Syncing my 20,000 photos from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom Mobile

[Peter35664653u66f]

Hi!

I have a question about syncing my 20,000 photos from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom Mobile. 

Objective:

I would like to view ALL photos from my LrC-catalog (MacBook) on the iPhone and iPad..

Initial situation:

• The photos in my catalog are on an external SSD and in around 500 folders, for example 20250305_Holiday Sicily, etc.
• LrC and Lr installed on MacBook, LrM installed on iPhone and iPad. Synchronization is activated and working.
• It would be elegant if you could create and synchronize smart collections - but unfortunately that is not possible.
• Moving all 20,000 photos to the "All synchronized photos" folder is not an option for me because of the confusion.

I currently see only 1 possible solution:
I could create a collection from each of the 500 folders in the catalog and then synchronize these 500 collections.

Pro:

Folder structure on mobile devices is identical to the folder structure in LrC.

Cons:

• Complex creation of 500 collections.
• Changes in the folders in the catalog would not be automatically synchronized with the collections. I would have to delete the old collection and create a new collection when making certain changes to the folders, e.g. when I add new photos to a folder.

But maybe you know other ways to achieve the goal described above. I am grateful for every tip and every idea.

Best regards from Vienna, Peter.

[Jim Wilde]

I currently see only 1 possible solution:
I could create a collection from each of the 500 folders in the catalog and then synchronize these 500 collections.

Pro:

Folder structure on mobile devices is identical to the folder structure in LrC.

Cons:

• Complex creation of 500 collections.
• Changes in the folders in the catalog would not be automatically synchronized with the collections. I would have to delete the old collection and create a new collection when making certain changes to the folders, e.g. when I add new photos to a folder.

By @Peter35664653u66f

Assuming your folders in LrC are organised with one or more parent folders, you can have LrC automatically generate a collection set/collection hierarchy (which will include all the images in the folders). Simply right-click on a parent folder and choose "Create Collection Set...." from the menu and repeat for any other parent folders. Once the collection set/collections have been created you can then enable sync for each of the collections. Note that only the collections can be synced (into "albums" with the same name in the cloud), but collection sets do not so you would need to manually create the collection set (called "Folders") in the cloud.

In terms of the other "con", if you add new images to a folder in LrC you simply need the workflow discipline to add the same images to the corresponding synced collection. Eventually you may come to realise that there is no need to organise your images using folders in LrC, instead you could switch to using a date-based folder structure going forward and switch the organisational function to the collections.

[Peter35664653u66f]

• Thanks for the tip about creating a collection set - works great. After the 500 collections are automatically created this way, I have to mark each individual collection for syncing. I think there is no way to select multiple collections for syncing at the same time?
• In LrM on the iPhone, the collections are in the "Album" category - as you wrote. If I create a folder in LrM, how can I move the 500 "albums" into this folder at the same time? I can only find the option to move a single album - I would have to do that 500 times...
• Regarding your comment on the folder structure in LrC: I'm working with LrC for about 2 years. Before that I used ACDSee for many years - there was no option to work with collections there (at least I wasn't aware of one).

[Jim Wilde]

In LrC you can select multiple collections and then click the sync icon on one of the selected collections and it will be applied to all of them.

You could use the Lightroom Desktop app to move multiple selected albums into one or more folders in one go.

[Peter35664653u66f]

great - thank you very much!

[Peter35664653u66f]

I found a page on the internet that describes a trick for the interaction of collections, smart collections and synchronization. It's in German - but the idea is cool...

https://kunckeledv.de/2015/12/03/smart-sammlung-mit-lightroom-mobile-synchronisieren/

[Jim Wilde]

Jeffrey Friedl developed a plug-in for LrC which allows smart collections to be (sort of) synced: https://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/smart-collection-sync

I tested it when it was being developed and it seemed to do the trick, and I know others have adopted it as part of their workflow. I think (but not certain) that @johnrellis also has a plugin for this purpose.

[Peter35664653u66f]

Thx 🙂

[johnrellis]

"I think (but not certain) that @johnrellis also has a plugin for this purpose."

Right, the Any Source plugin provides a similar mechanism for continually mirroring the contents of a LR Classic smart collection as a normal collection, which then gets automatically synced with LR Cloud. The two plugins have different feature sets and other functionality, but they generally work the same for syncing.

[Peter35664653u66f]

thx 🙂

[Peter35664653u66f]

Thanks to your tips, I've now set up a few collections. John Rellis' plug-in seems to cover exactly what I was looking for. I'll definitely test Any Source.

Two more general questions:

1) Are the smart previews of photos that are included in multiple synchronized collections also physically uploaded to the cloud multiple times?

2) I'm still having trouble understanding the logic behind deleting synced photos. Apparently, when I disable or delete synced collections, the corresponding photos are not automatically deleted from the cloud. If I understand correctly, I need to remove these photos from the "All synced photos" folder. Is that correct?

