Synching Keywords from LR Classic to LR Cloud

Change Log

V01 – LrC/8.0 – Aug 2018

V02 -

V03 – LrC/13.4 - Jun 2024]

• The hack used to get a one time sync of keywords from Lr/Classic to Lr/Cloud no longer works

V04 – LrC/15.4 & Lr/9.4 - Jun 2026]

• Keyword sync between Lr/Classic and Lr/Cloud added.

This article only includes a short summary of syncing.  See here for more detailed information
LR009 - Use LR/Classic and LR/CC together on same images.

Contents

If you want to skip ahead to what it looks like as of LrC/15.4 click the LrC/15.4 section below.

Change Log

Contents

History of Classic <-> Cloud Keyword Syncing

Overview of how syncing works

Keyword Syncing through LrC/13.3

Keyword Syncing LrC/13.4 through LrC/15.3

Keyword Syncing starting with LrC/15.4

Sync Keywords Global Preference

What triggers keyword sync

How keywords sync

General rules for keyword sync

History of Classic <-> Cloud Keyword Syncing

02 Classic to Cloud Logos

Let’s start with a bit of background and assumptions. Starting in October 2017 - when LR7 was first branded with the name “Lightroom Classic” (aka LrC) instead of just “Lightroom” and the name “Lightroom” changed to mean a new cloud based product -  Adobe has been supporting two different products which are both under the heading of Lightroom.  One is Lightroom Classic which is the most recent iteration of a product that was first introduced 2007.  The 2nd product is just plain Lightroom which I’ll call Lightroom Cloud (Lr/Cloud) to distinguish it from Lightroom Classic (Lr/Classic). 

Lr/Cloud has essentially the same purpose of Lr/Classic, but is an entirely different product.  Some of the main differences are:

• Lr/Classic references images on your computer whereas Lr/Cloud stores your original images in the Adobe Cloud
• Lr/Classic is one program that can run on a Mac or PC whereas Lr/Cloud has apps that can run on a Mac, a PC, an Android or Apple Tablet, and Android or Apple phone, or through a web browser
• Lr/Classic has many more features than Lr/Cloud.  For example: printing, maps, web page creation, printed paper books, publish services, hierarchical keywords, more metadata access, smart collections, folders, and much more
• Lr/Cloud manages your original images for you on Adobe servers (you no longer place images into folders on your own disk drives) and Adobe takes care of backups whereas with Lr/Classic you need to do your own folder management and backups of both your Lr/Classic catalog and your images.
• Lr/Classic supports hierarchical keywords whereas Lr/Cloud only has linear (flat) keywords, but Lr/Cloud has an Artificial Intelligence engine (they call Sensei) which can detect common subjects or items in images without the need for keywords.

Overview of how syncing works

In order to have the rich feature set of Lr/Classic, but the “on all your devices” convenience of Lr/Cloud with the same images you need to have the two eco-systems work together.  Adobe has facilitated this by providing a way to sync images between the two systems.  You can read my blog on how to do that here How to use Lightroom CC together with Lightroom Classic

The key to this though is having selected images sync between your Lr/Classic system and the suite of Lr/Cloud applications.  In their promotional material Adobe touts this as 2-way sync.  What is going on is that all images in Lr/Cloud sync to Lr/Classic and images in Lr/Classic that you designate sync with Lr/Cloud.  You designate such images by placing them into a collection in Lr/Classic that is marked to sync pr the “All Synced Photographs” special collection. 

In this set up, if images enter the Lightroom world via the Lr/Cloud eco system, those images are automatically copied to Lr/Classic and placed in a default folder and automatically are added to the “All synced Photographs” special collection as well as one or more synced collections corresponding to Albums in Lr/Cloud. 

If images enter the Lightroom world via Lr/Classic,  You can manually place them in the “All Synced Photographs” special collection, or into any synced collection (which automatically also places them in the “All synced Photographs” special collection.  Once that takes place a “smart preview” of the image is created behind the scenes (if one doesn’t already exist) and that Smart Preview is copied to LR/cloud where the Lr/Cloud apps can get to it.

If changes are made to the image in either eco-system those changes are synced back to the other eco-system.

