Today’s Question: I synchronize photos from my iPhone to Lightroom Classic by importing the into Lightroom Mobile. I discovered that some photos have been imported into Lightroom Mobile but do to show up anywhere in Lightroom Classic. What can I do to repeat the process to force the missing photos to sync?
Tim’s Quick Answer: In this type of scenario, the best approach is probably to download all photos from Adobe Creative Cloud and import the applicable photos into Lightroom Classic manually.
More Detail: There are several ways that photos can appear in cloud storage with Adobe Creative Cloud, but not in Lightroom Classic. In my view the most likely explanation in this case is that you may have switched which catalog was being synchronized with the cloud, leaving some photos “stranded” in cloud storage. It is also possible that an error occurred, causing certain photos to not synchronize properly.
One way you can resolve this issue is to download all photos from your Adobe Creative Cloud account and import only those that are not duplicates (or only those you specifically want to import). You could then remove the photos from cloud storage if you don’t want them there.
Fortunately, Adobe provides a software tool that makes it easy to download all your photos stored in the cloud. To get started, point your web browser here and sign in with your Adobe Creative Cloud account:
https://lightroom.adobe.com/lightroom-library-download
Click the “Export my photos” button, and you’ll see a message to let you know that an email will be sent to you with a download link once the files are ready for download. The downloads will be a series of ZIP files, which you can extract to access the downloaded photos.
You can then import those photos into your Lightroom Classic catalog. You can turn on the “Don’t Import Suspected Duplicates” checkbox in the File Handling section of the right panel in the Import dialog if you want to import all photos that aren’t already in your catalog. You can also filter the photos if you only want to import some of them, such as to only import photos from a specific date range.
Once you’ve imported the photos, you may want to remove them from cloud storage, as they would not otherwise be represented in the context of cloud storage in Lightroom Classic.
