Blog027 (V2) - Start over with Cloud Sync

V1 - Written 2025-02
V2 – Significant re-write 2025-04 (added variants including preserving URL’s)

If you’ve found your way to this article, it is probably due to problems you are having with the Lightroom cloud sync process.  While there are many blogs and videos on how to un-stick images stuck in the sync process as well as how to deal with other Lightroom cloud sync issues, sometimes it is just easier to throw in the towel and start the whole cloud sync thing over again from a clean cloud slate.  That’s what this article is about.

Basic Concept

This is a list of the sections of this article.  Not all of these steps are required in every situation, so pick and choose based on your own needs.

1. Backup your catalog
   You never know when you’ll need a backup
2. Save recently imported LR/Cloud originals
   Export LR/Cloud images that have not synced to LrC
3. Save images recently edited in LR/Cloud
   Export images from LR/Cloud where LR/Cloud edits may not have synced to LrC
4. Clear Cloud
   Clear everything out of LR/Cloud
5. Recover Lr/Cloud Recent Imports
   Import images saved in #2
6. Recover Recently Edited Set of Images
   Get edits back for images saved in #3

Assumption:  I assume that your sync process is stuck or otherwise dead in the water.  Therefore these instructions do not include a requirement to sync anything else before clearing the cloud.

Backup your catalog

No matter how careful you are, unexpected things can happen.  Even if you are working with Adobe Tech Support, they too make errors.  Therefore it is a good idea to take out some insurance before you start – “just in case”.

I suggest copying ALL the files/folders relevant to your catalog to another folder not just the “.lrcat”, and “.lrcat-data” files you get in the backups produced by LrC itself.

10 Win Files to backup

Save recently imported LR/Cloud originals

Depending on your situation, you may have LR/Cloud original images that never made it down to LrC through the sync process.  As we are going to clear all images from LR/Cloud you may want to save (export) these (with their edits) first.

Images that originated in LrC are still in your catalog, which you just backed up, and those physical image files should also still be in your disk file system as well so we don’t need to worry about those.  Here’s how to grab those LR/Cloud originals that may not have synced down to LrC.  Do this using the Lr/Desktop app (I’m not sure if other LR/Cloud apps have all the necessary features).

1. In LrC, Pause syncing if it is active
   01 LRC Pause Syncing
2. Switch over to LR/D (LR/Cloud Desktop app).  It is included in your plan but you may have to install it.
3. Select “All Photos”
4. Create a new Album called “LR New Imports” and copy all images to it
5. With album “LR New Imports” selected, set the filter for: Sync status -> Synced from Lightroom Classic
   03 LR - Synced from LrC Filter
6. Remove all images still showing after applying the filter
7. Turn the filter off
8. The remaining images are ALL LR/Cloud originals.
9. Depending on when your syncing issue started, most of the images still in this album have already synced down to LrC in which case we don’t have to save them from LR/Cloud before clearing the cloud (see next section for saving images with recent edits).  Unfortunately there is no filter that will show which ones have or have not synced down to LrC.  So, in order to remove ones from this album that have already synced to LrC, we will have to use the date where your sync issues started.  There are several ways to help figure this out:

• In LrD, under “All Photos”, you can select “recently added” but that list doesn’t go back very far
• You can rely on your recollection of when your syncing problem started
• You can manually compare images in LR/Cloud with those in LrC and see where new LR/Cloud images started showing up in LrC.
  
  In LR/D, sort the grid by Import Date (newest on top).
  06 LR Sort by Mod date
  
  Scroll down while comparing images in this grid to what’s in LrC.  At some point you’ll get to images that also show up in LrC.
  
  Let’s say the circled image is the first one to show up in LrC
  04 LR Capture Date .
  That means that all the images in the Lr/D grid starting with that one to the bottom of the grid should already be in LrC.

10. Remove all the images that had already synced down to LrC from this album.  You can also remove any other images you don’t care about, or for other reasons don’t need.
11. Export what’s left in this album to disk so that you can later re-import them either to LR/Cloud or LrC after you clear the cloud.

• Use menu “File -> Export”
• Then select “Original + Settings” as Image Type  and “Original” as File Name
• Then click the blue “Export xx Photos” button
  05 LR Export Originals
• In the popup navigate and create a new folder for these images (perhaps name it “LR New Imports”).

This will save the current edit state of the image with the images (but not the edit history
 

12. If any of these images are in LR Albums and you want them to return to those same albums, make a list of which images belong in which albums

    • Select the “LR New Imports” album
    • Click the “i” in a circle icon at the bottom right to open the info panel if it is not already open
            03 LR Info Panel Icon
    • In the grid, select each image, one by one
    • For each images, look at the bottom of the info panel and see if that image is in any other albums.
           02 LR Other Albums
    • Make a list of which other albums each image is in

Save images recently edited in LR/Cloud

The next group of images you may want to save (export) out of LR/Cloud before clearing it are images edited in LR/Cloud where those edits had not synced to LrC for some reason.  This is only useful if you do edits in the Lr/Cloud apps.  Again depending on when your sync problems started, most edits have already synced to LrC.  However edits done after your problem started may not have synced down to LrC.  Those are the ones we’re after.

