Migrate Classic to Cloud: Not enough storage; but there is enough!

[Moe52]

New Lightroom user (LR 2.2.1 on Mac OS Mojave 10.14.4). I imported my Aperture Library to Lightroom Classic CC. It works, but will not import from my phone so I figured, migrate to CC and abandon Classic.

The problem: When I try to migrate, I get an error, "Something went wrong: Not enough disk space ... Please clear at least 22.40 GB on <name of volume> ..." But that volume has 400 GB of space.

(Theory: it's an 800 GB SSD with 412 GB used by the LR Classic's Lightroom folder and 391 GB free. Is the error message lying and maybe I actually need 412 GB free?)

Looked in FAQs, the how to migrate docs, etc. and no idea what to do next.

Also, I did the pre-migrate steps of Optimize Catalog and resolved metadata conflicts.

Thanks in advance...

[john beardsworth]

Moe52  wrote

New Lightroom user (LR 2.2.1 on Mac OS Mojave 10.14.4). I imported my Aperture Library to Lightroom Classic CC. It works, but will not import from my phone so I figured, migrate to CC and abandon Classic.

If importing from your phone is the reason for migrating to "LRCC", why not fix that problem? It seems a particularly poor reason for migrating.

The easiest way to import from a phone to Lightroom Classic is to get Lightroom Mobile on your phone, and sync your Lightroom Classic catalogue. Once that's done, new phone photos are imported automatically on your phone, and existing ones can be imported. They all just appear in your catalogue with no further effort.

[Jim Wilde · Accepted solution]

I interpret that message slightly differently.....my understanding is that you need to increase the amount of free space by 22.4GB, not that it only needs 22.4GB for the migration.

In fact, you need at least the same amount of disk space as your Lightroom Classic images are occupying. The LRCC migration copies the existing Classic images into its own space, from which the migrated images will then be uploaded to the cloud. If you are short of disk space on your system drive, you could always use an external drive....simply change the location of LRCC originals to the external drive via the LRCC Preferences>Local Storage tab, before you attempt the migration again.

But going back to your original issue, what's the problem with importing from your phone? If you install LRCC on the phone (and set it up correctly), then enable LR Classic to sync, any images that you take on the phone can be automatically added to the LRCC app on the phone, from where they will automatically upload to the Adobe cloud, and from there they will automatically download into the LR Classic catalog.

[JohanElzenga]

Jim is correct. What that messages says is that it needs 22.4GB more disk space than what is available. The reason is that Lightroom will copy all your images first before migrating them, so it needs 412 GB while it only has 391GB.