Need step by step help with cleaning out my cloud storage and not permanently deleting my pictures.

[angelam73896981]

Here is my issue- I take a lot of pictures and was using lightroom Classic on my old laptop but also downloaded LR CC. I used to synch my pictures to Lightroom Mobile for the ones I wanted to be able to edit on the go. However when I downloaded LR CC I didn't realize at the time that all of my thousands of pictures would start counting to my Cloud storage (stupid on my part) I need to know how to get the pictures out of the cloud and be able to go back to my old work flow and only synch the ones that I really need to keep and edit. I hope this makes sense.  I also have a new laptop and was wondering if I just need to uninstall LR CC and just put LR Classic on it. I know the pictures are stored on my SSD so I won't lose any of them. Thanks! 

[Jim Wilde]

Can you clarify a few things?

Which version of the Photography Plan subscription do you have: the one with Classic, Lightroom, Photoshop and 20GB of cloud storage. Or the Lightroom-only plan with 1TB of cloud storage. It sounds as though you have the Classic version, but confirmation would help.

Simply downloading Lightroom won't affect your cloud storage, but using it to import images most definitely would: if you sync images from Classic to the cloud, only Smart Previews are uploaded which do not count against the cloud storage allocation. But if you import images into any of the Lightroom apps (desktop, mobile, web) then those full original images are uploaded to the cloud automatically, and they do count against your cloud storage allowance.

It sounds as though you are currently only using Lightroom on the new system, not Classic, so I'm guessing you've been importing new images ino it, which would explain why your cloud storage space is shrinking, but clarification would be helpful.