1. In LR/Desktop select the “All Photos” album
2. Filter by Edited-= yes
   01 LR Filter for edited
3. Create a new album called “LR Recently Edited” containing the filtered images in the grid (those with “edited = Yes”).
4. Go to album “LR Recently Edited”
5. Sort grid by Modified date in reverse order (most recently edited on top)
   06 LR Sort by Mod date
6. If you know the date where things stopped syncing, you can use LR/Android (and I assume LR/iOS) on your phone or tablet to find the images edited on that date.  To do this:
   • Select album “LR Recently Edited” rather than “All Photos”
   • Use the 3 dot menu to segment the grid by day
     01 LRM Segmented grid
   • Scroll down to the day where your system stopped syncing properly
   • Make a note of the last image that synced OK
   • Now go back to LR/Desktop and with the “LR Recently Edited” album grid sorted by modified date in descending order (new on top) scroll down to that same photo
7. If you don’t know the date it stopped working, then you’ll have to visually compare images in LrC to those in LR/D to determine where the edits showing in LR/D start appearing in LrC.
8. Once you find where in the sorted “LR Recently Edited” album edits had made it down to LrC, remove all the images with earlier modified dates from the album
9. What we’re left with are images that were modified since your sync problem started.  What we don’t know (and I don’t know how to find out) is whether the most recent modifications were done in LR/Cloud or in LrC.  So we’ll just have to export all of them.
10. Select all the photos left in the album and export (menu File -> Export) them to an appropriately named folder on your system using “originals + Settings”.
    05 LR Export Originals
    If some of these images originated in LrC, then Lr/Cloud will only have an SP (Smart Preview) available to export.  In this case you’ll get a warning message as shown below
    09 LR SP will export
    Go ahead and export them as well.

CLEAR CLOUD STEPS

Now that we’ve exported images that were imported into LR/Cloud and possibly never synced to LrC and also exported images from LR/Cloud that were modified after the date when sync stopped working we can proceed to clear the cloud as everything else should already be in LrC. 

At this point you may want to verify that you don’t have missing photos in LrC by using the “Find all missing photos” tool (in the Library Menu).  If you do have missing photos, find and relink them using the ”Find Missing Folder” or “Locate Missing Photos” commands.  Re-run the “Find all Missing Photos” tool again.  If there are still missing photos, and some or all of them are present in LR/Cloud, you may want to export those from Lr/Cloud as well – especially if the copy in the cloud is a full size original rather than a Smart Preview.  But, even a Smart Preview may be better than nothing.

The steps below vary depending on your particular situation.

1. Variant 1 is where you will continue using your current LrC catalog as the synced catalog and you do not care about preserving shared/public URL’s for collections/albums that you may have distributed to others  This includes not caring about being able to refresh Adobe Portfolio galleries from Lr/Cloud or LrC.  For this variant, execute steps with an “X” in column V1
2. Variant 2 is where you will continue using your current LrC catalog as the sync catalog and you do care about preserving those shared/public URL’s.  For this variant, execute steps with an “X” in column V2.
3. Variant 3 is where you will be switching to a different sync catalog but don’t need to preserve Album/Collection URL’s.  This includes creating a new catalog through the use of the “Export as Catalog” function or creating a new empty catalog and then using “Import from another catalog” to populate it from the currently synced catalog.  For this variant, execute steps with an “X” in column V3
4. Variant 4 is the same as variant 3, except in this case you do want to preserve those URL’s for shared/public collections/albums.  For this variant execute steps with an “X” in column 4.

Here are the steps:

Now we have to deal with (as best we can) those images we exported from LrC before we cleared it.  If you recall, one set are images imported into LrC and probably never synced to LrC and the other set are images edited in either LrC or LR/cloud where LR/Cloud edits may not have made it to LrC.

As it turns out, the same image may be in both sets or the imports or edits ‘might’ have made it to LrC.

Recover LR/Cloud recent imports

Now we will deal with those images we exported from LrC before we cleared it.  If you recall, one set are images imported into Lr/Cloud which probably never synced to LrC.

IF NOT TOO MANY

If there aren’t very many, you can just visually see if the images in the folder on disk are also in LrC.  For those that are, delete them from the disk folder.  The ones that remain in the folder need to be imported.

If you want to put the full size originals back in Lr/Cloud (consuming your paid storage), import the images remaining in the folder into one of the LR/Cloud apps.  They will sync down to LrC and be placed in whatever folder you have set in preferences like any other images imported into LR/Cloud.

If you would prefer to have only Smart Previews (free) in the cloud, then import them into LrC and then add them to the “All Synced Photographs” special collection or any other synced collection. 

In either case feel free to move them to other folders as desired using the LrC Folders panel.

IF THERE ARE MANY

If there are too many to do visually follow these steps to import them into LrC (you can do something similar if you want to import them into LR/Cloud).

