Unable to Delete Local Storage

[Guest]

When I go into local storage settings in the Lightroom app, I see there is 1.27 GB of locally stored copies. Is there anything I can do to free up this space? Note that I stopped paying for a subscription about a month ago.

[JP Hess]

If you stopped paying for your subscription then this local backup of copies would seem to be the only source of those images you have remaining. What you can do to free up that space would be to delete those images. Doing so would get rid of the only copy of the image that you have unless you have backed those images up to another source such as an external hard drive or to some other cloud source. Or, do you have them stored on your iPhone? Do you want the images?

[Guest]

I downloaded the Adobe Creative Cloud app to see if there were any photos left in the cloud. There were only 48. I permanently deleted them all, but Lightroom Mobile local storage is still showing 1.27 GB local storage used. Will I have to delete the app for that to reset?

[JP Hess]

I don't use Lightroom Mobile. But I suspect that those images are on your phone and will have to be deleted separately.

[Guest]

Reinstalling the app resolved the issue. Locally stored copies storage is now at zero. I hesitated because I didn't want to lose synced presets, but they remained.

[JohanElzenga]

Wow. You have been very lucky. Apparently your online storage is still active, despite that you stopped your subscription. If you uninstall/reinstall the app without having a subscription, then you will lose everything: custom presets, custom profiles, and all your images.

When you tap on the three dots behind an album name, you can select or deselect 'Store Locally'. This only works with a subscription. The free version always stores everything locally.

[selondon]

Sometimes it seems that's the only thing that works if you have already tried Settings/Local Storage/Clear Cache and that hasn't reduced the size.

[JohanElzenga]

Most likely the problem was simple. The OP did not uncheck the 'Store Locally' option of one or more albums. Clearing the cache won't free up space in that case, because the cache is something different.

[Guest]

That makes sense. Although, I did delete all photos and albums from my device. Maybe there's a bug where those copies remain even after deletion of the album? Even if I had deleted the album after my subscription had expired, I would think those copies would still be deleted. 🤷🏼‍:male_sign:

[JohanElzenga]

After your subscription expires, the online storage remains for a certain time. That is for example for cases where the person who had a Lightroom subscription passes away, and the family wants to retrieve the photos after a while. The subscription may have expired in the meantime. This apparently saved your behind. Like I said: the free version of Lightroom stores everything locally, so if you uninstall the app and then reinstall it, you will have lost everything you ever did and stored; presets, profiles, images, the lot. Keep this in mind, because this will happen to you too if you remove local storage and already let your subscription expire. It's just a matter of time...