Lightroom Classic Sync Files

[matt-thebixlers]

Lightroom Version Number

15.1.1

Operating System

1. macOS 26 Tahoe
2. iPadOS

Hello,

The sync function in Lightroom Classic is taking hours with no apparent progress. It has said "syncing 1 photo" for hours and the cloud storage amount has not changed. I recently opened Lightroom on my iPad for the first time in a while but I have not added any new files. Is there a way to check to see if this is working properly? Thanks in advance for your consideration.

Matt

 

[Psamathe]

Others have different experiences from myself but I found LrC/Lr Mobile sync something of a disaster. Unsure about current status but a bug ridden release somewhat messed up my LrC Catalog and I'm still slowly working through it to remove the "From Lr Mobile" develop steps.

 

[matt-thebixlers]

Thank you for your perspective and I'm sorry you are experiencing problems with this. I did some additional research and was able to solve my problem by selecting Preferences > Lightroom Sync > Sync Activity. I then selected and deleted the one file that was not syncing. It was a random picture from my iPhone that I did not care about. Working fine now.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Have you tried it recently @Psamathe? There have been a lot of improvements in reliability over the last year or so.

Glad you got it working @matt-thebixlers

 

[Psamathe]

Have you tried it recently @Psamathe? There have been a lot of improvements in reliability over the last year or so.

Glad you got it working @matt-thebixlers

Not tried recently. I'd expect it better but that they did a buggy release and that I'm still removing all the LrC Develop steps "From Lr Mobile" that it can happen once highlights the risk and could happen again.

<offtopic>
Decided instead as I'm working through my photos, many are travel to unusual sites around the world and I'm sorting the "From Lr Mobile", doing a lot of exporting to Wikimedia Commons (issuing Creative Commons Licenses) and doing a .jxl export and then load into Apple photos to sync to devices. I don't get on well editing on tablets/phones so the sync is just for viewing on mobile devices.

As an amateur I like that others can make use of my phots via Create Commons (free) licenses and people do - I have a note seperate from license saying if people can inform me of their use I'd be interested. I've even had print books posted to me (free from publishers) when my photos have been used in printed books!).

Re: jxl I've seen a lot of "not so good" comments about Adobe's jxl export but I did some tests and find that 70% compression creates an excellent quality yet very small sized file.
</offtopic>

 

[Eric1951]

I too have developed that syncing feeling recently! Here's the story. Lightroom Classic 15.1.1 all up to date on a Windows 11 PC - ditto all up to date. Historically I have used synced Collections extensively to view but seldom to edit on Android devices. (I have a lot of un-synced collections too - for convenience.) I also sync WhatsApp photos from my phone - which works OK.
Recently - for the sake of security - I have spent a long weekend converting my entire 15,000 + photo collection from various varieties of RAW to DNG - and set edits to save to file and backed the whole lot up locally. Whew! At the end of the day, most of my collections have re-synced with Lightroom cloud faultlessly (Cloud storage is about 35% full) but I'm left with about 10 photos which WILL NOT! They just stick, they don't appear in sync. errors, the little cloud icon top right stays blue forever, the number outstanding unchanged! Most or these are original dngs, some are Lightroom copies, differently processed or cropped, a couple are psds. In one case where the original and one copy won't sync, a second copy does so without difficulty. I have tried everything in the book, including removing the villains from sync individually, then restoring them to the relevant collection, removing whole collections (most of the photos in which behave perfectly) from sync. then re-ticking alongside to put them back.
I'm flummoxed!
Any inspirations anyone?

Thank you

 

[Califdan]

I have tried everything in the book

Each "book" can have different advice even though most touch on the same things. I gather that you have

• Removed images from the Sync activity log in Preferences (didn't un-stick others)
• Removed images from the "All synced Photographs" special collection and then re-added them to one or more synced collectiuons (they still did not sync

what other steps have you done?

 

[Swingman]

Have you tried it recently @Psamathe? There have been a lot of improvements in reliability over the last year or so.

Glad you got it working @matt-thebixlers

Victoria,
Today I have been installing Classic for the first time. I started the sync at 13.30. I have about 85GB in about 8800 files. I have a fast internet and using 2TB SSD ( measured speed of around 850 R/W) I am running this on a MacBook Pro M5 and no ther applications are running.
I am only syncing at the rate of 600 files per hour.

Is this normal or any way of speeding it, as current rate of progress would take about 14 to 15 hours to complete the task.

 

[clee01l]

Victoria,
Today I have been installing Classic for the first time. I started the sync at 13.30. I have about 85GB in about 8800 files. I have a fast internet and using 2TB SSD ( measured speed of around 850 R/W) I am running this on a MacBook Pro M5 and no ther applications are running.
I am only syncing at the rate of 600 files per hour.

