Unable to Move Some Photos - Pop Up

Report · Jul 26, 2023

Hey Lightroom Community!

One of my students is getting this "Unable to Move Some Photos" message each time she opens Lightroom (see attached screenshot). She can import new images without issue, but this error has persisted for about a week. If we "Postpone for a Week" and check her sync status, she is getting the "Synced and Backed Up" message so things appear to be working normally.

In all the related Community posts for this issue it seems like other users are seeing more text at the bottom of this pop-up that explains why the images can't be moved. In our case, this is all the information we have access to. If I click "Learn More" it just takes me to the generic Lightroom manual explaining how all this works.

The student in question does have the "Store a copy of all originals" option turned on with the destination set to an external hard drive.

The main issue is, Lightroom is providing no information on which images are unable to be moved. If we knew, we could simply delete and re-import them. I've tried filtering the library for sync status, but every image is marked as "Synced and Backed Up."

Both the computer and Lightroom are fully updated and running the latest version.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Report · Jul 26, 2023

It sounds like a problem with the local storage preference. The location of the local storage may have been changed at some point.

Local storage of originals is not required because everything is managed in the cloud. Check to see if Save a local copy of originals is turned on. If it is, try turning it off and restarting Lightroom.

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-cc/using/preferences.html

Report · Jul 31, 2023

That was my feeling as well. That preference is turned on, but it needs to be as this student frequently travels to areas without reliable fast internet and has a small internal hard drive. Ideally I'd love a way to know which images are failing to move so we can delete them.

I know if we uncheck "save a local copy" and then recheck it later we are going to have to wait for all 1.5TB of her images to redownload from the cloud which I would like to avoid if possible.

Report · May 03, 2025

This error pops up every time I open Lightroom and my only options are "postpone for one week, "try again", or "resume later". It won't let me click anything else and I'm unsure what to do.

"unable to move some of your ohotos ?:0: attempt to compare number with nil"