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Can I delete photos from LR mobile once they're in LrC?

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rosiegirl

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Dec 4, 2020
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25
Lightroom Version Number
Lightroom Classic 10.0
Operating System
  1. macOS 10.15 Catalina
Hi!

I'm new here but an old lady with Lightroom. I use LR mobile just to upload my iPhone photos into LrC so I can catalog, edit and print. I used to be able to just plug my iPhone in via USB every couple of weeks and upload into LrC like I would any SD card. But that all changed and I had to start using LR mobile.

I have read a bunch of articles and other questions on the forum and my workflow looks like this:

1. Set photos to automatically upload from my camera roll to a roll on LR mobile (called uploads). Then have that folder set to automatically sync. I've done the same with my husband's phone (just a different folder name on his phone to automatically sync).

2. Once photos are synced with LrC, I can just drag them into the folders with my camera photos from the same date (I have my folders set: 2020-->12 2002-->120120, 120220, etc.)

This works, sort of. I usually end up with a bunch of photos that just never sync for whatever reason. So sometimes I have to go and drag my camera roll into my upload folder to force a sync, which is fine but super annoying (why can't I just plug in and upload?!) It's a big pain to figure out what is missing but I'll deal with it if it's all I've got.

My main question is this:

Once the photos are synced with LrC, can I delete them from the upload/syncing folder on my phone without having them deleted from the desktop computer? Obviously I have more than 20GB of photos, so I was hoping to just upload/sync a month at a time and then delete from LR mobile. Will the synced iPhone photos *stay* in my LrC and on my desktop when I delete them from the LR mobile app on my phone?


Thanks!
 
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Yes. If you delete the photos from Lightroom Mobile, they will only be removed from the synced collections in Lightroom Classic, not removed from the catalog or your computer.
 
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Johan Elzenga said:
Yes. If you delete the photos from Lightroom Mobile, they will only be removed from the synced collections in Lightroom Classic, not removed from the catalog or your computer.
Click to expand...

Thank you so much, Johan! So just to be clear, once I move my photos from the synced folder to the catalog, I'm good to delete from LR mobile?

Also, any thoughts on why only some photos end up syncing and then I have to do a manual sync?
 
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rosiegirl said:
I use LR mobile just to upload my iPhone photos into LrC... Once the photos are synced with LrC, can I delete them from the upload/syncing folder on my phone without having them deleted from the desktop computer?
Click to expand...

My preference is to remove them from All Synced Photos in LrC. By doing so in LrC, I can be sure they have synced down to my hard drive.
 
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johnbeardy said:
My preference is to remove them from All Synced Photos in LrC. By doing so in LrC, I can be sure they have synced down to my hard drive.
Click to expand...

Thanks, John...So does that mean you move them into specific folders? on my LrC, I see the synced photos in 2 places (screenshots attached).
 

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It only means that I remove them from the All Synced Photos section (in your first screenshot) because this removes them from LR Mobile and frees up space.

I wasn't referring at all to folder location. ASP is only a listing of photos which are synced to LR Mobile. So it's not a folder, unlike folders in the Folders panel. You seem to have set your download location to Lightroom / Synced / Dates, and I can imagine that you might now want to move photos out of those folders because it might be confusing. I have no need to do that because my download location is exactly the same folder as I use for new files imported directly into LR. Maybe that's equivalent to your 2020 folder?
 
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johnbeardy said:
It only means that I remove them from the All Synced Photos section (in your first screenshot) because this removes them from LR Mobile and frees up space.
Click to expand...

I'm usually really good at this but I'm having trouble understanding exactly where the photos go! Yes, they upload from the phone into the Lightroom/Synced/Dates folder and then I manually move them from each date to the corresponding folder in my catalog Lightroom/Year/Month/Date. That way I can make sure they're all uploaded before I move them and it only adds 5 minutes.

Can I then delete the photos in ASP? Or do I just make a new folder and drag them there and then delete them? To be clear, I just want iPhone photos to be in my LrC, I don't need anything on LrC to sync to my phone...I'm just using LR mobile for syncing purposes.
 
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rosiegirl said:
Can I then delete the photos in ASP?
Click to expand...
Yes, though technically you are just "removing" the images from the All Synced Photographs, which is simply a special collection which contains a list of every image in the catalog that is currently synced with the cloud. The actual image remains in the LrC catalog. So if you remove an image from the ASP, the rules of that collection means that the removed image cannot be synced, therefore it is "unsynced". That in turn causes the cloud copy of that image to be deleted from the cloud, and it also means that if the image was in other synced collections in LrC it is removed from those also.
 
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Jim Wilde said:
Yes, though technically you are just "removing" the images from the All Synced Photographs, which is simply a special collection which contains a list of every image in the catalog that is currently synced with the cloud.
Click to expand...

Ahh! That makes sense!

Thanks, everyone!
 
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Hi @rosiegirl I know this post is quite old now, but it is worth mentioning one more thing. This doesn't work for videos. If you choose to sync also videos from your phone to LR mobile, they will be uploaded to the cloud and synced down to LrC. But they won't appear in the ASF collection and therefore will not be automatically removed from the cloud when you empy that collection.
The workaround to that is to connect to LR Web and manually delete the video files from the cloud library. Notice that one single video could use several hundred MB of storage.

Sent using Tapatalk
 
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