What is best way to start over with Creative Cloud and LR Classic

[wayneh92496952]

I have spent hours on the phone chatting this weekend with Adobe about problems syncing. We ended up creating a new Catalogue. After hours of "adjustments" with LR Class my brand new Apple iMac Pro died. Second one in one week!!! I took it back to Apple but prior to getting another iMacPro I was working ONLY on LR Classic trying to Sync (basically what was happening is that my HD on the iMacPro would eat up RAM (32GB gone in less than 10 minutes) and 250GB HD space gone in about the same time. The computer would crash. Restart. LR would come on. Syncing would start and then RAM and HD GB slowly eaten up. Eventually the computer died. Could not reboot by any means with Apple Support. So, now I have my third brand new computer (one iMAC 2017 and two iMac Pro's). I thought I would try to only have LR running other than the basic MacOS (after all updates). But I wanted to create yet another new Catalogue and import my photos (40K of them) into LR Classic. I have about 20K on Creative Cloud going to my devices and a MacBookPro laptop. The construction of the Folders of Photos will be different (although same photos but just a different organization).

My question is should I delete my Creative Cloud 20K photos and upload a new Creative Cloud photo "collection" and download a new set to my other devices etc or what should I do? 

The other issue is that I have my photos on an external HD for Lightroom in a backup of the original LR photos. For some reason thousands of my photos in the original LR Photos folder are gone. Gone!  Folders are there but they are just ghosts. I never deleted those images on Creative Cloud, Lightroom CC on my MacBookPro or on my iPhone or iPad. Why are they gone? They all were "eaten up" when the syncing began with LR Classic. I never deleted them in any way. Where did they go? And how to stop that from happening again?

[Bill Sprague]

Can you break this question into parts.  There are multiple computers, multiple drives and what appears to be references to Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic CC.  I'm not understanding the question(s).

[wayneh92496952]

Sure. thanks.

I had an iMac 2017 and had LR Classic on it with 40L photos.  LR ran unbelievably slow. I thought it was related to 8 GB RAM

I bought a iMac Pro with 32 GB RAM and 1 TB HD.

LR Classic continue to run slow after migrating LR and my iMac 2017 data over to it. It would be three days and only 20K photos had been syncing. Then that new iMac with Apple support deemed that it was the computer that was running extremely slowly and despite trouble shooting they said to return it. I did and received another new iMac Pro

In only did a MacOS software update. It was running well. I then downloaded LR Classic and began to sync to my external LR Photos album. I did not download any other program, data, or Apps. But it was very slow again. I called Adobe on the weekend and they shared my screen for about two hours. They decided it must be that I needed a new Catalogue. It was created. I began opened up LR Classic and the computer kept crashing within 15 minutes. Each time I restarted the computer I witnessed the following; within 10 minutes my internal HD went from 250 GB available to 30 GB and crashed. I restarted. I watched my RAM go from 4 GB being used to 32 GB and crashed. I restarted in a Troubleshooting username and the same thing happened when I opened LR Classic.

Then the computer would not restart. It was dead.

I returned this iMac and have another new one. No external HD's. No migration of data. Just MacOS X. Nothing plugged in. Bare bones machine. I am thinking that I should have a new LR Catalogue and not sync to Creative Cloud but rather reimport all my images into LR and create a new Catalogue.

My question is that I still have photos on Creative Cloud and can view them on LRM on my devices and LR CC on my MacBook Pro.

Should I delete all my photos (20K) on Creative Cloud, import all 40K photos from a backed up external HD, create a new LR catalogue and then slowly sync these newly imported images to the Cloud and down to my devices and LR CC on my MacBookPro

OR, just leave my photos that have already been uploaded to the Cloud and down to my devices and LR CC alone and not touch them

Then, the other issue has to do with my actual Lightroom Photos album on my internal hard drive. During all these lengthy syncing trials on various computers I have noticed that all my Photos are gone! Only empty folders remain. I am not sure what happened to them. I did not delete them on other machines or devices and thus did not delete them from the Cloud. But they have disappeared. Fortunately I have the same 40K images on an external HD.

[Bill Sprague]

I would really like to help.

Paragraphs 1 through 7 are a history of Apple failures.

Paragraph 8 starts with "My question is" and is a statement that you have photos on the "Creative Cloud".   As far as I know, you can't do that.

You can have photos in Lightroom CC or you can have photos in Lightroom Classic that are "synced" to Lightroom CC.

Your last three paragraphs are about what you "should" do. 

The best recommendation I can think of is to suggest you pick Lightroom CC or Lightroom Classic CC and stop trying to run them in a confused parallel system.