Is this normal or any way of speeding it, as current rate of progress would take about 14 to 15 hours to complete the task.

You don't measure "fast internet". but I say 8800 file to the Adobe Cloud might take a while. Lightroom Classic is spending a lot of time up front staging temporary files and your internet will only handle a few at a time.
A 1Gigabit internet is considered fast. However an MBP connected via WiFi to your 1Gigabit router will be the big bottleneck at ~150mbps!

 

[Swingman]

You don't measure "fast internet". but I say 8800 file to the Adobe Cloud might take a while. Lightroom Classic is spending a lot of time up front staging temporary files and your internet will only handle a few at a time.
A 1Gigabit internet is considered fast. However an MBP connected via WiFi to your 1Gigabit router will be the big bottleneck at ~150mbps!

Cletus,
On my mobile phone I get 250mbps ( measured using apps). To download a file of 85Gb would only take 45min. Allowing for that this is split into 8800 pieces. I would expect to take may be about 4 to 5 hours. May be the delay due to LrC is not allocating full bandwidth to sync process. If it is the case is there any option/settings to speed up the process

 

[Eric1951]

Each "book" can have different advice even though most touch on the same things. I gather that you have

• Removed images from the Sync activity log in Preferences (didn't un-stick others)
• Removed images from the "All synced Photographs" special collection and then re-added them to one or more synced collectiuons (they still did not sync

what other steps have you done?

Each "book" can have different advice even though most touch on the same things. I gather that you have

• Removed images from the Sync activity log in Preferences (didn't un-stick others)
• Removed images from the "All synced Photographs" special collection and then re-added them to one or more synced collectiuons (they still did not sync

what other steps have you done?

 

[Eric1951]

Thank you. I started by simply Rebuilding Sync Data. No help, same images still 'stuck'. Removed these images from queue (hence also from the cloud) and of course this cleared the Uploading message top right. Tried reselecting the images to a synchronised Collection and uploading restarted but stuck again. Tried de-synchronising the Collection whilst images still stuck - this did not remove them from the queue, so this done manually (again!). Tried editing the images a little - adding stars - before attempting to re-synch. No help. Tried selecting a couple of the troublesome images - no longer synced or syncing to cloud - to an entirely new synced collection. And they stuck yet again. Goes without saying that I have tried pausing and resuming syncing, closing and reopening lightroom, rebooting the PC, tearing my hair . . .

It is odd that most - but not all - of the affected images are in the same PC folder.

Another of those intractable Adobe bugs I fear, which never get explained and which mysteriously disappear following a further upgrade - to be replaced by a few fresh ones!!

<sigh>

 

[Psamathe]

Re: OP's Sync Blocking Images
If you can find a solution I guess at this point you need to decide if it's a robust enough feature for long term use or will the same happen again in a few days/week/months (and probably just at the most inconvenient time.

Without knowledge of the solution, things I'd be trying to investigate are:
1. Copy original file, give a different name, import into LrC and add to sync'd collection and does it sync ie is it the name.

2. Use an external image converter to convert the original into a different format eg if original RAW, convert .jpg with different name and import into LrC to be sync'd and does it sync?

3. Use image processor to cut excerpts of original and store to new file (eg into 2 images one top half and other bottom half) store in new filenames and import to LrC and sync and do they sync?

4. Maybe use an external tool to check and remove any EXIF tags in case any of those are causing the problem.

My limited (maybe incorrect) understanding of the sync. process for images imported into LrC is that LrC generates Smart Preview (or Smart Preview like) versions to actually sync. So guessing on top of my assumption, might be the issue is with the conversion to the format that is sent to the servers or might be the upload to servers that is the issue. Please do correct my misunderstanding if my understanding is correct - I claim no expertise on this.

 

[clee01l]

Cletus,
On my mobile phone I get 250mbps ( measured using apps). To download a file of 85Gb would only take 45min. Allowing for that this is split into 8800 pieces. I would expect to take may be about 4 to 5 hours. May be the delay due to LrC is not allocating full bandwidth to sync process. If it is the case is there any option/settings to speed up the process

You could have gotten an M4 Pro or M4 Max chip in your MBO with more than 10CPU COre and More than 16GPU cores. and your processing would not be hampered by your hard ware. As for a Wi Fi of 250mbps. That is only for the phone and only for the location away from your router. Move the phone next to your MBP and you will get a different result. Run speed test on your MBP and you get a different result. Your ISO may throttle your upload speeds and favor download speeds (for movies etc.) Is that 250 mbps speed the up load speed?

If you have 1 gigabit router and internet, wire your MBO directly to a port on the router with CAT6 cable and run https://www.speedtest.net/ on the MBP . FWIW, my Mac Studio is in my office next door to my wiring closet. Here are the numbers I get on my Mac:

Running the same test on my iPadPro downstairs and I get ~150 Mbps. When I run this on my iPhone sitting next to my Mac Studio I get ~85Mbps upload speeds.

