Negative filters/searches: showing "not Synced and Backed Up"

[Laura Smith]

Lightroom Version Number

Lightroom 3.3 X64 [ 20200611-1039-7df19f1 ] (Jun 11 2020)

Operating System

1. Windows 10

I'm trying to display all the photos that don't have full size originals in the cloud (originated from Classic), so I can reimport them in Lr Cloud. The "Synced and Backed Up" filter shows "(676 filtered)" so I want to invert the filter to show which photos aren't fully synced. There's no apparent way to get a minus sign in front of it in the search box. There's no option to invert a selection, which would be another way of doing it. Am I missing something or is it just not implemented? Creative solutions welcomed!

Thanks for your help!

 

[Jim Wilde]

When you use the "Sync Status" filter, you should see the option to select "Synced from Lightroom Classic", which would give you exactly what you're looking for.

 

[Laura Smith]

Thanks Jim! That was a lesson in not assuming what something does . I thought that filter showed all photos that originated in Classic. I didn't realise that once Lr cloud has an original, it doesn't consider that photo as being synced from Classic.

 

[Jim Wilde]

I didn't realise that once Lr cloud has an original, it doesn't consider that photo as being synced from Classic.

Well, if the file exists as an original in the cloud, then that means that it cannot have been synced from Classic. Yes, it may have started out as a Smart Preview from Classic, but it could only become an original if it was subsequently imported from one of the cloudy clients, which replaces that Smart Preview and so the file now has a different point of origin). So yes, "Synced from Lightroom Classic" means any image which currently exists in the cloud only in Smart Preview format.

 

[Laura Smith]

Makes sense when you put it like that! Is there a way to identify virtual copies that have made their way over to Lr cloud? They are forever stuck as "Synced from Lightroom Classic" because you can't reimport the full size version into Lr cloud, as it registers them as a duplicate. I'm up for a hacky suggestion!

 

[Jim Wilde]

It depends on how many there are in your Classic catalog. You could filter All Photographs for VCs, then manually select those that are synced and add them to a new collection which will sync as an album to the cloud. So at least you will have then isolated them in both apps while you figure out how you want to deal with them.

That might be easy to do if you have a relative few VCs, but not likely to work if you're one of the users who creates a VC of all or most images in Classic.

 

[clee01l]

It might be useful to point out that proxy image files sync'd from Classic are stored differently in the Adobe Cloud and do not count against your subscription limits where full sized originals originating from a Lightroom cloudy source do. So Adobe needs to make the distinction.

 

[Laura Smith]

You could filter All Photographs for VCs, then manually select those that are synced and add them to a new collection which will sync as an album to the cloud. [...]

Oo that's almost there, thanks. I only have fewer than 100 VCs in a catalogue of 14,000 images - I tend to clear up VCs when I've finished playing around with edits. What I want to be able to do is a monthly check that I've remembered to reimport into Lr cloud anything I've imported into Classic. So with the VCs in a collection/album I'd want to display anything not in that album and filter by Sync Status. So we're back to the impossible negative searches again. Hmmm... any good ideas?

It might be useful to point out that proxy image files sync'd from Classic are stored differently in the Adobe Cloud and do not count against your subscription limits where full sized originals originating from a Lightroom cloudy source do. So Adobe needs to make the distinction.

Thanks - I realise, definitely worth remembering though.

 

[Jim Wilde]

Oo that's almost there, thanks. I only have fewer than 100 VCs in a catalogue of 14,000 images - I tend to clear up VCs when I've finished playing around with edits. What I want to be able to do is a monthly check that I've remembered to reimport into Lr cloud anything I've imported into Classic. So with the VCs in a collection/album I'd want to display anything not in that album and filter by Sync Status. So we're back to the impossible negative searches again. Hmmm... any good ideas?

Hmmm, that's a tricky one (smart albums and/or colour labels in Lightroom would be a big help). There is a clunky method, but even that would depend on other things falling into place.....if all the images in Lightroom were in a least one album, you could click on the first album in the list, then shift-click on the last, so then you have all albums and their images selected. Then Ctrl/Cmd-click on the VC album (which removes its content from the selection), so at that point you have all images selected apart from the known VCs. In that state, running the Sync Status>Synced from Lightroom Classic filter should identify any outlier smart previews.

Sounds like that's what you want, but there's a couple of catches....first is ensuring all images are in an album (which you could do by creating a "not yet in any album" album, by using the search bar), but the big problem is likely to be that the images in the VCs album might also be in other albums. So the "Sync Status" filter will pick up any such VCs and confuse the filter results (which is where colour labels would help a great deal). But that's the best I can come up with right now.

I avoid the issue entirely as I remove the processed images from Classic (which I may or may not have synced as Smart Previews) afer first doing a Ctrl-S to write all settings to XMP. Then I import them into Lightroom, after which they'll sync back down into Classic. There's a lot more so it than that, of course, but that's the general workflow that I've adopted which works very well for me and avoids the complications that you are surfacing.

 

[Laura Smith]

if all the images in Lightroom were in a least one album, you could click on the first album in the list [...]

I already have a smart collection in Classic to pick up on anything not in a collection, which is part of my monthly-ish check. So as long as I do the checks in the right order, that works. Not elegant, but I've given up on elegant . Just tried it out and it's not as bad as it sounds!

I avoid the issue entirely as I remove the processed images from Classic (which I may or may not have synced as Smart Previews) afer first doing a Ctrl-S to write all settings to XMP. Then I import them into Lightroom, after which they'll sync back down into Classic. [...]

That sounds like a right pain . Out of interest... why do you do it like that?! Have you run into a problem I haven't hit yet, with the whole Classic/cloud jiggery pokery?

 

[Jim Wilde]

That sounds like a right pain . Out of interest... why do you do it like that?! Have you run into a problem I haven't hit yet, with the whole Classic/cloud jiggery pokery?

It's not too bad....probably a lot less painful than the hoops you're having to jump through to make sure you've found all the SPs that you want to convert to originals. I import into a "holding" folder outside the normal date-based folder structure, and I add the images to the static collection which heads up my version of John's Workflow Smart Collections. I may or may not sync that collection so that I can work on them from any device, but I ensure that keywords and location data are added exclusively in Classic. When the set of images is "done" I convert them all to DNG then do Cmd-S to write all the metadata to XMP, and at that point I remove the "holding" folder from Classic (which clears out any synced SPs from the cloud). Up to that point I'm simply doing what I'd need to do anyway if I was only Classic or Lightroom based. When that removal has synced, I can import the contents of that "holding" folder into Lightroom, the files are uploaded to the cloud and sync back into Classic (complete with metadata) and stored in my dated folder structure.

I do it that way so that I get all the data that I want, especially keywords and location data, into the cloud as well as in Classic. It allows me to sit on the fence until such time as I feel ready to commit to Lightroom only (if that ever happens).....I guess you could say I'm doing a migration in stages, rather than one big effort at some point in the future. If nothing else, it forces me into the discipline of processing images quickly after capture, and not leaving them lying around in a "to be done" state for weeks and months at a time.

But just to be clear, I possibly wouldn't be doing this if I was a power-user shooting thousands of images a week (though it would only be the lengthy cloud upload that I'd find daunting).

 

[Laura Smith]

Oh the metadata, of course! That doesn't sound like so much work once you say it gives you synced metadata. Yep, I'm going for sitting on the fence too . I'm excited about Lightroom cloud, but find myself using them interchangeably at the moment depending on what I'm doing.

Thanks ever so much for your help.