Sorry for the long quote but this is really what I struggle with... Logic reasoning is very hard for me, and with every update it seems that I lag behind further. I started with LR with the beta version, what, ten years ago or longer, and aways liked it and never looked back. I do work with desktop, ipod and ipad. All the talk about preview and smart preview is only partially making sense. I have watched zillions of tutorials, from Ben Wilmore to Julianne Kost (the latter being totally drama because she is useless for beginners, sorry), but don't really grasp the totality of the syncing. I do travel a lot, being a Belgian married to an American and living in the States). Both iphone and ipad are 256gig versions. I often take pics from my NikonD800 onto iphone/ipad with the dedicated sd card reader, loving that one btw...
If that "Load full resolution" is off, where exactly do my raw files go depending on having WIFI/NOWIFI... I take it that my raw files stay in my camera roll on phone/pad. If I am fortunate enough to have fast wifi, do my raws upload to my 1 TB I seem to have now? Does LRmobile know automatically to upload raws to server but put previews on mobile devices? Do I then manually take them off server once home to put on the drobo?
The next confusion point is "All photographs-All synced photographs"... At this point I have 427.313 photo's in my main catalogue. Pics are on a Drobo, which I have two off, so every 3 months I swap drobo's and sync the whole lot up. I think I have backup down. All synced photographs tells me 17.259, this is desktop. Phone says 17.316 pics. I have a couple of synced collections that I manually synced from LR desktop to mobile. I also have an iphone folder that is auto imported from camera roll.
Sorry again for the lengthy questions, know that I will hold you in my thoughts for helping me...
If I delete from this phone 17.316 folder, do I delete originals? Is it of use to have the auto importer on phone or am I only creating doubles of doubles? Once a month, I manually drag everything from phone onto drobo, to clean the phone...
What a lot of people lack is a "lightroom sub-basics for dummies supreme". Guess I better get of my keyboard before someone faints. I will reread this thread probably a hundred times in the days to come. Thank everyone for all the bits and pieces that are of so much help.
One of the problems is that the various LR mobile apps have moved on, and in some cases the settings have changed. Probably best if I try to explain how it works today, concentrating mainly on the iPhone (but the iPad would be only different if it's not a cellular-capable model). Hopefully if I give you that perspective it may answer your questions along the way, OK?
1. Any image you add to the LR mobile app will (eventually) sync up into the cloud ecosystem, from where it will subsequently appear in all your "connected" devices. "Connected" means the device is running the appropriate LRCC app and has been signed in using the same Adobe credentials as the app on your iPhone.
2. If the images are captured using the LRmobile camera app, these are not automatically added to the iPhone's camera roll, but are of course uploaded to the Adobe cloud.
3. Images captured using the phone's camera app (or another 3rd party camera app) will NOT be added to the LRmobile app unless/until the user makes that happen. This "making it happen" can be a simple manual "add photos from the Camera Roll" method, or in a more automated way by first enabling "Auto Add Photos (and/or Videos)" in the LRmobile preferences, and then selecting one of your existing synced albums (formerly collections) and enable that album's preferences (tap on the "three dots" icon on the main collection list screen, and tap on "Enable Auto Add").
4. Same with new imports from, say, an SD to Lightning connector. You can use that to capture new images, Raw included, using the iPhone Photos app, and once added to the Camera Roll they will again automatically be added to the album in LRmobile if that auto add has been enabled (you don't have to enable auto add on a specific album, you can import/add directly from the Camera Roll to the All Photos special album).
5. At the time of such a capture and import into the LRmobile app, you will then have two copies on your iPhone....the original copy in the Camera Roll and the copy that LRmobile has made in it's own internal cache, pending upload to the cloud. There is no mechanism from within the LRmobile app, I believe, that allows you to remove the original copy from the Camera Roll, the user has to do that manually.
6. When the images are added to LRmobile, they will appear in two places (but only the one copy): in the "auto add" album, and in the "All Photos" special album. This last one is the representation of all your synced assets in the cloud ecosystem, and it should be the same number as when viewed in the other synced apps (e.g. iPad, the new LRCC, LRWeb, and the All Synced Photographs collection in LR Classic). The fact that you have a small mis-match between Classic and LRmobile would suggest that you have a few files "stuck", which you should be able to see by looking at the "Lightroom CC" tab in your LR Classic Preferences.
The imperative thing to note is that if you remove ANY image from All Photos/All Synced Photographs, two things will happen: the first is that the image will be removed completely from the cloud ecosystem, i.e. gone, deleted, removed, gone, and there's no "cloud trash can" to recover it from. The second thing to be aware of is that in LR Classic, all that happens is that the image is removed from the All Synced Photographs collection, but remains in the catalog and on the hard drive. Understand, therefore, that if you "delete" the All Photos album (you actually can't, but you can delete all the images in it) then they will
all be removed totally from the cloud.
7. In terms of managing the space on your iDevice, you should now understand that at some point you might want to clean-up the Camera Roll, but that's something you have to do yourself. Once in LRmobile, however, there are a few things to help. Firstly, you now have some better information available in the LRmobile preferences, thinking specifically about the "Local Storage" tab and the "Cloud Storage & Sync" tab. "Local Storage" gives you the overview of how much space is being used on the device by LRmobile, and I do believe that some "intelligent management" of its space usage is in place. My understanding is that the originals that you might have added into LRmobile, once uploaded, may subsequently be silently removed and replaced with a much smaller preview. So you shouldn't find LRmobile using all your available space, especially on a 256gb model. Even then, there are controls in the "Cloud Storage & Sync" tab to help further, most notably the "Only Download Smart Previews" option. This has replaced the former "Load Full Resolution" option and simply means that if you've going out of WiFi/Cellular range and want some images available on the phone before you go, you could enable that option (I keep it permanently enabled), then use the "Store Locally" option on a per album basis to get smart previews only downloaded. Though note that if the "Only Download Smart Previews" option is NOT enabled, using the "Store Locally" option will download full originals (if they exist in the system). Every once in a while, I'll look at clearing the cache on either a specific album or globally via the All Photos album (or the "Local Storage" tab.
8. One other thing to note is what happens when you open an image into any of the "full-screen" modes such as Edit, Info, Review. If an original file exists in the ecosystem, and you haven't got the "Use Cellular Data" option enabled (Cloud Storage & Sync tab), i.e. you have full cloud access, LRmobile will initially download the smart preview while downloading and rendering the full original. These originals will be cached, and subject to the same "intelligent space management", but it's useful to know they might be there, even if you thought you were getting smart previews only.
I hope the above gives you a better understanding. I'm sure I've missed things out, so don't hesitate if you want to come back with more questions.