Thanks for answering so quickly... I was going to make a separate post about that. Anyway here's the story of the past month or so...
I have 66.000 images on an external hard drive and also a backup on our NAS. Everything is sorted nicely into year/month folders, no missing images, no extra files, images named consistently.
These 66.000 local images are in my MasterCatalog for Lightroom Classic which contains all my previous work (processing, ratings, keywords, facial recognition) which is quite a bit, I've had Lightroom since version 4.
I my dreams there are 4 copies of each image:
- 1 in the cloud
- 1 local copy of the cloud for CC
- 1 local copy on external hard drive which Classic uses as basis for the MasterCatalog
- 1 local copy on NAS ("manually" synced via BeyondCompare at semi-regular intervals)
My subscription has 1 Terabyte of storage. The 66.000 images are about half a terabyte.
To achieve this... I spent the past month in frustration.
What I did (twice, for reasons... ):
- migrate MasterCatalog to Lightroom CC
- wait "patiently" for ~10 days until upload is finished
- start Lightroom Classic
- start Sync in Lightroom Classic
Stuff starts happening, tons of Virtual Copies get created, it never ends, seems to run into a loop.
Attempt 1 failed because my MasterCatalog was an unkempt mess full of inadvertent duplicates, missing images, extra files, etc. (I'll leave it at that, it was worse... if not for the NAS, I wouldn't have many pictures left)
Between attempt 1 and 2, I verified that the setup is indeed possible. For that test I used a ~300 image catalog. When everything seemed to work, I tried again.
Attempt 2 failed ... when the sync just stopped doing anything.
So today I deleted everything on mobile for the second time and I decided, that I will not use the cloud storage at this time, because there are too many images, it takes too long and my patience is worn out.
Instead I want to sync collections directly out of Classic to use the "smart previews" for sorting through everything, and thin the herd before attempting another upload of originals.
It turned out that my MasterCatalog was unable to upload a single file. Download yes but got stuck on uploads. Every other catalog I tried/created worked fine. Just not the MasterCatalog ...
I tried everything: logging out, rebooting, repeatedly deleting everything on mobile, switching catalogs, rebuilding sync data, deleting the sync cache....
Finally, I exported all my photos into a new catalog and voilà I can suddenly sync those photos via collections.
I can only conclude that something was wrong with that other catalog. What that was I couldn't say...
