Hi @Charlie.D thanks for the response. Here's some more detail for you.
I'm not sure if you've really understood the problem from your questions so I'll have another try to explain the issue. However, to answer your question, the phone isn't plugged in to power unless I am charging it overnight. That will become relevant in a bit as you read on. Most of the time it is being used by me whilst I am out and about and therefore on the celular network, OR it is on my home wifi network. But it's also happening within just the home network when my PC is connected to that - the home network works fine for all other uses (including file uploads to cloud). I've not tried it using a friend's network as I think this is not a network speed issue but a file number reporting issue within Lightroom.
Here's a specific example. Today I've gone outside and taken eight photos of my house. I know a setting within the LR Mobile app has changed since I originally posted this query, the one allowing that you can read just from Camera Roll, but I kept the setting unchanged so the DNG files get pulled into Lightroom Mobile from the Camera Roll. If I look in LR Mobile there are eight images in there. I can see them uploading as I type this. i.e. my phone tells me upload has not yet completed.
That in itself is odd as I know that the Apple Photos has already uploaded those versions an hour or so ago to the iCloud and I went into my Photos on my PC using PhotoMechanic an hour or so ago and it downloaded them all just fine ages ago.
This tells you that the speed of my network to upload from phone to the cloud and back down to my PC is not the issue.
There is still however synchronisation of those eight images going on with Lightroom.
With those eight images, if I go into my iPad I can see them all on Lightroom Mobile just fine even though the DNG files are still uploading. I guess it is showing me the preview and then uploading the main file in the background. Fair enough but then don't tell me synchronisation is complete when it clearly isn't.
LR Mobile on my iPhone says (now it has caught up as I've typed this) that all is Synced and backed-up.
LR Mobile says all eight are synced to the cloud. It says I'm all backed up and synchronised.
If I go to lightroom.adobe.com in my Chrome browser I can see all eight images. Great.
So to my mind there are 8 images on my phone, on my iPad, on the web.
When I went on the family trip last week with 150+ images in the album I was only on cell network. Apparently I was synchronised to the cloud. Apparently. That's what it told me: that synchronisation was complete. And indeed I could see them "all" on my iPad (or at least what I assumed was "all). I was looking on my iPad by using by using my phone as a hotspot to download them from the cloud via the cell network as the iPad doesn't have cell signal and there was no wifi at the location I was at - again this says it isn't the network as the phone had uploaded them to the cloud, then downloaded them again from the cloud to the iPad.
Even though the applications told me that they were synchronised the numbers didn't add up. I didn't spot this initially and I found later that when I thought I had posted all images to Facebook that a few had come through later and weren't edited by me or posted to social media. That was frustrating. Thankfully it was just family photos and not professional ones.
Now back to today's experiment: I'll open Lightroom Classic on my PC. I've not opened it since taking those eight images of my home. Remember as far as LR Mobile on iPhone/iPad/web are concerned they are all there and all synchronised.
The little cloud icon, top right has a tick above it suggesting all is in sync and if I click on it then I see it saying it is all synced. Great. However I can not see them in the grid. BUT I can see those images slowly starting to appear in the Lightroom Classic grid as I type this. So clearly they were NOT all synchronised. They were coming down still. It hasn't taken long for just 8 images. It has, however, now completed.
Last week it was telling me all was synchronised but nothing was downloading. After stopping LR Classic and re-starting it a few times eventually it reluctantly confirmed it was still synchronising.
This is just 8 images. Try doing it with 200 DNG files shot on an iPhone - whether on wifi or on a 4G network. It says it is synced but the files aren't all there.
Now try in the other direction. I created a collection and told it to synchronise. It said it was synchronised but I couldn't see those images on the web, on the iPhone, on the iPad.
I don't mind it telling me that sync is incomplete and that I've got another 20 images to upload/download or whatever but to tell me that it is all synchronised and not actually have the files synchronised is pretty poor.
My original plan, as I have a 1TB phone, was to use a SD card reader to ingest a wedding onto LR Mobile on my phone, and as I have 1TB plan for LR Mobile I wanted to then let it upload (now I've got backup as I have a copy on SD card, on phone and in cloud), then get that onto my PC the next morning. As an example of my wedding photography use the last three weddings I've done were just 21.0GB, 25.2GB and 21.7GB. At 30GB and 10Mbps that should be about 7.5 hours to upload so an overnight upload ought to have been just fine as my phone IS plugged in charging overnight.
The reality was that I found upload and download was impossible to do like that. It was so slow as to be unusable. I went to my phone the morning after the wedding and upload was nowhere near done. It looked more like it had only recently started.
I found that the mechanism for synchronising between the various devices wasn't viable. I know my upload link is slow by modern standards (my home netowrk published speed is 10Mbps but I get more like 8.5Mbps) and I didn't mind that being slow if it happened eventually - but I was seeing it telling me all was synchronised whilst I'm at a wedding and when I come back from a wedding with 700 or 800 images and they weren't actually synchronised.
I thought it had been designed for scenarios where one is working away from base specifically to allow for backup of images to the cloud so that if disaster happened (like a stolen phone/laptop/ipad) then all was safely in the cloud. It seems that's really not true.
I've abandoned that idea simply as it was not useable.
I would however like to get it working if it should be working. However I look at it the reporting of whether something is genuinely synchronised or not (and I mean RAW in the cloud not just a preview) does seem to be at best unreliable.
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