P: Lightroom Ecosystem: Selective Sync

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I'm not a professional and have only used Lightroom for less than a year. I do love the redesign and I want to use it but I don't like the auto-sync. How hard would it be to implement an option that prevents auto sync and instead enables manual sync? 

My idea is to add a manual sync option in the settings and when you want a photo to be uploaded to the cloud you should be able to click on the cloud button and hit "Sync" or "Upload". Taking away people's ability to choose doesn't just scare away the pros but also the beginners. 
Also, some advanced features from the original Lightroom need to be added. One of them is the export function. The new export function is terrible. I only see "Small, Full Size, and Custom". The original Lightroom has a lot more export functions.

[Conrad C]

What that post means is that with cloud Lightroom (not Classic), there is an option to cache the cloud originals locally (in a hidden folder). It is not an option to edit originals that have never been uploaded to the cloud, so it was never intended to do what you are trying to do.

that makes no sense, my photos are already offline (sd card), I want to use them directly without uploading them unless I want to (which I don't at all)

By @DoNotSellOrDisplayMyInfo

It sounds like you want to edit directly on the SD card without even copying them to the computer? That is impossible with cloud-based Lightroom, which requires importing before editing. With Lightroom Classic, it is possible to leave files where they are if you select the Add option in the Import dialog box. Add means “catalog the image in its current folder without moving or copying it.”

However, there is a special rule for some removable media such as SD cards. Lightroom Classic is programmed to forbid cataloging an image on that kind of media. That means the Move and Add options are not available for camera card formats. There are multiple reasons for this: One is that in case it’s a camera card, it could get reformatted soon and then the images would not be there the next time Lightroom Classic looks for them. The other reason is that some cameras are picky about the file system on a card that camera set up, so allowing other programs to work off the SD card potentially risks the data on the card.

Now, you could say Adobe is being too cautious here. But that is the philosophy of the Lightroom team, to err on the safe side with data. You can certainly ask for it to be changed by submitting a feature request in the Ideas section of this community, and if it gets enough upvotes there it might happen.

So what can you do in the meantime? Instead of Lightroom or Lightroom Classic, you can use Photoshop and Adobe Bridge to browse the SD card and edit. If it’s a raw file, either application can open it in Adobe Camera Raw. I don’t know exactly why they treat SD cards differently than the Lightroom team, but my guess is that it’s because those applications are not cataloging so they never have to count on those images being there next time, they just edit and move on.

[Benjamin Warde]

This page explains how to upgrade your storage.  (And I agree - it should be easier.  I am personally working to improve this, but in the meantime, the link above is your best bet.)

-Ben

[Nelson291850810b8c]

I like reviewing all my pictures in Lightroom to have the opportunity to do some quick adjustments (Test a framing, check if the highlights are recoverables...). However a single photo shoot can exceed my cloud storage quota, and I cannot afford to have extra Tb plan.

What would be ideal for my workflow would be to be able to have the option to control which files are to be synced in the cloud (for backup, use on my phone...). Being able to choose if the pictures of an album is synced to the cloud or locally only would be an amazing feature for me. By default being locally only when importing new pictures would be really handy too.

Thanks for your help!

[dakksolo]

Hello everyone, I'm new to lightroom (I've always used Camera Raw and Bridge) I've desktop/mobile/web lightroom. My big question is: Can I choose what to sync? example: I take 100 photos with Iphone (NOT lightroom mobile photo) every time I go into lightroom mobile App to edit a photo, it syncs all 100 photos that I am not interested in, and I get them in lightroom web/desktop. Similarly, I don't want to import a 30Mb photo to lightroom desktop and find it in lightroom mobile on the iphone. How does one choose what to sync. (maybe it's me not understanding how to take advantage of this automatic thing). Thanks for the helpfulness. 🤝😊

[dj_paige]

You are in the wrong forum. This is the Lightroom Classic forum but your question is not about Lightroom Classic. Please post in the Lightroom (ecosystem) forum.

[dakksolo]

I'm sorry, thank you!

[dakksolo]

Hello everyone, I'm new to lightroom (I've always used Camera Raw and Bridge) I've Lightroom classic desktop/Lightroom mobile/web Lightroom. My big question is: Can I choose what to sync? example: I take 100 photos with Iphone (NOT lightroom mobile photo) every time I go into lightroom mobile App to edit a single photo, it syncs all 100 photos that I am not interested in, and I get them in lightroom web/desktop.  How does one choose what to sync. (maybe it's me not understanding how to take advantage of this automatic thing). Thanks for the helpfulness. 🤝😊

[Rob_Cullen]

In the Lightroom Settings/Import you should see option switches to Auto Import from Camera Roll.

TBMK if you turn these switches 'off' then photos taken with the IOS iPhone camera will only be added to Lr & synced to the Cloud by a 'manual' process. 

Photos taken with the Lightroom Camera will always be synced to the Cloud.

[dr_shutter]

I'd love this to be possible too. After 4 years of the OP, it still is not.