For image edits – meaning changes to what the image looks like – this works pretty well as long as you leave enough time for the syncing to take place, don’t sync too many images at one time, and the sync process doesn’t get hung up.  How long syncing takes of course depends on your Internet speed and how many images you are syncing.  For single images, with modestly good Internet speed, we’re talking about less than a minute. 

What they don’t make very clear is that there are many things present in both Lr/Classic and Lr/Cloud (sometimes with different names) that don’t sync back and forth as one would expect or as one would desire.

What syncs back and forth (for images and Virtual Copies):

• Quick Develop changes from Library Module
• Develop module / Edit Panel changes
• Star Ratings
• Pick/Reject flags
• Titles
• Captions
• Copyright text
• Capture date/time
• Much of the Cameras’ EXIF data (e.g., exposure info, camera info, Etc.)
• GPS coordinates (but not location text such as country, state, citty)
• VC’s (Virtual Copies) from Lr/Classic arrive in Lr/Cloud as a separate image but still sync with the VC in LrC
• Keywords (as of LrC 15.4)

What syncs 1 time only (Values taken from when Smart Preview first created)

• Camera settings (of course these can’t be changed so not an issue)
• Keywords (flattened list) (up through LR/Clasic 13.3)
• Location data (Country, State/Province, City, Sublocation)

What never syncs

• Other metadata fields such as:
• Copyright Status
• Creator
• Job information
• Contact info for image creator/owner
• IPTC Data (headline, Subject code, etc.)
• Collection/Album hierarchy
• Collection/Album sort order
• Publish Services
• Snapshots
• Keyword Synonyms
• Stacks
• Etc.

What syncs differently

• Videos originating in Lr/Cloud, sync to Lr/Classic (one way, one time)
• Videos from Lr/Classic do not sync to Lr/Cloud at all
• No video metadata syncs  (including metadata that would sync for still images)

But, even so, syncing is a good thing if one understands what does and doesn’t sync and how to work around some of those issues. 

Keyword Syncing through LrC/13.3

This was an awkward period when keyword syncing was not supposed to work at all and Adobe was saying it was technically unfeasible to implement due to Lr/Classic having hierarchical keywords and Lr/Cloud having flat, or linear, keywords.  But clever people outside of Adobe found a hole the implementation that got around this to some degree.  I call this the “Keyword Hack”.

During this period there was a lot of confusion about this as witnessed by discussions in Lightroom forums about how it does (or doesn’t) work.  For example if you select a bunch of images in Lr/Classic and add them to a Synced collection, they may arrive in Lr/Cloud with keywords.  But then if you change any keywords in either eco-system those changes never migrate back to the other eco-system. 

So, what is going on and how did the ‘hack” work?

As I mentioned earlier, when images are synced what is actually syncing is a Smart Preview for each synced image.  Smart Previews are actually reduced size DNG files.  They were introduced as an option in Lr/Classic several versions prior as a way to allow you to edit images in the Develop Module of Lr/Classic even when the disk drive containing those images was not connected to the computer.  Part of this was that as soon as the original images were again connected to the computer, it would catch up with any changes that needed to be written to the image files.

So, here’s what happens.  When you sync an image in Lr/Classic, it must place a Smart Preview of that image into the Adobe Cloud.  But, that leaves two situations.  One is where you had already created a Smart Preview for that image on your own (let’s call these user smart previews).  The other situation is where you didn’t in which case LR will automatically create one for you (let’s call these automatic smart previews).  Now this sounds like a trivial distinction but it does have ramifications. 

You can see if an image has a User Smart Preview by looking below the histogram in the Library or Develop module in Lr/Classic.

01 Histogram

So why does this matter?  Whenever a smart preview is FIRST created, all the pertinent metadata pertaining to the image that happens to be saved on disk in or with the image file (not just in the catalog) is included in the smart preview.  However, after that point in time many metadata changes, such as keywords, are not updated in the smart preview and are not synced with the cloud.  So, how do you get keyword and location changes you make in Lr/Classic to sync back to Lr/Cloud?  The answer depends on which kind of Smart Preview you have.

