LR insists on filling a local Mobile Downloads.lrdata

[stet]

This is driving me nuts - have I missed something somewhere?

1. I have a small boot drive (Mac), and a large external drive with a biggish LR catalogue on it.

2. I'd hoped to migrate it to CC, but the migration insists on an insane amount of space *on the boot drive* so that's out.

3. I'm now using a mix of CC and Classic: Classic to handle the old catalogue, CC for newer files.

4. I'd like to enable sync, so I can get certain collections to sync between the two.

Two problems here:

A. If you turn on sync, Classic downloads *everything* from CC (missing the point of cloud storage, to my mind). This sucks, but isn't a bug, just a misfeature.

B. Regardless of what I set for the "Specify Location of Lightroom CC ecosystem's images" setting, it's a Mobile Downloads.lrdata on my boot drive that fills up (with originals). Delete it, LR will recreate it (until it consumes all free space on my Mac and it crashes). This seems like a bug. No?

If I can't fix B, then I can't use LR CC and Classic sync at all. Surely that's not right. Any pointers gratefully received!

[Tony_See]

I read this post as if you are using 2 desktop versions of Lightroom on one desktop OS?

Can you clarify this?

[stet]

Yes, that's right - On my Mac I have Lightroom Classic (to manage my 2007-2017 catalogue) and Lightroom CC (managing late 2017-onwards).

The situation is with the behaviour of Lightroom Classic, which is insisting on trying to download all the originals from CC to my boot drive instead of the location specified in preferences.

[GoldingD]

What folder does it download to in boot drive? Be specific.

[Just Shoot Me]

stet  wrote

Yes, that's right - On my Mac I have Lightroom Classic (to manage my 2007-2017 catalogue) and Lightroom CC (managing late 2017-onwards).

The situation is with the behaviour of Lightroom Classic, which is insisting on trying to download all the originals from CC to my boot drive instead of the location specified in preferences.

Is the External drive ALWAYS Connected? If not then LR will revert to the default location when it doesn't see the external connected.

[JohanElzenga]

stet  wrote

This is driving me nuts - have I missed something somewhere?

1. I have a small boot drive (Mac), and a large external drive with a biggish LR catalogue on it.

2. I'd hoped to migrate it to CC, but the migration insists on an insane amount of space *on the boot drive* so that's out.

AFAIK, that is not true. Lightroom copies the originals to its own location, probably to make sure that the user does not delete them before the sync is finished. So what you need to do is change the destination of the originals in Lightroom CC to the external drive before you try to migrate the catalog, even if you chose not to store a copy of the originals locally.

[JohanElzenga]

stet  wrote

B. Regardless of what I set for the "Specify Location of Lightroom CC ecosystem's images" setting, it's a Mobile Downloads.lrdata on my boot drive that fills up (with originals). Delete it, LR will recreate it (until it consumes all free space on my Mac and it crashes). This seems like a bug. No?

It certainly does not do that for me. I have set the location to a normal folder on my external disk and that works fine. Make sure that the disk is available and the folder is writeable before you start Lightroom Classic. If it can't find the folder or can't write to it on start, it may recreate the default Downloads.lrdata in the default place (although I remember seeing an error dialog in that case).

If that does not work you may try to reset the preferences: https://www.lightroomqueen.com/how-do-i-reset-lightrooms-preferences/

[GoldingD]

/EDIT/ Never mind this response, the next response is probably what you need to consider:

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Not a user of LR CC (that to me should have been called LR CC Mobil)

Now I see that at least one member posted a screenshot of LL CC Local storage dialog.

But what about your LR CC Classic CACHE setting? Not a clue yet if this affects where the sync will land:

And, maybe more likely, the file location for sync in Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop:

To get to the latter, on your Adobe Creatvie Cloud Desktop App, click on the three dots upper right, Select Preferences, select Creative Cloud.

[JohanElzenga]

No, neither have anything to do with this.

[GoldingD]

Ah, not having the Mobil version, I have to hunt via google, came across what you probably need. Appear when you have both LR flavors installed, the Classic has an additional tab in preferences, this one for SYNC. You need to look at that tab.

In this link:

How to sync Lightroom Classic CC desktop with Lightroom CC

[stet]

Thank you all — to answer questions:

- The path being used is /Users/[me]/Pictures/Lightroom/Mobile Downloads.lrdata - this is not the path set in the "Lightroom Sync" tab in settings. It *does* create the date-based folders in that path, but doesn't download the original files there.

- External drive is always connected, certainly whenever Lightroom is running.

Next stop to try resetting the preferences, I think.

[JohanElzenga]

Have you tried to reset the preferences, because this is definitely not right. https://www.lightroomqueen.com/how-do-i-reset-lightrooms-preferences/