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Sync Should this plan work (at least in theory)?

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Steve Birch

Steve Birch

New Member
Premium Classic Member
Joined
Sep 6, 2020
Messages
6
Location
Leeds, United Kingdom
Lightroom Experience
Beginner
Lightroom Version
Classic
Lightroom Version Number
Lightroom Classic 9.4
Operating System
  1. Windows 10
  2. Android
Hi,

There are features that I'd like to use in both Lr and LrC, and I've been trying to get set up with a way of working. I've tried several approaches, and I'm hitting problems, but before I go much further, I'd like to get some advice or feedback on what I'm trying to achieve.

My equipment looks like this:
  • A good specification desktop computer running Windows 10 with LrC & Lr
  • A laptop currently running Linux (because it's very old) with access to lightroom.adobe.com. I intend to buy a new laptop next year running Windows 10 with Lr (not LrC)
  • Various Android devices
  • 1TB Lr cloud storage
  • Home internet connection reliably at ~140Mbps down/~30Mbps up
In theory, I'm trying to do this:
  1. Import my single LrC catalogue into Lr and sync to cloud (allowing full-size images to go to the cloud). Current catalogue size is ~380Gb/~42,000 images
  2. Create a new, clean LrC catalogue.
  3. Tell LrC to save synced files to a new, clean folder.
  4. Make the new LrC catalogue the synchronised catalogue and start synchronising.
  5. After synchronisation, use Lr & LrC as below
    1. Lr (or Lr website) on desktop or laptop to import images from SD card, editing away from home and use some of the Lr only features (e.g. the fantastic search tool)
    2. Lr on Android to view, pick & share images already in the cloud. Probably little or no editing.
    3. LrC only on the desktop to do editing and use the Publishing services. No importing
My goal is to have Lr cloud as the single source of truth, with a full copy in LrC (i.e. all files at full size with edit history). I'm happy to use previews only on other devices. This means that I always have a full copy at home that I can back up; however, I see fit but have the flexibility of cloud storage/access on other devices.

Does this make sense? Is there anything fundamentally wrong with what I'm trying to do here?

I really appreciate any advice you can provide.

(Also, this is my first proper post here - please let me know if I've missed some vital info or etiquette)
 
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I don't see anything wrong with this approach. I don't think Adobe intended LrC and Lr to work together, but I do something similar.
Here are some comments:
You don't need Lrc and LR on the PC. Just work with one of those. However if you want to Migrate your LrC catalog to LR, then you need both installed migrate the whole catalog. (You can remove Lr from this PC after the migration is complete. Then if it is your preference, you can sync the Cloud back to a new LrC catalog.

You can install Lightroom on the Linux as a WINE app. and then the Lightroom cloud images would be available on the Linus machine. Or you can access Lightroom for the Web through your LINUX web browser.

My approach for using both Lr and LrC was a little different. I have a bunch of phots that are mostly Chaff in my Master Catalog. I chose the best of my master image and added them to a Syncing collection. That put about 7000 Smart DNGs (Proxy files for originals that don't count against my subscription storage limit.) in the cloud for access by my mobile devices.
I used a MBP laptop running LrC for travel but I replaced that with an iPadPro running Lr. I now import into Lr on the iPadPro and full sized images get sync'd back to my Master catalog on my desktop.

My rationale for keeping the master catalog is for the "chaff" that I don't think needs to be taking up cloud storage. If I ever get my master catalog "chaff" free, I can then migrate it to replace SmartDNGs with full size images. Lightroom is not yet a product that can replace Lightroom Classic. You can't have a proper backup if your master images are in the cloud and your edits are too but no edit history and only limited snap shots . If I accidentally delete a large number of image file in the cloud, they are gone after 60 days. If you realize on day 61 that it was a mistake, too bad. Also if you make batch metadata changes in the cloud and discover a mistake (careless user error) that affects large number if images, these are not recoverable. If you have a Lightroom catalog locally as in LrC, there is a backup catalog that won't have your careless user error.
I used to use a hierarchal keyword system. Lightroom for the cloud does not support this. Now my well ordered keyword hierarchy is a mess of flat structure Lr keywords and a well ordered hierarchal keyword list. I have yet to resolve e this outstanding issue.
 
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Thanks Cletus. That gives me some more confidence in what I'm trying to achieve. And I take your point about not needing Lr on my desktop if I'm using LrC there. That should keep things cleaner, so I'll remove it once I'm happy that LrC is up and running.