If your image does not have a User Smart Preview (i.e. has only an Automatic Smart Preview) in Lr/Classic perform the following steps:

Remove the image from the “All Synced Photographs”: special collection (which will also remove it from any other synced collections in which it participates) and wait for the sync process to remove it from cloud

If you don’t have “Automatically write changes to XMP” checked in the catalog preferences screen, force metadata changes to the image file (or XMP side car file) by clicking the “metadata mismatch icon” (3 horizontal lines with a hollow down arrow) on the image thumbnail in the grid. 

Then add the image  back to the at least one synced collection and let it sync to the Cloud

All your Lr/Classic keywords and location fields present when you re-add the image back to the first synced collection will be in the Automatic Smart Preview generated by LR and will migrate to the cloud but will not update thereafter (in either direction).

If your image has a User Smart Preview (i.e. shows as “Has Smart Preivew” in the metadata filter or under the histogram) removing the image from all synced collections and then re-adding it does not refresh the keywords in the Cloud because no new Smart Preview needs to be built.  In this situation perform these steps:

Remove the image from the “All Synced Photographs” special collection (which will also removed it from any synced collections it may also participate in)

Delete the User Smart Preview (menu:  Library -> Previews -> Discard Smart Previews).

If you don’t have “Automatically write changes to XMP” checked in the catalog preferences screen, force metadata changes to the image file (or XMP side car file) by clicking the “metadata mismatch icon” (3 horizontal lines with a hollow down arrow) on the image thumbnail in the grid. 

Now you can optionally re-create a User Smart Preview if desired, but either way, drag the image back to a synced collection and let it sync to the cloud. 

This will force a one time reload of the keywords and Location metadata to the cloud but will not keep them synced thereafter unless you repeat this process.

IMPORTANT notes: 

• Keywords that sync to the cloud include not only the explicit keywords assigned to the image(s), but also all their parents regardless of your choices in the edit keyword panel.  So, even if you uncheck “Include on export” and/or “Export Containing Keywords” you get them all.
• Synonyms will not sync to Lr/Cloud at all
• There is no hack for syncing in the other direction (Cloud to Classic).  In other words if I make keyword changes in Lr/Cloud, how to get them synced back down to Lr/Classic.
• Adobe has not documented or acknowledged anything about this ‘hack’.  The fact that keywords and location data, and perhaps other metadata, get added to Smart Previews when the Smart Preview is first created may have been unintended by Adobe.

MORE IMPORTANT note: 

• With LrC/13.4 Adobe “fixed” this “oversight” and stopped such metadata data from being added to the Smart Preview at all.  This stopped the ‘hack’ from working.  The user community pushed Adobe to go the other way and to embrace Keyword and other metadata syncing and make it work automatically in both directions like they have already done for image adjustments, star ratings, capture date/time, pick flags, and perhaps a few other items.  And they (partially) did so with LrC/15.4.

Keyword Syncing LrC/13.4 through LrC/15.3

Sorry, no such luck.  The only way to keep keywords consistent between Lr/Classic and Lr/Cloud is to manually make the same changes In both systems.

Keyword Syncing starting with LrC/15.4

With LrC/15.4 in June 2026 they introduced a true, built in Keyword sync with no ‘hack’ needed.  They did not address the lack of sync for location fields (country, state/province, city, sub-location) but as before GPS coordinates continue to sync so the default location fields can be looked up using the GPS coordinates. Everything from here on in this blog pertains to LrC/15.4 and beyond.

Sync Keywords Global Preference

There is an option in the Preferences dialog, on the Lightroom Sync tab, that controls whether keyword’s sync between Lr/Class and Lr/Cloud at all.

08 Sync KW Preference

This option is off by default for catalogs that were already set as the “sync catalog” prior to LrC/15.4, but is on by default for an unsynced catalog that becomes the synced catalog.

When you turn on “Sync keywords”, nothing initially happens other than allowing keywords to be included when images sync.  Subsequently, whenever an image syncs either way, keywords associated with the image being synced are included in both directions.  If there were any keyword changes made while the global “Sync Keywords” preference was turned off, a “Sync Keywords to Cloud” button will appear at the bottom of the Keywording Panel.  If you hover over this button it will show you the number of images whose keywords will be synced if you click the button.  Clicking the button will sync keywords for all the currently sleeted images (regsrdless of whether or not they actually had any KW changes).