Solve your bandwidth issues and then you can point fingers at Lightroom.

 

[Swingman]

You could have gotten an M4 Pro or M4 Max chip in your MBO with more than 10CPU COre and More than 16GPU cores. and your processing would not be hampered by your hard ware. As for a Wi Fi of 250mbps. That is only for the phone and only for the location away from your router. Move the phone next to your MBP and you will get a different result. Run speed test on your MBP and you get a different result. Your ISO may throttle your upload speeds and favor download speeds (for movies etc.) Is that 250 mbps speed the up load speed?

If you have 1 gigabit router and internet, wire your MBO directly to a port on the router with CAT6 cable and run https://www.speedtest.net/ on the MBP . FWIW, my Mac Studio is in my office next door to my wiring closet. Here are the numbers I get on my Mac:
View attachment 28147

Running the same test on my iPadPro downstairs and I get ~150 Mbps. When I run this on my iPhone sitting next to my Mac Studio I get ~85Mbps upload speeds.

Solve your bandwidth issues and then you can point fingers at Lightroom.

Here is speed test results, next to where I use my MBP.

You could have gotten an M4 Pro or M4 Max chip in your MBO with more than 10CPU COre and More than 16GPU cores. and your processing would not be hampered by your hard ware. As for a Wi Fi of 250mbps. That is only for the phone and only for the location away from your router. Move the phone next to your MBP and you will get a different result. Run speed test on your MBP and you get a different result. Your ISO may throttle your upload speeds and favor download speeds (for movies etc.) Is that 250 mbps speed the up load speed?

If you have 1 gigabit router and internet, wire your MBO directly to a port on the router with CAT6 cable and run https://www.speedtest.net/ on the MBP . FWIW, my Mac Studio is in my office next door to my wiring closet. Here are the numbers I get on my Mac:
View attachment 28147

Running the same test on my iPadPro downstairs and I get ~150 Mbps. When I run this on my iPhone sitting next to my Mac Studio I get ~85Mbps upload speeds.

Solve your bandwidth issues and then you can point fingers at Lightroom.

I am sitting at the same location as yesterday. My router is next door.
Here is the download results taken few mins ago

 

[Swingman]

Here is speed test results, next to where I use my MBP.

I am sitting at the same location as yesterday. My router is next door.
Here is the download results taken few mins ago

Yesterday’s numbers from my mobile was taken from my bed, that is one floor above the router.

 

[Swingman]

You could have gotten an M4 Pro or M4 Max chip in your MBO with more than 10CPU COre and More than 16GPU cores. and your processing would not be hampered by your hard ware. As for a Wi Fi of 250mbps. That is only for the phone and only for the location away from your router. Move the phone next to your MBP and you will get a different result. Run speed test on your MBP and you get a different result. Your ISO may throttle your upload speeds and favor download speeds (for movies etc.) Is that 250 mbps speed the up load speed?

If you have 1 gigabit router and internet, wire your MBO directly to a port on the router with CAT6 cable and run https://www.speedtest.net/ on the MBP . FWIW, my Mac Studio is in my office next door to my wiring closet. Here are the numbers I get on my Mac:
View attachment 28147

Running the same test on my iPadPro downstairs and I get ~150 Mbps. When I run this on my iPhone sitting next to my Mac Studio I get ~85Mbps upload speeds.

Solve your bandwidth issues and then you can point fingers at Lightroom.

When I bought my MacBook Pro M5, Apple only allowed box shifter to sell M5 base model. I bought mine from Costco at about 35% discount (only for one day). I could have bought one with extra memory from Apples store, that would have been increase of 50% from my purchase price.
Before I bought I was checking perpromance difference between this and M4 pro, being rest of the spec same. Most of the test M5 base model outperformed except some graphics test where it only lagged by about 12%. Even the internal SSD is much faster than on M4 pro. So hobbyists use I am happy with my purchase.
The cores in M5 MacBook Pro is lot better than on M4 pro.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARcYx2tz84s&t=453s

 

[clee01l]

Here is speed test results, next to where I use my MBP.

I am sitting at the same location as yesterday. My router is next door.
Here is the download results taken few mins ago

Your screen shot looks good on the download but horrible on upload where you need it. (51Mbps). This may be a limitation imposed by your ISP.

Lightroom uses the GPU and CPU cores to stage multiple files concurrently. The more cores you have, the faster Lightroom will be on file operations.

I know you can’t do anything about the hardware that you have. But if Lightroom performance is important to you, then some research before you buy would have helped.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[Swingman]

Your screen shot looks good on the download but horrible on upload where you need it. (51Mbps). This may be a limitation imposed by your ISP.

