Last batches of imported photos to LrC not syncing to cloud

[Stephanie Booth]

Lightroom Version

Lightroom Classic 13.0.1

Operating System

1. macOS 14 Sonoma

I have a batch of photos imported into LrC that are "stuck" syncing to the cloud. I've wandered through the forum looking at sync problem threads and tried a variety of troubleshooting steps, to no avail. Some background and what I tried.

This is my usual workflow: import photos into LrC from my camera, stick them in a synced collection, wait for the photos I took from my phone to arrive in LrC through sync, also add them to the collection. I've been doing this for years.

I've been on holiday this last week so taking photos regularly. At one point I noticed that sync seemed to be stuck (the photo count was not decreasing, new photos from my phone were not arriving). The Creative Cloud app told me a firewall was preventing access to the cloud servers. I assumed that the place where I was staying had safeties in place on their wifi to block applications using up a lot of data transfer (would make sense). Now that I'm back at my base with good wifi, I assumed things would sort themselves out, but they haven't.

Here are some observations/actions/infos:
- there are 395 photos syncing according to the top right cloud icon, 250 uploading and 4 pending in preferences sync tab
- the blue semi-circle that rotates while syncing is not moving
- I've restarted more times than I can count, rebooted the computer, signed out of CC, rebooted, signed back in, even tried moving the Sync.lrdata (1.7Gb) file to a different folder
- I have about 115k synced photographs
- in the preferences pane, I saw one photo in the sync queue was a photo with a missing source file (an old one, I'm not carrying my external hard drive with me) so I "unsynced" it, no change
- I've had "pending" files in the sync queue before, it's a chronic issue, and in my memory has never prevented newer files from uploading to or downloading to the cloud. I did try to identify which files they were, but I can only reach the web version of them, not sure where they are in the catalog (see screenshot)

Any ideas? Similar stories? What else can I try? Thanks!

 

[Stephanie Booth]

Oh, I might be onto something! Looking closely, I realised there are other photos in the "sync queue" with source files missing (they're on my external hard drive back at home). Can this cause the whole queue to freeze? And what would be the best way to remove those photos from the sync queue without removing them from the synced collections they are in? (by filtering photos edited in the last week, I found about 100 or so of them)

 

[Stephanie Booth]

Update:
I created a smart collection for photos edited in the last week.
Then I selected those that were not on my hard drive (117 of them). I added a "to sync" keyword and labeled them red for easy identification.
After that I went to the All Synced Photographs folder, right-clicked and removed them from All Synced Photographs.
This unfortunately also has the side-effect of removing them from shared collections they are in. (In the case of these photos, it won't be too horrible to put them back in their respective collections, but still annoying.)
After I had done that the little blue circle under the cloud icon up right started moving again, but stopped shortly after.
I now have a longer list of pending photos, and there are still some in the "uploading" list that are from my external hard drive, but which I definitely did not edit recently (or at all, it seems). Why on earth are those trying to sync?
I'll be reunited with my hard drive in 36 hours, so I guess the simplest thing to do is wait until then and see if all my problems go away once I connect it to the computer and LrC can find the source files – however, I'm sure I've already had situations with missing sources files in the queue and I don't recall it blocking everything (I may be mistaken).

 

[clee01l]

I realised there are other photos in the "sync queue" with source files missing (they're on my external hard drive back at home). Can this cause the whole queue to freeze? And what would be the best way to remove those photos from the sync queue without removing them from the synced collections they are in? (by filtering photos edited in the last week, I found about 100 or so of them)

Yes. this is the reason. You can not sync image files if they are missing. Sorry that you had to work through this yourself. It is usually the first question that I ask.

Still this should not be a reason for the sync to stop. When Sync encounters a missing file it should report it, skip it and move on to the next one. If you will report this as a Bug with Adobe and reference the link back in this thread I will support your Bug report.

If you are looking for a solution to prevent this problem, here are the steps that I would suggest:

• Before Syncing, use the "find missing photos" feature to locate which images have missing files.
• Duplicate any syncing collections that contain those images with non syncing equivalent collections.
• Remove (temporarily) those missing images from the syncing collections
• Let the sync process complete then pause it.
• When you can resolve the missing image files, restore the syncing collections with images from the non syncing equivalent collections.
• Resume the Sync process.
  

 

[Stephanie Booth]

Still this should not be a reason for the sync to stop. When Sync encounters a missing file it should report it, skip it and move on to the next one.

Exactly, I’m sure that is how it behaved before!

I will definitely file a bug report once I confirm that making the missing source photos available again « unsticks » things.

And thanks a lot for the workaround with the collections, it’s smart!

 

[Stephanie Booth]

Connected external hard drive and no more missing photos, but it doesn't seem to be helping, unfortunately.

 

[Stephanie Booth]

Have tried resetting the prefs file, but doesn't seem to change much. Going to let LrC running for a bit to see if it works it out, but I suspect I'm going to need fresh troubleshooting ideas here... :-/

 

[Stephanie Booth]

If anybody comes around here I am really really stuck with this problem

 

[Stephanie Booth]

Out of desperation I hit the Rebuild Sync Data button. I was very hopeful initially: my recent photos in the Cloud started downloading to LrC. I left the computer alone for a few hours (115k synced photos, remember) and when I returned, I ran into memory problems on my mac and had to force-quit LrC. I rebooted, tried again, same problem, then made some space on my hard drive and am trying again. Fingers crossed.

One strange thing I noted is that a the very start, LrC seemed to be counting downwards (initially 110k+ photos to sync, then 95k, etc). I saw it go down to 30k. But then when I came back, it was back up around 60k. Now it's around 73k and seems to be creeping up, but not reliably. If I click on the cloud icon and look under Local Activity, the numbers seem to jump back and forth. 73589... 73652... 73799... What is going on? (It is, generally, heading upwards.)

I hope I'm not going to regret this...

 

[Stephanie Booth]

Another update (maybe this will be helpful to somebody someday). Upon closer inspection, the global count of images to sync is slowly going down.
I found this comment in a thread that might explain what is going on: https://www.lightroomqueen.com/community/threads/infinite-sync-loop.45712/#post-1302364

 

[clee01l]

One strange thing I noted is that a the very start, LrC seemed to be counting downwards (initially 110k+ photos to sync, then 95k, etc). I saw it go down to 30k. But then when I came back, it was back up around 60k. Now it's around 73k.

Here’s a thought (and I don’t know if this is true). Lightroom has to sync “X” images and “x” metadata edits. If the process occurs such that only the images are synced then another pass to sync the metadata changes. This might account for the increase in the sync count.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[Stephanie Booth]

Celebration – the rebuild sync data finished rebuilding during the night, and LrC now shows all synced (for real) and my last RAW photos from my Indian vacation have reached my phone!
I had been afraid to do Rebuild Sync Data because I didn't know how long it would immobilise my computer. Actually, it's not so much of a pain as you can quit LrC during the process and open it again later to pick up where it left off. In all, it took around 15 hours, I'd guess, for my 115k synced photos (a few hundred of which were not synced yet).