Today’s Question: I have 1,800 photos in my “All Synced Photographs” collection but not more than a couple hundred in my synced collections. I once made a mess of my catalog by deleting these and they all came back again anyway. How can I get these under control?
Tim’s Quick Answer: You can resolve this issue by identifying which photos should be removed from cloud storage based on not being in a synchronized collection, and then making sure that other images don’t get added directly to cloud storage.
More Detail: The first thing to do here is identify where the photos came from, if possible. For example, if you had synchronization enabled for a different catalog, then switched it to the current catalog, photos from the cloud would be downloaded into the latter catalog. If you add photos directly to cloud storage, such as by importing to the Lightroom mobile app, they’ll also show up in Lightroom Classic if you have synchronization enabled.
If you’re confident that none of the photos that appear in the “All Synced Photographs” collection are accounted for in your local photo storage, you can safely remove photos from cloud storage via the “All Synced Photographs” collection. If you want to preserve images in cloud storage that are in synchronized collections, however, you’ll want to mark those first.
For example, you could mark all photos that are included in a synchronized collection, such as by adding a specific color label to them as long as you aren’t using color labels for other conflicting purposes in your workflow. Let’s assume, for example, that you add a blue color label to all images in all collections that have synchronization enabled.
You can then go to the “All Synced Photographs” collection in the Catalog section of the left panel in the Library module, and set a filter for images that do not have the attribute you assigned. In this case, for example, you would want to set a filter for all images that do not have a blue color label. You can then select all the images that should not be in cloud storage, right-click on the thumbnail for one of the selected images, and choose “Remove from All Synced Photographs” from the popup menu.
Once you’ve removed these “extra” images from cloud storage, you’ll just want to be sure you aren’t unintentionally adding photos to cloud storage, causing new images to appear in the “All Synced Photographs” collection. For example, if you have the automatic import feature enabled in the Lightroom mobile app, new photos you capture with your smartphone will automatically be added to Lightroom, and will therefore automatically appear in the “All Synced Photographs” collection.
