Where are my edits?

[mercurial.ohearn]

I created an album of about 100 photos with edits in them in Lightroom for Desktop. It's gone. All the albums are gone. I cannot find the edits I made anymore. The last album I worked in opened when I opened the app. I backed out of that one to find the one I was looking for and POOF! that album is gone now as well. I can't find any album I've ever made using this infernal application.

I do not sync to the cloud as I'm on a rural internet connection and syncing GB of data to the cloud prevents me from connecting to the internet at all for DAYS. 

WHERE ARE MY EDITS? I'm going crazy right now.

Edit: To be more specific, I pause syncing indefinitely--again, because syncing murders my internet connection indefinitely.

[Rob_Cullen]

If you intend to pause syncing indefinitely then you must be using Lightroom in the 'LOCAL' mode.

In Local mode Lightroom give you a simple browser style interface showing your local folders on the hard-drive.

If you then edit images in Local mode then the edits are saved in XMP metadata, either as a sidecar XMP for proprietary raw files, or internally in rendered RGB files (JPG, TIF, PSD,,,)

Edits made in Lightroom will only appear IN Lightroom unless you Export images from the Lr app (which then applies the edits to the new file).

Albums are not available in Local mode! Only the Folder browser is available in Local Mode.

Albums are simply lists of images you have imported/added to your Cloud based Catalog, ie. you need Cloud internet access to view and create albums from the images imported to the Adobe Lightroom Cloud.

You also need occassional internet access to verify your Adobe subscription.