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Problem with laptop and desktop syncing with OneDrive

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SarahSamaan

New Member
Premium Classic Member
Joined
Apr 4, 2019
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9
Lightroom Version Number
11.5
Operating System
  1. Windows 11
I hope I can explain this clearly. I have my LR catalog and pictures on my home hard drive, and back up to One Drive. I recently traveled with my laptop and decided to try to use the same catalog. Somehow I think I ended up downloading everything to my laptop. Now I can't get my new collections to sync, so I can't view them on my ipad. In trying to re-direct LR on my laptop, I have corrupted the copy of the master catalog stored on the laptop. I have created a new catalog for the laptop to use as a temporary catalog that I can later add to my master catalog. But I still can't sync the new photos. Does this make any sense to anyone? Any suggestions much appreciated! Mainly I just want to be able to sync again. When I look for sync activity under preferences, it shows zero activity.
 
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SarahSamaan said:
I hope I can explain this clearly. I have my LR catalog and pictures on my home hard drive, and back up to One Drive. I recently traveled with my laptop and decided to try to use the same catalog. Somehow I think I ended up downloading everything to my laptop. Now I can't get my new collections to sync, so I can't view them on my ipad. In trying to re-direct LR on my laptop, I have corrupted the copy of the master catalog stored on the laptop. I have created a new catalog for the laptop to use as a temporary catalog that I can later add to my master catalog. But I still can't sync the new photos. Does this make any sense to anyone? Any suggestions much appreciated! Mainly I just want to be able to sync again. When I look for sync activity under preferences, it shows zero activity.
Click to expand...
Should I just uninstall LR on the laptop?
 
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Depends what you mean by "Lr".!
You can only ever sync ONE Lightroom-CLASSIC catalog. If you start syncing another (eg. Laptop instead of Desktop) then the laptop is the ONE that syncs ( & downloads all Cloud files! as you experienced.)

If you want to use Lightroom-CLASSIC on the Laptop then - Read this article by Victoria-
MULTIPLE COMPUTERS- How to use (Lightroom Queen)
 
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Thanks so much Rob! That makes sense. It sounds like the problem is that I don't need Classic on both computers. Since I really don't need my whole catalog with me when I travel, the portable drive option is not for me. I do want to be able to download and process new images while I'm traveling, and I want to be able to access my catalog as well, but maybe Lightroom (not Classic) would be best to use on the laptop. I only use the laptop for travel, and use the desktop probably 95% of the time.
Does this plan sound do-able?
 
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I will also add that the idea behind OneDrive is that you are supposed to have a virtual copy of your files that is available anywhere. My computer guy seemed to think it would be seamless. However, this is the second misadventure I have had with combining LR Classic and OneDrive, so I have learned my lesson! They do not seem to play well together.
 
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I have my catalog and my photos on OneDrive and I work with them both on my PC and my laptop. Never had any serious problems.
Two things I always keep in mind though: I always have only one copy of Lightroom Classic running, and I have full copies of everything on both my PC and my laptop (the "Always keep on this device" option).
 
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Thanks very much, Jan. Do you mean you have complete copies of your full catalog stored on both devices?
I know that the catalog is not the same as the photographs, but I think that somehow I ended up downloading the photographs and not just the catalog.
One thing I realized is that my pictures and catalog are stored on an external D drive that I never remove from my desktop computer. I did get a message on my laptop that it could not access the D drive, and that would affect sync-ing. But it was still able to access the catalog, presumably through OneDrive (which also backs up my D drive).
 
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