Any way to cancel a collection sync in Lightroom Classic CC?

[Rick Baumhauer]

I'm in the process of going through my personal photos from the last 15 years, keeping only those shots that appeal on a technical or emotional level in my main catalog and shuffling the rest off to an archive drive/catalog. To make this process go faster, I'm going year-by-year and uploading to Creative Cloud so that I can do my picking on my iPad Pro.

I started a new year (2013 - home stretch!) today, created a collection with everything and started it syncing, then realized that I had a lot of RAW+JPEG pairs and don't really need both. I paused syncing, turned off syncing for the 2013 collection, then deleted the collection. When I turned syncing back on to sync the new, smaller collection with the JPEGs omitted, Lightroom just kept syncing the old collection. An hour later, it's still happily plugging along, uploading thousands of shots I don't want synced, but can't find a way to stop.

This seems pretty basic - if I tell it I don't want to sync a collection by turning off syncing, Lightroom shouldn't respond,"OK, I'll stop syncing that collection just as soon as I finish syncing it". While my download speed from my ISP is relatively fast (close to 100Mb/s), my upload is only 8.5Mb/s, so I'm looking at a few hours of watching Lightroom upload photos I don't want synced before I can start uploading the photos I do want synced. I could probably have gone into the collection and sorted out the JPEGs I didn't want synced there, but at the time, it seemed better to just stop the process before it got too far. Little did I know that, once a sync is initiated, there's apparently nothing that can stop it before it completes.

I swear, every time I start to think,"I'm sure putting all of my eggs in the Adobe basket for $10/mo instead of paying for multiple services and applications will be fine", something like this happens and makes me wonder if that's such a good idea.

[99jon · Accepted solution]

Try this:

1. Pause sync in Lr Classic and quit the application
2. Log-in to your LR Web App (link below)
3. Go to All Photos and select all (check-mark top right – on thumbnails) and choose delete on the blue menu at the top
4. Delete the 2013 Album
5. Quit the web browser and re-launch Lr Classic
6. Tidy up the 2013 collection e.g. delete jpegs
7. Mark the 2013 collection again for sync and activate sync again – deactivate pause

https://lightroom.adobe.com/

[Rick Baumhauer]

I appreciate the help, but this is a perfect illustration of the problem:

1) The 2013 album doesn't exist on the web, so it knows that the collection no longer exists, but it's still going to upload everything from the no-longer-existing collection anyways

2) Going through "All Photos" when you have any substantial amount of photos synced is painfully slow, especially if the photos you're after aren't conveniently located at the chronological beginning or end of all synced photos

3) Deleting everything from 2013 deletes synced photos from other collections (I hope these will re-sync once I turn syncing back on), but sorting through them manually is ridiculous

So, basically LR Classic CC creates a file list and sends it to the cloud. The cloud then apparently asks for all of those files, and nothing you can do will stop that process from chugging along until it completes, unless you want to go through this massive kludge?

Lightroom Classic CC should be able to gracefully stop a cancelled sync without jumping through all of these hoops, and should be able to clean up after itself instead of forcing the user to go to the web to do the job manually. This service has existed for how long? And we're paying Adobe a monthly tithe for all of this "convenience"?

Looking on the bright side, LR Classic CC is just about done getting itself back in agreement with the cloud, so at least the process worked. On the other hand, while scanning through "All Photos", I came across hundreds of other orphans from collections that I told LR CC to stop syncing, but never got removed from the cloud. Awesome!

I really wish somebody at Adobe cared whether users stuck around because they flat-out LOVE the software and services, or just because it's too painful (in $ or time) to turn everything off and start over with companies that care.

[Austin.B.Walker]

Sorry to revive an old thread but the fact that I am still having this problem in 2020 and not being able to find a solution is just outrageous. Adobe, why is there no clear way to CANCEL syncing a collection to Lightroom CC? I've deleted the entire collection, deleted the album on the LR Web App, tried logging out of my LR account and back in again. Why is there still no way to completly cancel a sync so I dont have to wait for DAYS (I accidentally started syncing 30,000 images, so literal DAYS) for the sync to finish before I can begin syncing the correct files?