Today’s Question: I planned to sync 20 photos to put on the web [in Lightroom Classic]. Instead, 248 photos started syncing to the cloud. I can’t get it to stop and it goes on and on. Is there any way to stop this and also get my photos out of the Lightroom cloud? Thanks for all you do.
Tim’s Quick Answer: In Lightroom Classic synchronization of photos to the cloud is managed by collections. You can simply turn off synchronization for the applicable collections to disable synchronization and remove the photos from your cloud storage.
More Detail: Because synchronization to the cloud in Lightroom Classic revolves around collections, you must first create a collection and add photos to that collection if you want to synchronize images. You also need to enable synchronization for the collection. It is easy to enable some of these options without intending to, because there are options for adding selected photos and enabling synchronization in the dialog for creating a new collection.
Any “normal” collection (as opposed to “smart” collections) can be set to enable or disable synchronization. When you hover over a collection in the Collections list on the left panel in the Library module, you’ll see an icon to the left of the collection. If synchronization is not enabled, that icon will look like a checkbox that is turned off (meaning just a square). If synchronization is enabled, the icon looks like a lightning bolt turned on its side.
You can click where that icon appears to enable or disable synchronization. So, in this case you would see the lightning bolt icon for the affected collection, since synchronization is obviously being attempted in the background. You can click that lightning bolt to turn off synchronization. That will stop the attempted synchronization, and also remove the applicable photos from your cloud storage if some of them had already been synchronized.
Note that you can also pause synchronization by clicking on the identity plate at the top-left of the Lightroom Classic interface and then clicking the option to pause synchronization.