01 15.4 Sync KW's button

What triggers keyword sync

When keyword Sync is enabled in Preferences, any new change made to an image in Lr/Classic or Lr/Cloud will trigger sync for that image and that will include all current metadata and edits,  including keyword’s.  This includes making changes to metadata fields in LrC which are not present in, or used by Lr/Cloud.

In addition, as referenced above, clicking the “Sync Keywords to the Cloud” button at the bottom of the Keywording Panel (if present) will cause any changed keywords on the currently selected images to sync to-from Lr/Cloud.

When keyword sync is disabled in preferences, if you make any metadata or edit change to an image in either LrC or Lr/Cloud, the edit state of the image and all metadata EXCEPT KEYWORD’S are synced.  If you then turn keyword Sync back on nothing happens until either another change occurs on the image or you click the “Sync Keywords to the Cloud” button at the bottom of the Keywording Panel (if present) while the image is selected.

How keywords sync

Keywords in Lr/Classic can be in a hierarchical structure where the same keyword may appear under different parents.  For example, you may have keyword “Alice” under parent “Family” and also under parent “Friends”.  However, Lr/Cloud only supports a flat list of keywords which precludes having two “Alice” keyword’s (one relating to family and one relating to friends).  This difference adds a fair amount of complexity to synchronizing keyword’s between the two systems.  There were several potential strategies Adobe could have chosen for how to deal with this but this is the one they selected.

The ultimate goal of keyword syncing is to have all the keywords shown in the Lr/Classic Keyword List which have either a checkmark or a minus sign for a synced image appear as individual keywords on that same image in Lr/Cloud and vice-versa.  Seems simple enough but it can become somewhat complicated when you start dealing with hierarchical keywords in Lr/Classic.

04 15.4 Classic Alice to Cloud

General rules for keyword sync

• For any particular synced image, all keywords and all their parent keywords assigned to that image will be mapped to individual, standalone keywords in Lr/Cloud.  This is all the keywords that show up in the Keywording Panel “Keywords & Containing Keywords” view which is the same as all the keywords that have either a check mark or minus sign in the Keyword List Panel when only that one image is selected.
• If you change anything in the Lr/Classic Keywording or Keyword List, panels those changes will be represented in Lr/Cloud for all images affected by the change
• New keywords added in Lr/Cloud, will become top level non-hierarchical keywords in Lr/Classic (will have no parents and no children) unless you use the “piped” format to create the keyword (see next bullet)
  05 15.4 Arch Cloud to Classic

A “piped” keyword in Lr/Cloud lists an entire keyword hierarchy as if it were a single keyword using either a “|” symbol or a “>” symbol to denote dropping down one level in the hierarchy,  For example add keyword “Fauna>Bird>Robin” will create (or use) a 3 level hierarchy in Lr/Classic.
06 15.4 Piped Arch Cloud to Classic
Piped keywords in Lr/Cloud will be un-piped into separate keywords later.  Not sure but I think this happens the next time that image is re-synced.  There is no way in Lr/Classic to force a hierarchical KW to become a “piped” KW in Lr/Cloud.  For example, in the above screen shot I can’t have “Arch” in Lr/Classic become “SUBJECT|Landscape|Arch” in Lr/Cloud instead of separate Keywords

• Removing an explicit keyword from an image in Lr/Classic will delete that keyword from that image in Lr/Cloud.  If that removal in Lr/Classic caused any parent keywords to become unassigned, those changes will be reflected in Lr/Cloud as well.
• Deleting a keyword from an image in Lr/Cloud will un-assign that keyword from the image in Lr/Classic (but will leave the keyword present).  If that keyword participates in a keyword hierarchy, its immediate parent (if any) will be explicitly assigned to the image and all lower level child keywords either implicitly or explicitly assigned to the image will be copied as standalone keywords in to the root of the Keyword List and assigned to the image.

For more details on the large number of specific cases of adding, removing, renaming and moving keywords in both Lr/Classic and Lr/Cloud see this article https://www.danhartfordphoto.com/blog/2024/8/lr024-lr/classic-lrc-lr/cloud-lr-sync-behavior.