The problem I keep hitting is the clean sync from the cloud down to LrC. It starts off well but quickly gets bogged down. I assumed that with a clean catalogue it would just download as fast as my internet connection would allow. However, it quickly gets to a point where the "Catalog/All Photographs" counter is incrementing at about 1 image every 10 to 15 seconds. I get occasional bursts of activity on my network connection, but mostly there's no traffic (the image counter is steady so doesn't correlate to the network activity). CPU is stable at about 20%, and memory is sitting at 30%. My internet connection is fibre to premises and stable at 145Mbs. I can download a 4Gb ISO file in a couple of minutes. So there's no bottleneck there.

I'm currently on my 3rd iteration of trying this, and I've never had it get to the end (even after a week of running). This makes me think that LrC is doing something other than just downloading the images. I'm assuming there is more going on under the hood than I realise (i.e. more than just downloading the files).

I'm tempted to try a complete uninstall / re-install of LrC in case there is some sort of library caching that's not specific to the catalogue.
 
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I suspect that you will be much happier using Lightroom Classic on your desktop, with a full cloud backup with the cloud storage service of your choice, as your "source of truth." You can easily blow through all the free storage in the Adobe plan, and they charge a very high rate for additional storage. I am about to sign up with Backblaze Personal.

My personal guess, based on my "daytime job" as a software product manager (recently retired) is that Adobe has to move to a converged code base for both Classic and the version that we have nicknamed "cloudy." However, that sort of convergence is a multi-year effort, based on my experience with other complex software products. In the meantime, focus your work on Lightroom Classic.
 
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Steve Birch said:
In theory, I'm trying to do this:
  1. Import my single LrC catalogue into Lr and sync to cloud (allowing full-size images to go to the cloud). Current catalogue size is ~380Gb/~42,000 images
  2. Create a new, clean LrC catalogue.
  3. Tell LrC to save synced files to a new, clean folder.
  4. Make the new LrC catalogue the synchronised catalogue and start synchronising.
  5. After synchronisation, use Lr & LrC as below
    1. Lr (or Lr website) on desktop or laptop to import images from SD card, editing away from home and use some of the Lr only features (e.g. the fantastic search tool)
    2. Lr on Android to view, pick & share images already in the cloud. Probably little or no editing.
    3. LrC only on the desktop to do editing and use the Publishing services. No importing
My goal is to have Lr cloud as the single source of truth, with a full copy in LrC (i.e. all files at full size with edit history). I'm happy to use previews only on other devices. This means that I always have a full copy at home that I can back up; however, I see fit but have the flexibility of cloud storage/access on other devices.

Does this make sense? Is there anything fundamentally wrong with what I'm trying to do here?
Click to expand...
Provided you remain disciplined in your importing (i.e. only import into one of the Lightroom apps), then absolutely that would work. I do something very similar, as does Victoria. The only thing you need to understand is that while most things sync freely between Classic and the cloud, some things do not. Specifically keywords, location data, and face recognition data do not sync....so keyword only in a cloud app, and use Lightroom's face recognition (not Classic's). For geotagging, if the image captures are from a GPS-enabled device (such as your phone) there'll be no issue, as both Classic and Cloud have the ability to populate the location fields from the GPS coordinates. However, Lightroom doesn't have mapping capability for images with no GPS data, so for those you could use Classic's geo-tagging to add GPS coordinates to the images. That GPS data will sync to the cloud, so that some of the location fileds will then be automatically populated in Lightroom.

Regarding the slow download sync, the high speed of your connection really doesn't factor.....you'll always be constrained by the speed of the slowest link in the chain, which is likely to be the speed of the Adobe servers....many people have noticed fluctuating daily speed over the years, often tied to the time of day. (as different parts of the world wake up and start working).
 
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An update.

Things seem to be going reasonably well since I did the uninstall / re-install of LrC. I saw the usual profile of things going really well at first but then slowing down to an absolute crawl.

I had convinced myself that this must have been something local to me, and I must confess that I paused for a while and tested a clean LrC install on a clean Windows install (using a virtual machine). After an hour or so I saw the same behaviour of it slowing down (eventually satisfying myself that it is not something local to me).

I went back to my main setup and resumed the sync and we're making good progress. The sync is stuck at 245 images (and has been for some time), but the "All Photographs" count is steadily incrementing and we're about 8,000 images away from completion. And the rate seemed to pick up a little too, so my ideas about what was going on (i.e. it couldn't be the Adobe servers) was clearly wrong....and I'm happy with that :)

I've got to this point before and had it just stick at this number and not import any files. Hopefully, this will be OK this time (and maybe I should have been more patient last time).

Fingers crossed :)
 
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