Lightroom Classic CC sync problem

[modernyeti]

When I enable sync, Classic CC puts tons of mobile photos on my local drive-- mainly mobile photos from my iphone and ipads, even when I specify the attached usb drive as the destination. I want these photos on the external drive, not wasting space on my laptop. How do I fix this?

[Image with personal information removed... Mod]

[john beardsworth]

On the line "Specify location...", is big_red the USB drive? If so, what's probably happening now is that it is completing the downloads it has already scheduled. Once they're done, it may start using the external drive.

Once images are downloaded, you can move them where you want.

[modernyeti]

Yes, big_red is the external drive, but what I'd like to have happen is for it to stop using my local drive entirely for syncing. So you're saying that if I let it complete I can move the photos wherever I want, but how? it's creating a huge library file that I can't do anything with along with the actual files.

[modernyeti]

And on top of that, it's also syncing a 20GB library from the Photos app, and I don't see a way to stop that from happening either. Help!

[john beardsworth]

modernyeti  wrote

Yes, big_red is the external drive, but what I'd like to have happen is for it to stop using my local drive entirely for syncing. So you're saying that if I let it complete I can move the photos wherever I want, but how? it's creating a huge library file that I can't do anything with along with the actual files.

I don't know for certain but I've enough experience in this area (deliberately trying to break things!) to be 99% sure.

Your screenshot shows only 6 pending files, so are you sure that it hasn't already nearly completed? When this existing sync is done, I think it will use the external drive for new files. But you will be left with the downloaded photos on your laptop, so in LR you just use drag and drop images or folders to wherever you want them, ie on the external drive.

[modernyeti]

I think you're probably right, I'll give that a shot, letting the local sync finish then moving it off the drive, thanks.

[modernyeti]

Well, it kinda worked, mostly didn't. I got some things to sync to the correct location, but then ran into a huge problem with iphone photos that had previously synced into LR Mobile.  Turns out iOS renames anything saved to the camera roll so as to be useless to Lightroom, just a long string of characters, so what happens now is when I enable syncing in Classic, I end up with 5,000+ duplicates with different filenames and often incorrect dates (basically every photo I've ever taken on or saved to the camera roll on an iphone).

Not seeing any good way around it other than wiping my entire iphone camera roll and starting over, with no real way of knowing if I'm losing something unique or otherwise unsaved.