Get Cloud photos properly sync'd down to Classic

[Auz]

Lightroom Version Number

9.2

Operating System

1. macOS 10.15 Catalina

My recent photos in the Classic catalog are in a confused state owing to my own mistakes. I'd like to clear out the past year's contents in Classic and re-sync down from the cloud. How can I do that? Perhaps I could pause syncing and just delete all the photos in Classic--but not from the All Synced Photos Collection. Restart syncing and everything would get re-downloaded to the designated folder? Would that work?

My All Synced Photographs collection appears to have all of the photos I see on the Cloudy side, with the exception of the movies. Maybe movies don't appear in that collection because they only get downloaded once. I guess I'll have to move those into Classic manually.

 

[Johan Elzenga]

My recent photos in the Classic catalog are in a confused state owing to my own mistakes. I'd like to clear out the past year's contents in Classic and re-sync down from the cloud. How can I do that? Perhaps I could pause syncing and just delete all the photos in Classic--but not from the All Synced Photos Collection. Restart syncing and everything would get re-downloaded to the designated folder? Would that work?

No, that would not work. You cannot delete a photo from Lightroom Classic and keep it in ‘All Synced Photographs’ at the same time. All Synced Photographs is a collection, so a photo that is deleted from Lightroom Classic is also deleted from there. If you then enable sync again, it will be deleted from the cloud too.

I think your only option would be to create a brand new Lightroom Classic catalog and sync that. Because you can only sync one catalog, that will disable sync of the old catalog and download all cloud images into this new catalog. If there are other (non-synced) photos in the old catalog that you want to keep, then you could use Import from Another Catalog and import the old catalog into the new one.

 

[Auz]

Yes, after posting my question I slowly realized that All Synced Photographs is just a collection. Thanks for outlining a plan that will actually work, Johan! It seems like there could be a more straightforward way to "restart" the sync, but I guess not.

I have been curious about the fact that you can pause sync, but not turn it off. I guess the way you turn it off is to start syncing a different catalog. So is this rule true: Once a Lightroom Cloudy catalog starts syncing with some Classic catalog it can never stop? It can switch to a different catalog, but it will forever be trying to sync somewhere. (Of course it can be paused indefinitely.) This is probably a distorted way of looking at it, because it is actually Classic that is in charge of the sync process, not the cloud.

 

[Johan Elzenga]

I guess that Adobe decided that because you can only sync one catalog, pause is effectively the same as stop. They could have called it stop/start rather than pause.

 

[Auz]

Your solution did the job, Johan. Thanks very much. I am gradually beginning to understand how sync works, but the model is not simple for me to internalize.