How do I remove photos from Adobe Cloud sync?

Previously we looked at how to check what’s synced to the Adobe Cloud. But how do you remove photos from the cloud?

You may rely on the cloud to get your mobile photos synced back to Lightroom Classic, but if you only have the 20GB Photography Plan, you’ll eventually run out of cloud space. Remember, photos synced UP from Lightroom Classic are just Smart Previews, which don’t count towards your 20GB limit. Anything uploaded using the cloud-based Lightroom apps or web interface are held as full-size originals in the cloud. Then the full-sized photo/videos are downloaded into Classic, so they can gobble up your space quickly.

When you hit your 20GB limit, of course you can just increase your Adobe cloud storage. The next step up is 1TB. But that’s an additional cost that you may not want, especially if you don’t require the full-sized originals in the cloud. So, how do you remove the full-sized photos from the cloud to stay within your 20GB limit?

How do I remove photos from the Adobe Cloud?

There are potentially a few steps and we’ll explain the effect of each action as we go….

1. First, check Classic has completed syncing from the cloud. This means any photos uploaded using other devices are safely downloaded into Lightroom Classic and stored on your local hard drive.
2. Next, go to the Collections panel and check if any collections are synced. You do this by checking the sync on the very left side. As we’re going to remove photos from the cloud using All Synced Photographs, we need to unsync the collections first. This prevents them being removed from these synced collections too. Repeat for all of the Collections that are synced. (Please note, removing photos from a collection doesn’t remove them from the catalog, just from the collection.)
   
3. Allow Lightroom Classic to finish syncing these changes before proceeding to the next step.
4. Go to All Synced Photographs and delete all of the photos. You may wish to do this in chunks if there are a lot you want to delete, as it takes a while to sync the changes. Make sure you are in All Synced Photographs! (Alternatively, you can skip this step and use the web interface in step 5. This deletes both photos and videos from the cloud.)
   
5. One final step… if you have any videos in the cloud, they don’t show in Lightroom Classic’s All Synced Photographs collection. You’ll need to log into the web interface to delete them from the cloud. Go to https://lightroom.adobe.com and log in with your Adobe ID. Click the filter icon to the right of the search field, then click the Video icon, just to the left of Reset. Just as you would on the desktop, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-A (Windows) / Cmd-A (Mac) to select all of the videos. Then click on Delete in the blue bar above to delete the videos.
   
6. Once Lightroom Classic’s sync completes, you may want to re-upload the photos as smart previews. This then makes them accessible on your mobile devices again. To do so, just click on the sync icons we mentioned in step 2 to sync the collections again, or drag individual photos to the All Synced Photographs collection to upload them. One word of warning – if any of the albums were shared publicly, you’ll need to share them again. Also, the links will have changed, so you may need to send the new links to your contacts.

Cloud Sync is covered in a lot more detail in Chapter 23 of our Adobe Lightroom Classic – The Missing FAQ book.

This is just one way of removing originals from the cloud, and admittedly it’s a bit of a blunt instrument. There’s no way of identifying which photos have originals in the cloud using either Lightroom Classic or the web interface, so you have to remove everything (unless you know which photos will be full-size originals).

If you have a large number of photos synced or you frequently use shared albums, you might consider using the cloud-based desktop app to do steps 4/5, as it allows you to filter by original/smart preview status. That’s a post for another day!