Syncing photos from Cloud to Lightroom Classic

[Karina Biskop]

Hi there! Can someone please help me figure out what I can do with all the copies of the original files that Lightroom downloads to my hard drive when I hit sync in Lightroom Classic? I’ve been happily using the cloud version of Lightroom, but now I want to try Imagen (AI software) and it only works with Lightroom catalogs.  So I created a catalog in Lightroom Classic and decided to transfer (sync) all the edited photos there, but it keeps downloading original files and led me to have more than 150 GB of data on my hard drive, which doesn’t make any sense cause I have these files backed up on a different external drive. Is there a way to duplicate edited photos from Lightroom to Lightroom Classic without storing copies of the original files that it keeps creating?

[JohanElzenga]

This is how it is designed. Lightroom Classic works with local images, and so it will download all images from the cloud if you sync its catalog. In Preferences - Lightroom Sync you can define the location of the downloaded orginals however, so you could use that external drive to save space on your internal drive.

[Karina Biskop]

Thank you Johan!

If I delete the local images that Lightroom Classic downloaded to my computer, the ones that are stored in the Cloud will still remain there, correct?

[JohanElzenga]

Thank you Johan!

If I delete the local images that Lightroom Classic downloaded to my computer, the ones that are stored in the Cloud will still remain there, correct?

By @Karina Biskop

No! Don't do that. If you delete the local images that Lightroom Classic downloaded, then Lightroom Classic won't be able to do anything with the images, so the idea of using Lightroom Classic for Imagen AI becomes moot. And if you remove the images from the Lightroom Classic catalog while the catalog is still synced, then they will be deleted from the cloud too.