[Jim Wilde · Accepted solution]

1) No. Collections (and albums) are virtual containers only. They do not contain physical files, only catalog references to the actual individual files. Much like playlists. The advantage of this approach is that we can "add" the same image to multiple collections/albums without duplicating the image, but because they are virtual containers they only exist within the catalog.

So when you sync an image to the cloud, only one smart preview is uploaded no matter how many synced collections you may have added it to.

2) Because the collections are virtual, and the images they contain may be in other collections, it is a fact that deleting or unsyncing a synced collection (or album) does NOT delete or unsync the images that the collection/album contains. If you want to delete a synced image from the cloud you must either remove it from the "All Synced Photographs" special collection (which will automatically remove the image from any synced collection that it was in - because a synced collection cannot contain unsynced images), and will also automatically delete it from the cloud,  or you must delete it from any cloud app (which will also remove it from the ASP in LrC as well as any synced collections/albums that it may have been in). One exception to that rule....if you remove an image from a synced collection you will get an option to also automatically remove it from the ASP but ONLY if the image is not in any other synced collection.

[Peter35664653u66f]

Thank you very much for your competent and detailed support.

[Peter35664653u66f]

Thanks to Jim's explanations, I think I now understand how LrC and Lr work together, and I've already tried a few things. What I still don't fully understand is the workflow for importing NEF files into Lr.

1. Import NEF files into LR on the iPad into the album "Nikon"
2. The NEF files are uploaded from LR to the cloud
3. In LrC, I can then find these photos

   a) in the catalog/hard drive

   b) in the "All Synced Photographs" collection and

   c) in the synced collection "From Lightroom/Nikon"

However, the NEF file is still stored in the Adobe Cloud.
Can I delete this NEF file in LR?

If I had started the workflow from LrC, there would only be a smart preview of the NEF file in the Adobe Cloud.

[Jim Wilde · Accepted solution]

Yes, you can then delete the NEF originals from the cloud....either by doing it from within any of the Lightroom apps or by removing it from the All Synced Photographs collection in LrC (though best to do it from LrC as then you will have ensured that the sync download into LrC has indeed happened). Many users have adopted that workflow, though many will then resync the image from LrC back to the cloud, but which uploads a smart preview instead of the original but which does not count against the users cloud storage allowance.

[Peter35664653u66f]

Thank you 🙂

[Peter35664653u66f]

I've now adjusted my workflow according to the tips and am getting along well with it.

Apparently, there are still some "skeletons" on Adobe Creative Cloud that I created during my initial attempts.

Is there a way to control the photos stored in the cloud?

Since I only synced collections, my entire cloud storage (20 GB) should be available. However, about 3 GB are used up—presumably by uploaded raw files from my test phase.

Is there any way I can identify these "skeletons" so I can delete them from the cloud?

[Jim Wilde · Accepted solution]

Not sure what you mean by "skeletons", but if you have some of your 20GB allowance already used up, the logical assumption is that you have some originals stored there (such as photos imported from LrMobile on a mobile device, or imported directly into the Lightroom Desktop or Web apps). Any of those images will already be in the LrC catalog (assuming sync was fully up to date between LrC and the cloud), but if you want to identify and remove those originals from the cloud (and replace with Smart Previews) the easiest was would be to use the Lightroom Desktop app:

1. Open LrD, click on All Photos to populate the grid with all the cloud images.

2. Create a (temporary) new Album, give it a unique name.

3. Click on the Filter icon (at the end of the top centre search bar), and select Sync Status from the filter bar.

4. That will show various entities, such as Synced from Lightroom Classic, but the one you are interested in will be "Synced and Backed Up", which is all the images stored in original form. 

5. Click on that "Synced and Backed Up" entry and that will populate the grid only with those images.

6. Cmd+A to select them all, then add them to the new temporary album.

7. Wait until the equivalent collection appears in LrC.

8. When the collection has appeared, unsync it by clicking on the sync icon on front of the collection name. That will have no affect on the synced images in that collection, they will remain synced.

9. Select that collection, then Cmd+A to select all the contained images. Then, keeping them all selected, click on the All Synced Photographs special collection, then right-click on any one of the selected images and "Remove from All SYnced Photographs". This will remove all those images from the ASP and will also cause them all to be deleted from the cloud.

10. Monitor the LrD app until all those originals have been deleted from the cloud. When that's done, and assuming that you want them all back in the cloud as Smart Previews, go back to LrC and re-enable sync for that collection, which will upload them all as smart previews. Any that you don't want to resysnc, remove them from the collection before enabling it to sync.

[Peter35664653u66f]

skeletons: My translation was incorrect. I meant: orphaned files—of course, you interpreted that correctly. 🙂

I followed the process you described—perfect!

Thank you for your patience!