# Lightroom and Classic minimize disk space



## richard.hallett (Jan 7, 2020)

Laptop with Windows 10,  1TB internal, 2TB external
I just made the switch from Lightroom 5.7 to the Lightroom subscription. In order to maximize flexibility I chose to download both Lightroom and Lightroom Classic. I successfully migrated my catalog and had Lightroom store my photos on an external drive. I also set up Classic and set all my collections to sync.  I'm storing all smart previews on my internal hard drive. In classic my synced images are stored on the internal drive.  It appears that I have done something wrong because now my number of photos has doubled from 30,000 to 60,000 and I am using up most of my internal hard drive space. The cloud account shows 60,000 photos and  239 GB of space used.  Before I did this I had plenty of space on my  internal hard drive.  I'd like to be able to take my laptop without the external drive and still work on my photos. I don't know why my number of photos doubled.


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## Victoria Bampton (Jan 8, 2020)

richard.hallett said:


> I also set up Classic


This bit could be key. How did you do this?



richard.hallett said:


> now my number of photos has doubled from 30,000 to 60,000


Where are you seeing the 60000? Classic? Cloudy? Both?


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## Jim Wilde (Jan 8, 2020)

Victoria Bampton said:


> Where are you seeing the 60000? Classic? Cloudy? Both?


And are any of those additional 30000 images virtual copies, or full resolution originals?


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## richard.hallett (Jan 11, 2020)

Victoria Bampton said:


> This bit could be key. How did you do this?
> 
> I installed classic on my hard drive. Same laptop that I installed cloudy on.
> 
> ...


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## richard.hallett (Jan 11, 2020)

Jim Wilde said:


> And are any of those additional 30000 images virtual copies, or full resolution originals?


I don't know how to determine if they are virtual copies. 

One thing I did notice is that photos taken with cameras that don't have the capability to shoot RAW show two identical copies next to each other. Whereas DNG show one copy.


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## Jim Wilde (Jan 11, 2020)

richard.hallett said:


> I don't know how to determine if they are virtual copies.


Virtual Copies have an upturned corner, bottom  left, in the Grid. See this screenshot of an original image with a virtual copy:



Or, if you select All Photographs, then enable the Attribute option in the Library filter, you can click on the VC icon (see screenshot) which will populate the grid with all VCs in the library. The "breadcrumbs bar" (below the toolbar) will indicate the total number of VCs found.


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## richard.hallett (Jan 12, 2020)

Jim Wilde said:


> Virtual Copies have an upturned corner, bottom  left, in the Grid. See this screenshot of an original image with a virtual copy:
> 
> View attachment 13776
> 
> ...


Jim, thanks for the screen shots and explanation. Very helpful. In classic I was able to determine that 23,800 photos are virtual copies. In cloudy, I don't see the upturned corner or any way to filter by VC. If I delete the virtual copies how do I prevent them from being created again? 
Thank you,
Rich


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## Jim Wilde (Jan 12, 2020)

I wouldn't rush to delete them yet, we need to figure out what they are first. Cloudy doesn't support VCs, it uses real copies if needed, so there'll be no upturned corners there. Can you tell me the total number of images for All Photos in Cloudy, All Photographs in Classic, and All Synced Photographs in Classic?

We just need to figure out what you might have done wrong...I suspect you re-enabled sync in the Classic catalog after you migrated that catalog to the cloud. Re-enabling sync after the migration can open up a can of worms, it is entirely possible that those 23k VCs in Classic are the images that are synced with the cloud, not the originals....so deleting the VCs in Classic could result in the original copies in the cloud being deleted also. Have a look at some of the VCs in Classic to see if they have the "sync" icon showing in the top right corner of the thumbnail in Grid view, and if it does look at the original file next to it to see if that has the same sync icon.

Let me have those numbers so that we can help figure out the best way to proceed.


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## richard.hallett (Jan 12, 2020)

Jim Wilde said:


> I wouldn't rush to delete them yet, we need to figure out what they are first. Cloudy doesn't support VCs, it uses real copies if needed, so there'll be no upturned corners there. Can you tell me the total number of images for All Photos in Cloudy, All Photographs in Classic, and All Synced Photographs in Classic?
> 
> We just need to figure out what you might have done wrong...I suspect you re-enabled sync in the Classic catalog after you migrated that catalog to the cloud. Re-enabling sync after the migration can open up a can of worms, it is entirely possible that those 23k VCs in Classic are the images that are synced with the cloud, not the originals....so deleting the VCs in Classic could result in the original copies in the cloud being deleted also. Have a look at some of the VCs in Classic to see if they have the "sync" icon showing in the top right corner of the thumbnail in Grid view, and if it does look at the original file next to it to see if that has the same sync icon.
> 
> Let me have those numbers so that we can help figure out the best way to proceed.


Photos in Cloudy = 60,115
Photos in Classic = 60,163
Both VC and Original have the sync icon in upper right.
I installed Cloudy, then Classic, migrated classic and then enabled sync for each of my collections in classic. Maybe the start of my problems?


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## Jim Wilde (Jan 12, 2020)

You didn't included the All Synced Photographs total (should be the same as the Cloudy total).