Lightroom uses the GPU and CPU cores to stage multiple files concurrently. The more cores you have, the faster Lightroom will be on file operations.

I know you can’t do anything about the hardware that you have. But if Lightroom performance is important to you, then some research before you buy would have helped.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

I also can’t do about the internet. Of course I can change the supplier. My current contract run for another 10 month. I did do some generic research and decided it’s ok for me.
I just googled it and there is a complainant in the Adobe forum. One of the employee said that Lightroom Classic doesn’t prioritise this task and only support as a background activity.
So faster Mac with more cores is not going to make significant difference to syncing.
https://community.adobe.com/questio...w-compared-to-lightroom-downloader-app-982876

 

[Psamathe]

Unsure if I'm missing the issue here but questions raised seem to be in relation to very few of the total numbers of sync'd images

Hello,

The sync function in Lightroom Classic is taking hours with no apparent progress. It has said "syncing 1 photo" for hours and the cloud storage amount has not changed. I recently opened Lightroom on my iPad for the first time in a while but I have not added any new files. Is there a way to check to see if this is working properly? Thanks in advance for your consideration.

Matt

but I'm left with about 10 photos which WILL NOT!

How crucial is processor speed of internet upload speed given the number successfully sync'd and the few that appear stuck?

 

[clee01l]

Unsure if I'm missing the issue here but questions raised seem to be in relation to very few of the total numbers of sync'd images



How crucial is processor speed of internet upload speed given the number successfully sync'd and the few that appear stuck?

Swingman introduced another issue "piggybacked" on to this thread. It does not relate to the original issue.

 

[Swingman]

Here is my take on the original issue raised by op. I was using Adobe downloader to download all the original files from the Adobe cloud. There were 16files it complained were corrupted. Those belong to group of photo-scanned images from slides. I get the impression that even though I managed to upload them to cloud from my iPad, some other protocols prevented from downloading these images. Since they were not important images I deleted from the cloud. Then re-ran the downloader. A summary of the results can be found on my other thread

S

Thread 'Adobe cloud - file corruption'

Nov 12, 2025

I was using Adobe Downloader to archive my files in the Adobe cloud. I have about 7800 files occupying about 80GB. There were two incidents.
1 Few of my scanned slides using Samsung S24 files even though they were post-processed in Lightroom mobile but during the download they got stuck and downloader stopped working. I had to delete the offending JPEGS and restart the downloader. It continued to download rest of the file and finished normally.
2 The summary report highlights few error massages on missing files. Few are relate to deleted files. Others it list non-existent video files...

• Swingman
• Replies: 7
• Forum: Lightroom mobile/web apps (cloud-based service)

Do any of your refused to downloads belong to non traditional group? Is there any unusual types, or multi generational JPEGs etc?

 

[Psamathe]

Completely "off-the-wall" wondering but does the Adobe Cloud scan images/uploads of content they "don't like".

I know that some cloud storage services scan uploaded/stored content for copyright stuff and will close your account if they suspect it (fair number of complaints on some Reddits). What made me wonder is reports some years back in relation to sexualised images where some services were reported to be blocking eg medical images because their analysis identified to much flesh tones.

Just a complete wild idea and I have not experienced any such issues and not read any reports of Adobe scanning content, but wild idea?

 

[Swingman]

Completely "off-the-wall" wondering but does the Adobe Cloud scan images/uploads of content they "don't like".

I know that some cloud storage services scan uploaded/stored content for copyright stuff and will close your account if they suspect it (fair number of complaints on some Reddits). What made me wonder is reports some years back in relation to sexualised images where some services were reported to be blocking eg medical images because their analysis identified to much flesh tones.

Just a complete wild idea and I have not experienced any such issues and not read any reports of Adobe scanning content, but wild idea?

The original images were shot in 70’s & 80’s using slide film. I used my mobile phone to photograph the lid slides and uploaded into cloud. There are mainly street photos on buildings. They were not very good quality by modern standards. Only some of them failed to download. I think some part of it got corrupted and hence didn’t downloaded. Sometimes the database get corrupted due to their internal process.

 

[Psamathe]

The original images were shot in 70’s & 80’s using slide film. I used my mobile phone to photograph the lid slides and uploaded into cloud. There are mainly street photos on buildings. They were not very good quality by modern standards. Only some of them failed to download. I think some part of it got corrupted and hence didn’t downloaded. Sometimes the database get corrupted due to their internal process.

Maybe open original in Preview (macOS), "File>Duplicate" then do a "File>Save As" That should re-write the image (particularly if you save it in adifferent format. eg if slides digitised into tiff then save as jpeg (set quality to 100% to minimise quality loss but you say they are not great quality anyway)