Blog027 - Start over with Cloud Sync

Written 2025-02

If you’ve found your way to this article, it is probably due to problems you are having with the cloud sync process with Lightroom.  While there are many blogs and videos on how to unstick 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.

Assumptions and warnings

1. Assumption:  I assume that your sync process is stuck or otherwise dead in the water.  Therefore these instructions do not include syncing anything before clearing the cloud
2. Warning:  Recent edits done in Lr/Cloud that had not synced to LrC are quite difficult to deal with in this scenario and may required re-doing.  But hopefully there won’t be too many.

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

Change/Clear the LR/Cloud Sync Folder

This is the folder, specified in “Preferences -> Lightroom Sync”, and is where the sync process places images which originated in one of the Lr/Cloud apps.

08 LrC - Set Download folder

If you are still using the default shipped with LrC, that folder is “Mobile Downloads.lrdata” (not shown in the preferences dialog) and is in the same folder as the catalog.  But it is not a regular folder with images (on Mac’s it is a package).  Rather it is in a special format and only really usable by LrC.

I suggest telling LrC to use a real folder instead as it can make life later on easier.  Even though we want to start fresh, there may be images in this folder which have previously synced down from LR/Cloud prior to your sync problems.  Because of this, select “Move” in the dialog shown below which you’ll get when you change it to a real (or different) folder.

07 LrC - Move Mobile Downloads confirmation

Once it’s a real folder, if it has any images in it, those are real images that originated in LR/Cloud.  Copy them to other folders where they would have gone had you originally imported them directly into LrC.  Whenever images show up in this folder I either move or delete them.  In other words this folder acts like a ‘to do’ list for new images originating in LR/Cloud. 

However, others just leave their Lr/Cloud originals in this folder which is fine as well.

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 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)
3. Select “All Photos”
4. Create a new Album called “Lr Originals” and copy all images to it
5. With “Lr Originals” 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 LR/Cloud originals.
9. Depending on when your syncing issue started, most of the images still in this album may 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.  You can rely on your recollection of when your syncing problem started or you can manually compare images in LR/Cloud with those in LrC and see where new LR/Cloud images stopped showing up in LrC and come up with a date.
   
   Still in LR/D, sort the grid by Import Date (newest on top).
   11 LR sort by Import date
   
   In the grid, if you click on an image with the “info” panel open on the right it will show you the capture date but there is no place in LR/D that I know of where it will show you the import date.  But you can hopefully figure out where Lr/Cloud originals are not present in LrC
   04 LR Capture Date
   
   On in LR/iOS or LR/Android, you can select an “album” called “Imports” and segment it by day.  Then scroll to the date you want and see what images were imported on that day.  Back in LR/D scroll through the album we’re working with looking for that image.
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 and in the popup navigate and create a new folder for these images (perhaps name it “Originals from LR”).  This will save the current edit state of the image with the images (but not the edit history)
    05 LR Export Originals

Save images recently edited in LR/Cloud

The next group of images you may want to save out of LR/Cloud before clearing it are images edited in LR/Cloud where those edits had not synced to LrC.  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 all photos
2. Filter by Edited-= yes
3. Create a new album called “My Edits” containing the filtered images in the grid (those with “edited = Yes”).
4. Go to album “My Edits”
5. Sort grid by Modified date in reverse order (most recently edited on top)
   06 LR Sort by Mod date
6. Now you need to go to Lr/iOS or Lr/Android on your phone or tablet as this is not available in Lr/Desktop or Lr/Web (go figure)
7. Select album “My edits” rather than All Photos
8. Use the 3 dot menu to segment the grid by day
   01 LRM Segmented grid
9. Scroll down to the day where your system stopped syncing properly
10. Make a note of the last image from the last day when syncing was working well
11. Now go back to Lr/Desktop and with the grid sorted by modified date in descending order (new on top) scroll down to that same photo
12. Remove all the images with earlier modified dates from the album.
13. 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 who 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.
14. Select all the photos left in the album and 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

CLEAR ENTIRE CLOUD

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

1. If you’ve been following along, you already took a new backup of your catalog.  If you did not, do it now as described above in the “Backup your catalog” section.  DO NOT SKIP THIS STEP.  I suggest copying ALL the files/folders relevant to your catalog not just the “.lrcat” and “.lrcat-data” files you get in the backups produced by LrC itself
2. In addition, if you haven’t performed the other steps described so far, this would be a good time to look them over and run the ones pertinent to your situation.
3. LrC: Pause sync if it is active
   01 LRC Pause Syncing
4. LrC: If you don’t care about the URL’s for shared/public collections or being able to refresh Adobe Portfolio galleries, put a color label on all your synced collections and un-sync them (this maintains their images but looses attachment to Adobe Cloud for that collection)
   
