Today’s Question: I had previously enabled synchronization for some collections in Lightroom Classic, but have decided I don’t want to have any photos in the cloud. I turned off synchronization for the collections that had it enabled, but the photos still appear in “All Synced Photographs”. I assume that means they’re still in the cloud. If so, how do I remove them?
Tim’s Quick Answer: As long as you’re totally sure that the only way photos were synchronized to the cloud via collections in Lightroom Classic, you can remove all photos from cloud storage by selecting all images in the “All Synced Photographs” collection and then right-clicking on a selected image and choosing “Remove from All Synced Photographs” from the popup menu.
More Detail: Once you’ve enabled synchronization for a collection in Lightroom Classic the photos in that collection will be synchronized to cloud-based storage. However, if you disable synchronization the photos won’t be removed from cloud storage. This issue can cause there to be “stragglers” in your cloud storage, meaning photos that are taking up space but that you don’t want to have in cloud storage.
As noted above, you can remove photos from the “All Synced Photographs” collection in the Catalog section of the left panel in the Library module to remove the photos from cloud storage. Simply select the applicable photos, right-click, and choose “Remove from All Synced Photographs” from the popup menu.
However, because this will remove the photo from cloud-based storage it is important to be sure that is safe to do. If the photos were only added to cloud storage by being included in a collection with synchronization enabled, removing them from cloud storage is no problem because the originals should still remain in your local storage (as long as you haven’t since deleted any of those images).
If, on the other hand, the images were added to cloud storage by capturing a photo using the Lightroom mobile app, or by importing a photo to Lightroom mobile, web, or desktop (excluding Lightroom Classic), then you’ll want to be sure you have the source files being managed locally via Lightroom Classic before you remove them from cloud-based storage. For example, images synchronized from Lightroom mobile to Lightroom Classic can simply be dragged to your preferred folder location and managed as a normal part of your workflow.
Note that you can also review photos that are in cloud-based storage, and remove them if needed, by using Lightroom in a web browser. To get started with that, point your web browser to https://lightroom.adobe.com and sign in with your Adobe Creative Cloud account.
