Both Lightroom CC and Classic Storage?

[Colin_Begg]

I have almost 1TB in the Cloud and am syncing with Lightroom Classic on my Laptop, which has 3TB of hard drive attached via the Local Area Network.  It seems that my new images and videos , which come in through Lightroom CC on my iPad Pro, are being added to the Cloud as its growing, not getting smaller as I expected it to.  Surely they should be getting synced with Lightroom Classic.  How can I persuade Lightroom to use Classic rather than adding to my almost full Cloud storage?

Regards,

Colin Begg

[Jim Wilde]

If you want to use LR Classic and LRCC in a hybrid workflow, you'll need to understand a couple of underlying sync facts:

1. Any images which are added in any of the LRCC apps (phone, tablet, web or desktop) will be uploaded (full original) to the cloud, and will count against your 1TB cloud space. They then will be available to use on any other of your LRCC apps. Also, if you have a Classic catalog which is sync enabled, all of those new images will download automatically (full originals) into a hard drive, the location of which can either be the default or can be user-specified (e.g. to have them download into an existing date-based folder system).

2. Any images which are in or added to Classic via Import can also be synced, but that is not automatic, the user has to control that manually. When images are sync-enabled in Classic, only Smart Previews will be uploaded (so you won't have full-size files available in the cloud should you want to export or share from within any of the LRCC apps). However, those Smart Previews do not count against your 1TB cloud space.

So, in your specific situation, and reading between the lines, if your Classic catalog IS sync enabled, you should already be seeing the files that originated on your iPad. They'll all appear in the All Synced Photographs special collection, but they'll also physically exist in your file system. If you've changed the download location, look for them in the specified location, but if you haven't changed that location, look for an entry in your Folders Panel which will have the name of your iPad, expand that and you should see an "Imported Photos" folder.

If, after syncing from your iPad to the cloud and then down into Classic, you then want to remove them from the cloud to free up space, you can either delete them from any of the LRCC apps (which removes them from the cloud completely, but does NOT remove them from Classic) or you can use Classic to remove them from the All Synced Photographs collection, which again deleted them from teh cloud and all LRCC apps, but retains them in Classic.

Note that LRCC does not have a "selective sync" capability....images are either in the cloud and thus available in all synced LRCC apps, or they're not in the cloud and so no longer available in any synced LRCC app.

Note also that videos are treated differently....they do not sync from Classic, they do sync if added via LRCC. However, in the latter case, once they are safely downloaded into Classic, the sync connection is automatically turned of for those videos in Classic, i.e. changes to those videos will not sync between LRCC and Classic.

[Colin_Begg]

So compared to the original Lightroom, where everything synced to what is now Classic and your hard drive, all my gigabytes of images and movies will now fill cloud space.  Originally, I had 2Gb of Cloud space and never filled it.  Now I've almost filled 1TB and I have to manually manage the Cloud storage.  That stinks, Adobe!  So if I accidentally delete stuff from the Cloud (do I have to use the Web app?), its gone forever if it wasn't already on my hard drive!?

Not a happy Lightroom Classic user.  I wish they had a switch to make it work the old way which suited me down to the ground!

Regards,

Colin Begg

[Jim Wilde]

If by "the original Lightroom" you mean Lightroom CC2015, then actually nothing has changed regarding the way it works (I was using 200+GB of cloud space before LR Classic was released). What has changed is that Adobe have finally put a price on the use of that space, so whereas prior to LR Classic I was using that space "for free", now I know how much I'm going to have to pay for it (but I always expected that at some point that "free use" would end).

Interestingly though, Adobe are still allowing you to upload Smart Previews from Classic at no cost, so you could consider an alternative approach, i.e. keep mainly SPs in the cloud, just having originals up there where it's important for, e.g. sharing with a client.

[Colin_Begg]

Thanks for the info - again something I didn't know!  How do I accomplish this putting SPs into the Cloud, once I've got the full images and videos into Lightroom Classic?

[Jim Wilde · Accepted solution]

Once you've got them all in Classic, you'd have to remove them from the cloud, then re-sync them again....but this time doing it from within Classic because Classic is the only part of the system that uploads Smart Previews, all the other parts always upload originals.

[Colin_Begg]

Thanks. When the sync completes, I’ll follow that suggestion.

Regards

Colin Begg

[palmmodify_s]

Palmmodify’s