   If you do care, then instead duplicate each synced collection (including the images) into a non-synced collection and leave the original collections as synced.  If the synced collections are in a collection set you can duplicate the entire collection set all at once by right clicking on it and selecting “Duplicate Collection Set”.
   02 LrC Dup Collection Set
5. LrC: Create a new un-synced collection called "All Synced Copy” and copy all the images in the "All Synced Photographs" special collection to this new collection – DO NOT SYNC THIS NEW COLLECTION
6. LrC: Delete everything from the "All synced photographs" special collection.  This will also remove them from all of your synced collections (and would remove them from the Adobe Cloud if sync was working and active).
7. LrC: Close LrC and delete or rename the “<catalog name> Sync.lrdata" folder on disk.
   01 LrC Sync data file
8. Lr/Cloud: Delete all images from "All Photographs"
9. Lr/Cloud:  If you are preserving your shared/public URL’s & Portfolio links (step 4) assure that all your albums are empty.
   
   If you are not preserving you shared/public URL’s (step 4) Delete all albums
10. Lr/Cloud:  Empty the “Deleted” list
11. Lr/Cloud: Let the deletes propagate through Lr/Cloud.
12. Lr/Cloud: Check all the Lr/Cloud apps you use (Lr/Web, Lr/Desktop, Lr/iOS, etc) to assure empty.
    01 LR empty
    If you’re preserving your shared/public URL’s the albums should be there but should be empty
13. LrC: Re-open LrC and un-pause sync and wait a few minutes.  Nothing should happen.
14. LrC: If you are preserving shared/public URL’s, copy the images back to the still synced, but empty, collections from the duplicates you created in step 4.
    
    Otherwise, Turn sync on for one of your previously synced collections that had problematic images in it before
    
    That collection should sync normally.  If successful, repeat for the other collections a few at a time letting the sync complete between each set
15. When done, copy everything in "All synced copy" collection back to "All synced Photographs”.  This will re-sync any images that had been synced before but are not in any of your synced collections. If you don't care about any of those, then skip this step.  You can now delete the “All synced copy” collection.

Catching up on missed imports and edits

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 and the imports or edits ‘might’ have made it to LrC.

Recent LrC Imports Set

Let’s start with the Import set.  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 a synced collection or the “All Synced Photographs” special collection. 

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

If there are too many to do visually follow these steps

1. In LrC import the set of images from the folder.  Unfortunatly LrC will not detect these as duplicates even if they had already synced down from LR/Cloud and are in the LrC catalog.  You can use the “Add” mode for the import which leaves them in their current folder (you can move them later).
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 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. Set the grid to sort by Capture date
4. Click “All Photographs” in the catalog panel
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 capture date/time.  If one of them is the same image, 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
10. You can now move the images to a different folder if you wish using the LrC folders Panel (you may then want to delete the now empty folder from disk using your Finder/Explorer)

Recent Edits Set

Now let’s take a look at the recent updates folder of images.  These are images from Lr/Cloud which had been edited since some date and perhaps those edits had not synced down to LrC.  This is significantly 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 are only a Smart Previews – not full size original files.

One would think that you could look at various date/times in the metadata panel to determine which had the latest edits but this is not the case as the “metadata” date for all the ones coming from Lr/Cloud are the date/time of the export you just did which is not at all useful.  We also can’t look at the edit history of the two files as the one from Lr/Cloud only has one entry which is for the import. 

So, unfortunately what we are left with is to visually compare each pair of images and decide which one we like better. 

If the one from LrC is the better of the two, just delete the one from Lr/Cloud. 

However if the one from Lr/Cloud is the better version there’s no simple answer and more concerns pop up if that’s the one you want to keep.  Remember, as far as LrC is concerned the one exported from Lr/Cloud and imported into LrC is a completely different image than the original still in LrC.  Some of those concerns are publish services, collections, keywords, edit history and the fact that it may be just a Smart Preview to name a few. 

In this case, I suggest, using the one from Lr/Cloud as a reference image and then developing the LrC version to match it.  Doing it this way preserves the edit history, Publish services and collection participation, LrC keywords and keeps the full size original image rather then the Smart Preview.
14 LrC Reference View

You could also just keep them both and mark the one from Lr/Cloud with a KW or add it to a collection to identify why it’s there.

There are some ideas which I did not test that involve copying and renaming files behind LrC’s back to get the edits from the LC/cloud version  applied to the LrC version but as I didn’t test those ideas I’m reluctant to articulate them here.  I’ll come see if I can come back to this later and do those tests at which time I’ll add that info to this article.