Photos disappearing after migration

[Bongman]

Yesterday I migrated my LR Classic Catalog to Lightroom CC cloud service. It contains more than 43.300 photos.

Migration went OK, Lightroom CC said that all 43.300 photos where migrated with no problems.

But today my cloud "catalog" says that I only have 42.900 photos. Being a huge catalog, I can't go photo by photo to find what is missing. Where that 400 photos go?

How do I suppose to rely on a service that promise to "safetly" store my photos when at the first import it removed more than 4 hundred photos without warning?

This catalog not only contains my "pro" photos, it contains my personal/family memories too. That photos are invaluable to me. Of course I have a backup and my old LR Classic catalog is still "live" in my hard drive, but whats the point to keep paying for service that not provide a reliable storage?

Can you help me?

[JP Hess]

I have never migrated a catalog to Lightroom, and use Lightroom very little. Lightroom Classic is what I use almost exclusivvely. So I might be talking way out of line. But I'm wondering if maybe you had 400 virtual copies that are causing problems. Just a thought, something to consider.

[Bongman]

Hi Jim, thanks for your reply!

When you migrate Classic catalogs, virtual copies are (supposed to be) converted to real copies, as Adobe itself indicates in their own guide. Also I'm pretty sure that there wasn't that quantity of virtual copies in my catalog (I don't use them that much).

So I think there must be a problem or reason somewhere else. Maybe the app detects real duplicates or something? This problem made me think a lot and I just recall that once I misconfigured my camera and stored both RAWs and JPGs and maybe now those photos where merged together or JPGs discarded? (I really hope that).
But the problem for me is there was no warning, just one number yesterday and another today...

[Theresa J]

When you migrate your catalog, your originals are uploaded to the cloud. It does not 'convert' virtual copies to real copies.

The shortage of images could be the raw + jpeg that you suggest, or even virtual copies. Lightroom (cloud) does not support virtual copies right now.

With such a large catalog, I'm with Jim in recommending that you NOT switch to Lightroom. Keep your Classic catalog and selectively sync collections to Lightroom when you need access to them online. If you decide to keep Classic,  IT IS REALLY IMPORTANT THAT YOU DO NOT OPEN CLASSIC UNTIL YOU CLEAN OUT ALL THE IMAGES UPLOADED TO LIGHTROOM.

If your Classic catalog is synced to Lightroom, all 42,000 images will start downloading to your hard drive creating duplicates of everything you have.

[Bongman]

Thanks for your reply Theresa!

I really was a desktop guy, but lately I been working mostly on my iPad Pro (with Apple Pencil, very fast editing and developing). Also with the new iPadOS you can import directly your RAW photos from camera into Lightroom Mobile version, so that's why I decided to migrate. I was on the basic 20GB plan, but I upgraded to the 1TB plan.

The approach of selectively sync collections works fine, but is super tedious to make a collection every time you'll need a photo online and also you won't have the photos in full resolution (there is a workaround sycing a collection from Classic and ther upload the same photos to LR version, but I found that is not an elegant way to work), nor you can't export photos directly from LR mobile to publish or sharing (because of the smart previews), you have to go back to Classic and do it from there.

Also sometimes I found myself in the situation that I wanted to develop a photo that I forgot to sync and is very frustrating, it obligates you to work on desktop every time you need to import or to upload/sync something. That's why I wanted to have all my photos on line.

So I prepared my catalog to do the transition. I stopped syncing it with the cloud, then I optimized it and check every photo was linked to their hard drive copy, then I converted all my folder hierarchy to collections, so in the cloud I could replicate my order method.

And here I am! Long explanation, hehe... And now you make me wonder and doubt. Why do you recommed to stay in Classic instead of LR?

Thanks again!

[Theresa J]

Two reasons:

1. Classic is a more muture application with features that professionals need. Many, many of these features are still missing from Lightroom.

2. Eventually you will fill up your cloud space and have to purchase more data if you use Lightroom exclusively.

...and yes I agee that working with Classic and syncing to Lightroom is not elegant. But it works.

[Bongman]

Thanks again for your reply Theresa!

I tend to disagree (at least a little) with you.

If we were talking about LR version 1, ok, many, many features missing. But today (v3.1 I think) I don't know. Split toning was the most missing feature for me but it's already there right now. As I said before I found myself using more the iPad Pro with my pen to do most of the editing and only getting back to desktop to import/export photos in high resolution.

Yes, mass export is an issue, you can't rename photo filenames when you import, also personalized presets, good geotaging and manual tagging not posible yet. At the begining lens correction was missng too, but today my camera/lenses are there too. My prints are managed by someone else.

So even when I agree with you that some features are missing I tend to prefer to have access to all my photos anywhere that to have some features I rarely use.

Space, mmmm, some years ago to pay 10 bucks for 1 TB was nuts, five years from now, who knows if we would be taking about Petabytes instead of Terabytes... Hehehe... No that optimistic, but still...

Well, all that said, I'm not sure yet to do the migration, I will do export my classic catalog to a new one and migrate it just for testing purposes...

Thanks again for your time.

[JP Hess]

Just be aware that you can only migrate ONE catalog. No other options. Once you have migrated one catalog, that's it. That is the catalog you have to work with between the two versions.

[Jim Wilde]

Jim, that's totally incorrect. You can migrate as many catalogs as you've got, on my test cloud account I'm  currently showing that I've migrated 4 separate test catalogs into it. What you can't do is sync more than one Classic catalog at a time to the cloud.

[JP Hess]

Thank you for setting me straight on that point. I hadn't considered that. Perhaps if I was a more prolific user of Lightroom for the cloud I would have understood that.

[Jim Wilde]

"The approach of selectively sync collections works fine, but is super tedious to make a collection every time you'll need a photo online"

That's a common misconception. You can upload images from Classic without first having to put them into a collection (by simply adding them to the All Synced Photographs" collection in Classic's Catalog Panel). Putting them in a collection first, and syncing that collection, makes it easier to subsequently find them in the cloud apps, but it's not a pre-requisite. I've currently got around 19k images in the cloud, but only around 8k of them are in albums/collections.

"Thanks again for your reply Theresa!

I tend to disagree (at least a little) with you."

I tend to agree with you....I think we're sometimes guilty of overstating the importance of the "lack of features in Cloudy compared with Classic". Sure, there are features missing at this time, but I think it's wrong to assume that those missing features are a barrier to migration. Not everyone uses Classic in the same way....I've been a Lightroom Classic user since LR1, and I can honestly say that there are now very few things preventing me from migrating fully (I currently use Classic as my "base" but have all originals in the cloud and use the "mobile" and "sharing" features extensively). I'd just like to see some improvements to the organising side of things (Smart Albums would be great), but other than that I could fully migrate if I wanted to.

However, getting back to your "missing 400" images, in the Lightroom (cloudy) desktop app (or the Lr Mobile app on your iPad) is there a photo-count showing for the "Deleted" item under "My Photos"?

After migration, did you re-enable sync in the Classic catalog that you migrated (Adobe do warn against doing that)? If you did re-enable sync, in the Classic Catalog Panel, what are the respective photo counts for All Photographs and All Synced Photographs?