Sync misses occasional photos in a sync'd collection

[neilhunt]

Lightroom Version Number

Lightroom Classic CC 8.1.

Operating System

1. macOS 10.14 Mojave

Photographs loaded into a catalog on my Mac; selectively added to a synchronized collection marked to sync. Some (estimate about 1%) of the photos never make it to the cloud, even days after the rest of the collection has appeared; viewing at lightroom.adobe.com shows a collection without all the photos in it. The missing photos don't appear to be in the list of errors in Sync Errors.

How do I avoid this occasional failure?

How do I remedy it and get the missing photos synced when they are missing?

 

[Jim Wilde]

Can I just be clear what you're saying: you have a synced collection in LR Classic, which shows xx images, but that same synced collection (album in LRCC) shows a count somewhat less than xx. Is that correct? I'm talking about the number counts alongside the collection/album.

Have you looked in the Preferences>Lightroom Sync tab to see if there are any uploads still pending?

 

[neilhunt]

Collection in LR Classic has 514 photos; same collection on the web has 488 photos. LRCC shows the exact same number. (I guess that's more than 1% missing!) . There are no pending uploads, but there are a bunch of "errors" which don't seem to restart. I can't find any of the missing photos in this collection under "errors".

How do I retry the syncs that have errored out?

 

[Jim Wilde]

What do the errors say? Can you post a screenshot?

 

[neilhunt]

What do the errors say?

Just "Error"...
Screenshot attached

/Users/neilhunt/DriveNeil is local, and the files listed are present and intact and viewable on LR Classic locally.
/Volumes/Seagate is an external drive (which is often attached). The file was originally synced from local, and then moved to external, and the file root adjusted in LR. The drive is not now attached; attaching it and restarting LR and waiting even 48h does not change any of these messages.

It appears I need some way to trigger retry on these, but it's not obvious what that is...

 

[Jim Wilde]

Have you tried clicking on one of the listed files (start at the top of the list), that should take you to the folder with the image file showing in the grid. If that happens, do you see the three white dots showing, top right of the thumbnail? If so, and assuming the drive is connected, try clicking on those three dots....that's often enough to prompt things into action.

 

[neilhunt]

If so, and assuming the drive is connected, try clicking on those three dots....that's often enough to prompt things into action.

Thanks - a solution!

In my case, it's the sync arrow with a minus sign (see attached). DOUBLE click syncs it over again. But it appears I have to find and fix each picture separately - there must be a better way!

 

[Jim Wilde]

As the problem seems to be coming from the Classic end, you could try deleting the Sync.lrdata file. Same Lightroom Sync Preferences tab, this time hold down the Alt/Opt key and you should see a "Rebuild Sync Data" button, click on that and see if that frees things up.

 

[PeteGB]

I’m not sure I could repeat it under lab conditions but i’ve experienced this problem.

I think it occurs if you create a synced collection then make some edits on the main computer while the sync’ing in underway. Under some circumstances the image appears to get ‘stuck’ and you need to click the three dots to ‘unstick’ it.

It does present as pics just being ‘missing’ from the synced collection albeit they appear to be there on the main computer that created the collection. To try and explain that further the pics are on the computer but just missing on the device consuming the synced versoin, e.g. iPad.

It might be that you’ve actually got to be actively editing the particular picture whilst it is uploading, the three dots message is something to do with metadata (sorry, I can’t remember it precisely).

Pete

 

[johnbeardy]

I think it occurs if you create a synced collection then make some edits on the main computer while the sync’ing in underway. Under some circumstances the image appears to get ‘stuck’ and you need to click the three dots to ‘unstick’ it.

Do these images show in LrClassic's Catalog panel as the item "Sync Errors" ?

I suspect something similar, and can sync the photos after removing them from Sync Errors. So I first add them to the Quick Collection, remove them from Sync Errors which removes them from their collection, and then use the QC to add them back to their collection.

 

[PeteGB]

From memory I think yes, “Sync Errors”, then something about metadata update conflict.

The first couple of time it happened it took ages to work out what was going on. I’d been shooting at a fast frame rate and while sync was underway I’d looked at the sequence on PC and picked the best Image and done a quick crop and sharpen. I could see there was one picture missing from the synced collection but it wasn’t immedately obvious which one, it wasn’t until I looked at the individual picture sequence numbers I could work out which one was missing and infer what had happened.

If I’m disciplined and let the sync finish before I fiddle all is OK, every now and again I get excited about images, forget and get in a guddle before I remember what the problem is and sort it.

Again I can’t remember exactly what I do but it’s something like clicking on the three dots to ‘force’ a resync.

 

[johnbeardy]

Pete, not there - I was very specific about where to look for these Sync Errors. It wouldn't say anything about why.

 

[PeteGB]

Sorry John, I read yours in too much of a hurry and didn’t pick up the specificness of where to look.

No I have it’s interesting - And I’ve just found some more examples of the issue that I hadn’t noticed at the time (again, large numbers of very similar pictures shot at high frame rate).

If I look in “Catalog - All Sync Errors” (which I must confess I’d forgotten about) missing pictures are there. As I’ve now found some ‘live’ examples I can comment further.

On the PC the collection that is sync’ed to LR CC shows 76 pictures in the collection. If I look on the iPad the same collection shows 75 pictures.

If I look at the picture itself, either in the “All Sync Errors” or via the Folders panel the picture has two symbols top right.

There is the hamburger with down-arrow then next to it the double headed arrow with three dots. Hovering the mouse over either brings up a contextual message saying “Metadata file needs to be updated, Error Syncing with Lightroom CC”. If I click on either of these symbols it appears to force a sync, the picture is removed from “All Sync Errors” and the mobile collection now has the picture and this the picture count goes to 76.

If I look at most of my pictures they all have the ‘Hamburger and down arrow’ symbol and the “Metadata file needs to be updated” message, presumably because, like many, I’ve got the ‘Automatically save changes to XMP’ turned off.

Pete

 

[neilhunt]

I had 500 sync errors distributed across my collections, likely due to edits while syncing, as others have noted.

I used Option/Rebuild Sync Data.
Lightroom restarted and declared itself to be syncing 11,000 files, the number counting down about 10 per second.
Until it got to about 300 files left. Then it got stuck, with 400% CPU, and nothing happening for an hour.
I killed it and restarted it.
It declared it had 3000 files to sync. The number counted down pretty quickly, then started to increment - about 100 at a time.
It spent the night counting down from 3011 to 2990, then jumping back up to 3026, counting down to 2967, up again to 3125, down to 3051, etc.
This morning, 19,900 files to sync, and an hour later, 21,000.
Then it got stuck again. Had to restart the Mac.
Now it says 27,000 files. It's still counting down two or three a second, then incrementing by 50 or 100, and slowly climbing.
My total catalog is 220,000, 150,000 of which I haven't touched in a while, and only 90,000 synced to the cloud ecosystem.

The CPU usage for Lightroom is intermittently high (400%), but typically about 20-40%. Network usage isn't very high - "sent KB" increments by 1-2kB per minute - basically nothing. Received is even slower.
I have a 250Mbps Internet connection, but I've only used a couple of GB in the last couple of days of all this work, and most of that is probably Google Drive backup unrelated to this.

Any ideas what is going on?

 

[Victoria Bampton]

The counting down and counting up is it checking all of the files against the cloud catalog that it's probably already downloaded by now (so minimal internet use at this stage). Having to restart the Mac is due to a memory leak in huge syncs that they haven't managed to track down.