[Alexander319420509175]

Lightroom should allow users to decide which photos/albums are synced to the cloud and which are just stored locally. I have plenty of local storage, dwindling cloud storage, and plenty of photos that I don't need on the cloud. Up until now, my best solution (beyond deleting photos) has been to export entire photo albums (original + settings) to external hard drives for archiving. That way, I figure, I can always just import them back in if I ever need to edit those photos again. In retrospect, this seems absurd since I should be able to keep my photos and edits accessible within my photo editing app's library. If I have the local storage space for Lr desktop (or even Lr iPad) to use, I shouldn't need to export photos outside of the app just to keep Lr's cloud sync functional. I should be able to exclude them from cloud sync, and still be able to use Lr to manage, view, and edit them.

I do not want to contact Adobe support to pay for more than 1 TB. I don't want to migrate to LrC just for local photo libraries. So, without this small feature, I've started looking at competing photo editors, but I would prefer to stay with Lightroom.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Selective Sync (by keeping select items local) was released in the Local Storage Feature today on Lightroom Desktop. 

[erudobe]

"Selective Sync (by keeping select items local) was released in the Local Storage Feature today on Lightroom Desktop."

How do I select which items to just keep locally? I have a lot of old photos that I don't want to get rid of and have made edits of, but that I don't need to be synced in the cloud.

Doing some reading makes it seem like this is only for new photos going forward:

https://lightroomkillertips.com/what-does-the-new-local-editing-feature-in-lightroom-cloud-actually-...
https://www.lifeafterphotoshop.com/lightroom-adds-local-storage-but-is-this-quite-the-game-changer-i... 

It'd be great if I could select an album or folder and untick "sync to the cloud" and have it just be saved locally (which also has a backup).

[erudobe]

After doing some further investigation, it seems like the following flow would work (if somewhat fiddly):

1. manually recreate album/folder structure in LRCC on my external drive
2. export original+settings album by album into those folders
3. view them by manually navigating the filesystem in local mode

This is... kind of a crappy experience. It beats paying $120 a year for photos going back as far as 2010 that I don't need to reference or share very often and those photos are going to be VERY static. I'm currently at 1.1TB of usage (after upgrading my plan last fall) and could easily pull off a couple hundred GB that I hardly ever look at.

I assume that we're just being encouraged to upgrade our storage plans? Jumping from the 1TB plan to 3TB was a bit rough, and I wasn't even pro-rated for the three weeks or so left in the month on my 1TB plan. 😕

[erudobe]

I was easily able to clear out over 200GB of older photos that were in very loose older albums or ones I won't need to look at again in any reasonable time sensitive scenario away from my laptop.  There were a couple side benefits of this:

1) I was able to recover dozens of photos that had corrupted RAW files in the cloud, but had perfectly fine copies locally. Odd.

2) I was able to categorize hundreds of photos that slipped through the cracks of being in albums earlier (this is on me obviously). I basically just import RAW files directly from Photos.app (taken with Halide) into LRCC into a specific album now. In the past I would import photos and then sort of move them around into albums and some smaller "in between" bits got lost along with a few surprigising chunks that were very visible once I had removed 10k+ photos and all photos was cleaner.

On my external HDD I have a folder "Lightroom CC Local" sitting next to the managed "Lightroom CC" one.  Browsing them is perfectly fine they're all in namespaced by date folders. 

From here it's more problematic as I was more organized, so a trip abroad from 7-8 years ago might be split into a dozen albums. I don't need these to be accessible by cloud devices ever, but it will be more annoying to pull them out into local folders manually.  After a certain point in this process question if it's worth $10/mo of my time, but if I'm using this for another decade+ that's a thousand dollars or so that could be spent on something with value and this initial run is going to be the most annoying.

It would be AMAZING to just have a "cloud" tab of managed albums as is, a "local" tab of managed albums vs just browsing to a folder, and then a "cloud+local" tab that mixes both.  I won't hold my beath as that'd probably be too user friendly.

Downgrading my plan worked fine from the web interface, though the 1TB Lightroom CC plan wasn't recommended and I had to manually search for it.  Downgrading (as opposed to upgrading ~8 days into a month like I did) will pro-rate time on the plan you're currently on, which seems backwards if they can't make it work both ways.  Penalizing moving to a higher plan feels backwards and unnecessarily hostile.

[Benjamin Warde]

@erudobe, try out the "Archive" feature which is available in the latest version of Lightroom, 7.3, which was released yesterday.  It makes it much easier remove photos from the cloud and archive them onto your local hard drive.  It will automatically recreate your Lightroom Album structure as a folder structure on your local drive if desired.

-Ben

[erudobe]

Thanks for that heads up, used it on two folders that contained 26 albums (and one nested subfolder) and the interface seems to have all that I'd want in terms of options and information on what will be exported. Shame that wasn't out a week ago heh, though I still would have had some organizing to do in terms of having consistent namespacing for a lot of the older stuff.

Any potential for just having a proper local catalog and a cloud catalog? Exporting into folders works, but it is a bit jarring to switch between local and cloud. It would be nice if it'd just remember to go to my "Lightroom CC Local" base folder, though adding it as a favorite helps.