Today’s Question: My question is about synchronized photos from iPhones [or other smartphones] in Lightroom Classic. I now have four different iPhones under the “Folders” heading. Three of them are old ones. How can I delete them? Thanks very much for your help.
Tim’s Quick Answer: You can remove smartphones listed under the Folders heading by moving the photos shown under the applicable smartphone heading, and then removing all of the empty folders that remain under that heading.
More Detail: When you capture photos with the mobile version of Lightroom, the images are synchronized automatically to Lightroom Classic (or the cloud-based version of Lightroom). The photos will appear under a heading with the name of your smartphone, just like other photos (within folders) appear under a heading for the hard drive on which the photos are stored. In other words, in this context your smartphone is being listed as though it were an external hard drive, which in some respects it is as far as being a synchronization source.
So, if you want to remove a smartphone from the Folders list, you first need to move photos that appear below the smartphone heading to a different storage location. To do so you can simply navigate among the folders that appear under the heading of the smartphone on question. Select the photos you want to move, and then drag-and-drop those photos to a different folder location shown in the Folders section of the left panel in the Library module.
After you have moved all photos out of the folders below the heading for a smartphone listed in the Folders section, you can remove all of the folders so that the smartphone listing will disappear as well. To remove the empty folders, you can select one or more of the listed folders, right-click, and choose Remove from the popup menu that appears.
Once you have moved all photos to a different storage location and removed all photos from a smartphone listing, the smartphone heading will automatically be removed from the Folders list as well.