In Cloudy, click on All Photos and make sure you are in one of the two Grid displays. Then click on the Filter icon (right hand side of the Search bar), select the Sync Status drop down option and select "Synced and Backed up" and wait for the grid to be populated, then note the total (it should say 1 of xx,xxx, need the figure for xx,xxx). Then change the selection to "Synced from Lightroom Classic" and let me have the total for that.


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## richard.hallett (Jan 13, 2020)

Jim Wilde said:


> You didn't included the All Synced Photographs total (should be the same as the Cloudy total).
> 
> In Cloudy, click on All Photos and make sure you are in one of the two Grid displays. Then click on the Filter icon (right hand side of the Search bar), select the Sync Status drop down option and select "Synced and Backed up" and wait for the grid to be populated, then note the total (it should say 1 of xx,xxx, need the figure for xx,xxx). Then change the selection to "Synced from Lightroom Classic" and let me have the total for that.


Cloudy, Synced and Backed up = 30,445
Synced from Lightroom Classic = 29,670

One question, I do have an image of my computer that I took just before I started the process to upgrade from Lightroom 5.7. Is it worth it for me to just start over? Of course I'd need some guidance on how to avoid getting to this place again.

Thanks again for all your help!


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## Jim Wilde (Jan 13, 2020)

Thanks for those figures, which are about what I expected to see (though some things don't add up). I have to go out soon, and will be out for several hours. When I get back I'll try to explain what I think has happened, after which we can discuss the best way forward. In the meantime, it would be good to understand what your objectives were when you decided to use both Cloudy and Classic on the same system. Generally speaking, there's little added value by doing that as you can get many of the "cloudy" benefits by just running Classic and syncing just smart previews to the cloud.....those SPs are in most cases adequate for mobile access and album sharing. So if you had specific goals in mind, it would be good to hear what they are before making a decision about how to proceed.


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## richard.hallett (Jan 13, 2020)

Jim Wilde said:


> Thanks for those figures, which are about what I expected to see (though some things don't add up). I have to go out soon, and will be out for several hours. When I get back I'll try to explain what I think has happened, after which we can discuss the best way forward. In the meantime, it would be good to understand what your objectives were when you decided to use both Cloudy and Classic on the same system. Generally speaking, there's little added value by doing that as you can get many of the "cloudy" benefits by just running Classic and syncing just smart previews to the cloud.....those SPs are in most cases adequate for mobile access and album sharing. So if you had specific goals in mind, it would be good to hear what they are before making a decision about how to proceed.


It became obvious that I needed to upgrade my version of lightroom and in doing so I wanted to keep all my options open. I didn't (and don't) have a good conceptual understanding of the new way of doing things. I read that both could be used together and so I thought I'd implement both, Also, Adobe offered a package with both which suggested that they could work together. Given what you said and my experience so far it seems clear that I should be running classic and not use cloudy. 

I liked the idea that I could reduce the use of my internal disk space by leveraging space in the cloud, which comes with the subscription. Also, it seems that there is a way to backup your originals to the cloud. Consequently I tried to set up my originals on an external hard drive and syncing to the cloud. It was my understanding that any edits I made to my photos while not connected to the external drive would automatically sync back to the external drive and the cloud when I was connected again. 

From this experience it's clear that I don't have a good grasp of how things work.


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## Jim Wilde (Jan 13, 2020)

You can only reduce the use of internal disk space by running cloudy only.....Classic requires that all the cataloged files reside on local storage, not cloud storage. Yes, you could run Classic (with all the images stored locally), but additionally using cloudy to "back up the originals to the cloud" is difficult to achieve as well as being a very expensive cloud backup system.

Also not sure where you read that both could be used together.....they actually can, but not without a total understanding of how the two interact with each other, and most importantly the ways in which they DON'T interact with each other (and as knowledgeable as some of us are about the inner workings of the syncing system, we still don't know it all) . The reason why cloudy is bundled with Classic in the Photography Plan, together with the 20GB of cloud space, is to allow users to "dip their toes in the water" to see how they like it. Adobe themselves recommend that Classic and Cloudy are not used together in an integrated workflow, i.e. they would suggest we pick one and stick with it until you decide to switch.

The first mistake you made was re-enabling sync in Classic after migrating the catalog, for precisely the reason that migration is the tool that allows the user to make that switch from Classic to cloud, i.e. it's designed as a one-way deal with no going back.

Anyway, we need to figure out what you want to do going forward. I believe that both your Classic catalog AND the cloud catalog are significantly compromised, and while it might be possible to fix things it will likely be difficult (in a time-consuming way) to be completely sure that all is exactly correct. Before doing any of that, however, you need to decide what your desired end result would be. Have a read of the Cloud Sync section of your Missing FAQ book, where you'll get a much better understanding of the benefits of using the Adobe Cloud, and how it would be possible to attain those benefits with Classic as your main Lightroom editor.

Get back to me after you've thought about that end result, and I'll help work out how to get there. Starting over from the old LR5 catalog would obviously be possible, but it might be a pity to clear everything out of the cloud and then re-upload a lot of it again in a more controlled way.....if we can find a way to retain some of the cloud files that would save some pain.


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