1. In LrC import the set of images from the folder.  In most cases LrC will not detect these as duplicates even if they had already synced down from LR/Cloud and are in the LrC catalog but will put a “-2” on the end of the file name if you import them into the same folder(s) where there is already a copy of the image.
2. In the “Previous Import” special collection in the Catalog Panel, select them all and mark them in some way.  If you’re not using the purple color label for other things, I find that it works quite well.  First remove the purple color label from any images in the catalog that already have it.  Then select “previous import” and add the purple color label to those images
3. Click “All Photographs” in the catalog panel
4. Set the grid to sort by “File Name”
5. Filter for only “purple” color label images
   12 LrC Filter for Purple
6. Select the first one in the grid
7. Turn the filter off
8. Now the selected image exported from Lr/Cloud (purple label) will show up right next to other images with the same file name.  If one of them is the same image, (meaning that the image had already synced to LrC) delete the purple one (delete from disk, don’t just remove).  If there is no matching image then just take the purple color label off the image.
   13 LrC Match images
9. Repeat steps 3 through 8 until you’ve processed them all

You may now want to add these images to the Albums or Collections they had been in before.  Use the list you created when you exported these images from LR/Cloud and then add them to same Albums or Collections (either will do).

You can now move the images to a different folder if you wish using LrC.

Recently Edited Set of Images

The second set of images we exported from LR/Cloud before we cleared it are images edited in either LrC or LR/cloud where the LR/Cloud edits may not have made it to LrC.  This is a bit trickier as we don’t know which of those images have un-synced Lr/Cloud edits and in cases where the original came from LrC the version we exported form Lr/Cloud is only a Smart Preview – not a full size original file.

1. LrC:  Import the images in the folder you created for the recently edited Lr/Cloud images.  I’d use the “Add” mode (you can always move them later).  If you typically use the “By Date” option during imports, then use the “move” mode but put them under their own master parent in case the “previous import” special collection gets overwritten.
2. In the “Previous Import” special collection in the Catalog Panel, select all the images and mark them in some way.  If you’re not using the purple color label for other things, I find that it works quite well.  First remove the purple color label from any images in the catalog that already have it.  Then select “previous import” and add the purple color label to those images
3. Click “All Photographs” in the catalog panel
4. Set the grid to sort by File Name
5. Filter for only “purple” color label images
   12 LrC Filter for Purple
6. Select the first one in the grid
7. Turn the filter off
8. Now the selected image from Lr/Cloud (purple label) will show up right next to other images with the same file name.
   05 LrC which one
   Decide which one you want to keep.  You can visually look at the two images and just choose one.  Or you can look at the “Metadata Date” in the metadata panel (if you don’t see the Metadata Date, select “Exif & IPTC” view for the Metadata Panel.  It should be noted that if either image was edited in both LrC and LR/Cloud, due to the sync process being stuck  the image edited last may not have had the latest edit from the other system before it was edited.
9. If you want to keep the one from LrC (not purple) copy any desired data from the Lr/Cloud (purple) version to the LrC version:
   1. For metadata values, you can copy and paste individual fields using the Metadata Panel.  Or make sure both images are selected but the one you want to copy from is the active image (lightest cell), use the “Sync Metadata” button, and check/un-check fields as desired.
   2. For develop settings,  use the “Sync Settings” button and chose which edtis your want to copy or just make the edits manually
   3. Delete the one from LR/Cloud (the purple one).  If you had changed the image participation in LR/Cloud albums and that had yet to sync to LrC, manually make the same changes in LrC.
10. If you’re keeping the one from Lr/Cloud (purple one) there are more considerations.  The one from LR/Cloud may be a reduced resolution copy from a Smart Preview, will not have your LrC keywords, and will not be in your Publish Services among things.  For this reason it is better to keep the one from LrC but copy the develop settings and metadata changes done in LR/Cloud from the LR/Cloud image to the LrC image.  You can only do this one pair at a time.
    1. In the LrC grid, select both versions of the image
    2. Assure that the Lr/Cloud version is the active (most selected) of the two
       04 LrC Sync Image Settings
    3. Click the “Sync Settings” button at the bottom of the right panel.
    4. Click the “check all” button to select all the check boxes
    5. Click the “Synchronize” button.  If asked, “replace” masks rather than “merge” masks
    6. This will copy all the develop edits from the Lr/Cloud version to the LrC version but will retain the prior edit history of the LrC version.  It will also retain the LrC metadata including keywords, and participation in collections and Publish Services.
    7. If there are metadata values on the LR/Cloud version that you want to keep, you can copy and paste individual fields or use the “Sync Metadata” button and check/un-check fields as desired.
    8. If you had changed the image participation in albums that had yet to sync to LrC, manually make the same changes in LrC for the image where those albums are known as collections
    9. Using LrC, Delete (remove from disk) the LR/Cloud version with the purple label.
11. Repeat until you’ve processed them all

Final Comment

You’ve made it to the end of this long and detailed article.  I hope you found it informative and useful and that it addressed whatever it was that led you here.  If you’ve stumbled upon any errors, omissions, or things that could be presented better, please let me know by leaving a comment. 

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