Expert

This is a real design flaw in LR CC mobile. If you enable the auto add feature, it will start uploading every single image you have ever taken with your phone and all phones before if you use an iPhone and use the iCloud photo library feature. You can't just have it automatically upload just newly shot images to Adobe's cloud which is what most people really would want. Worse, if you realize that it is doing this wrong and disable the auto-add feature, it will just keep uploading everything anyway. There is no way to stop it from doing that except for completely removing the Lightroom CC app from your phone and reinstalling it from the app store. You can tell I ran into this problem too ;-)

Lastly, the only way to remove the images already uploaded is manually deleting them from Lightroom CC either on your phone or in lightroom.adobe.com or in Lightroom CC on a desktop computer. They will still be on the photo roll on your phone (yes it duplicates them!) and in iCloud photo library. They will only be removed from Adobe's cloud.

M

MontyMontgomery

Inspiring

In my opinion, having all photographs everywhere is the beauty of LRCC. I do not want to have a different collection of photos on my phone than I do on the iPad or Mac.

Many times I am sitting at a coffee bar with friends and a topic wil arise, “Remember when we...”. Seconds later I have searched LRCC and present a photos of the event.

It has been a long time since I have been as excited about a program as I am with LRCC.

“Who is the genius....”. The last thing I want to do is to wonder if “that photo” has been deleted on this device or that device. What a maniagement nightmare that would be. One catalogue, one set of photographs everywhere. Thank you Adobe,

Monty

PS, now, when is that next update coming?

M

merkkAuthor

Inspiring

MontyMontgomery wrote
In my opinion, having all photographs everywhere is the beauty of LRCC. I do not want to have a different collection of photos on my phone than I do on the iPad or Mac.
Many times I am sitting at a coffee bar with friends and a topic wil arise, “Remember when we...”. Seconds later I have searched LRCC and present a photos of the event.
It has been a long time since I have been as excited about a program as I am with LRCC.
“Who is the genius....”. The last thing I want to do is to wonder if “that photo” has been deleted on this device or that device. What a maniagement nightmare that would be. One catalogue, one set of photographs everywhere. Thank you Adobe,
Monty
PS, now, when is that next update coming?

That's good for you, but it's not what I want. I don't need or want all my camera photos uploaded to adobe. I prefer maintaining control over what gets uploaded and what doesn't. I particularly dislike when apps like this seem to try and force you into uploading all your data to their servers. They need to give you more control over whats uploaded - and more obvious ways of managing things that have already been uploaded.

Jim Wilde

Community Expert

Jao is correct. This is a flaw. If every photo on one's camera roll was a 'serious' photo then the idea of every photo being available everywhere would be fine. Many people, myself included, use their camera roll as a catch-all for all manner of media (e.g. photos I take for work that don't need to be synced to my personal LR cloud, memes, all manner of stuff I only wish to share on social media and not have in my LR cloud). Automatically grabbing EVERYTHING from a mobile devices photo storage is a miscalculation by Adobe.

bryceh5062428 wrote
Jao is correct. This is a flaw. If every photo on one's camera roll was a 'serious' photo then the idea of every photo being available everywhere would be fine. Many people, myself included, use their camera roll as a catch-all for all manner of media (e.g. photos I take for work that don't need to be synced to my personal LR cloud, memes, all manner of stuff I only wish to share on social media and not have in my LR cloud). Automatically grabbing EVERYTHING from a mobile devices photo storage is a miscalculation by Adobe.

What exactly is the flaw? You have the choice of having the LRCC app auto-add any new photos added to the camera roll, or not. If you don't want all the images you capture with your phone synced to the LR cloud, simply turn off the auto-add option. Then you can manually add/import only the photos that you do want to sync. How is that a "miscalculation by Adobe"?

selondon

Community Expert

This is how the ecosystem is designed to work, to have access to everything that is stored in the Cloud on any device.

Yep, turning off 'Auto Add' will help. Are the photos that are going up to the Cloud, from the Lightroom Mobile Camera or being imported from the iOS Photos App Camera Roll/Android Gallery (or whatever it is called).

If they are originally coming from the Camera Roll/Gallery and are still present there, then deleting from lightroom.adobe.com will not touch these. Yes, they will be deleted from the Lightroom Cloud ecosystem and you won't see them in the Lightroom App but they should still be in the device operating system's photos location (unless you have cleared them from there).

J

jm_colorado

New Participant

This is an ENORMOUS invasion of my privacy!!!!! By default everything syncs to the web? I didn't even know this was happening. IT SHOULD BE TURNED OFF BY DEFAULT WITH AN OPT-IN OPTION!!!!

selondon

Community Expert

jm_colorado wrote
This is an ENORMOUS invasion of my privacy!!!!! By default everything syncs to the web? I didn't even know this was happening. IT SHOULD BE TURNED OFF BY DEFAULT WITH AN OPT-IN OPTION!!!!

This is the point of the Cloud Based Lightroom though. Lightroom Classic exists if the Cloud isn’t preferable for you. Also, you can pause sync on the Cloud clients, so you don’t have to sync anything.

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