# I just don't get it - Lightroom classic  CC and Lightroom mobile.



## Kath M (Mar 27, 2018)

I've had a love/hate relationship with Lightroom for years. I was just getting the hang of organizing my photos into neat year/month/day/subject folders. Lightroom mobile was understandable. I have lots of collections containing over 4000 pics. (I know that is excessive, I had hopes of organizing all my vacation pics!)
I have 500 missing photos. 
Now I am totally baffled about how to proceed. It seems all my synced collections have changed to a huge number of folders. My naming method has disappeared for these images. I try to organize my pics and everytime I move something it turns into a missing folder.
I would like to keep using Lightroom Classic CC. Am I correct that "Lightroom mobile" is really Lightroom CC?  I don't need all those photos to be synced. If I delete those folders are my pics safe in Lightroom Classic. 
I need SIMPLE. I take 1 or 2 pics of all kinds of things. Parts, directions, etc.  As well I take pics of events and trips. 

On top of this - I recently learned that Dropbox has been collecting ALL my pics. Even copies of those I download. Thousands of pics going back to 2012. That is not your fault. But I am losing my mind with all this!


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## Linwood Ferguson (Mar 27, 2018)

There is no need to use Lightroom CC (aka LR Mobile on Steroids).  You can use Lightroom Classic CC without any cloud involvement, it is what many of us do.

You won't be able to edit on other devices.  But you won't have to deal with synchronization or synchronized collections.


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## Kath M (Mar 28, 2018)

Fine. I can live with that. But things are very messed up now. Most of the pics in collections I have in Lightroom Classic. But there are some that went directly there from my iPhone. 
How best to straighten all this out?


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## Johan Elzenga (Mar 28, 2018)

Kath M said:


> I try to organize my pics and everytime I move something it turns into a missing folder.


That means that you organize the pics outside of Lightroom. That's the only mistake you make. You should organize them from within Lightroom. Drag & drop the pics from one folder into another in the Lightroom folder panel. That is all. That way you can organize them as you want, without Lightroom losing track of them.


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## Linwood Ferguson (Mar 28, 2018)

@Kath M you can straighten it out but sadly I am not the one to tell you how, as I stopped using CC pretty soon after it came out as a not-of-interest tool, but there are a lot of experts here who, if you want to just stop using it but retain images ingested in it, can guide you.  Also, there are a lot of people that use both tools together, so not trying to dissuade you.  You do not NEED to use it if you do not need its features, but if you do, it's quite nice.


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## Johan Elzenga (Mar 28, 2018)

Ferguson said:


> @Kath M you can straighten it out but sadly I am not the one to tell you how, as I stopped using CC pretty soon after it came out as a not-of-interest tool, but there are a lot of experts here who, if you want to just stop using it but retain images ingested in it, can guide you.  Also, there are a lot of people that use both tools together, so not trying to dissuade you.  You do not NEED to use it if you do not need its features, but if you do, it's quite nice.


I don't think this is about Lightroom CC. Lightroom CC can't have 'missing photos', because it stores the photos in the cloud. If the photos aren't there, they aren't in Lightroom CC either.


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## Linwood Ferguson (Mar 28, 2018)

JohanElzenga said:


> I don't think this is about Lightroom CC. Lightroom CC can't have 'missing photos', because it stores the photos in the cloud. If the photos aren't there, they aren't in Lightroom CC either.


The comment about "some went directly there from my phone" made me think some had been ingested in Lightroom CC not Classic.  If CC is not involved then I'm not sure what the question is, but if CC is involved, I am unclear how to preserve an image ingested in CC so it lands in Classic and then gets deleted from the Cloud along with everything else in CC.  Which I thought was the question but may not be.  @Kath M ?


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## Johan Elzenga (Mar 28, 2018)

Ferguson said:


> The comment about "some went directly there from my phone" made me think some had been ingested in Lightroom CC not Classic.


Not necessarily. If you use a synched Lightroom Classic catalog, then your phone images will download directly into that catalog. And because the OP said "_I try to organize my pics and everytime I move something it turns into a missing folder_", I can only conclude we are talking about Lightroom Classic. Missing folders do not exist in Lightroom CC.


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## Linwood Ferguson (Mar 28, 2018)

JohanElzenga said:


> Not necessarily. If you use a synched Lightroom Classic catalog, then your phone images will download directly into that catalog. And because the OP said "_I try to organize my pics and everytime I move something it turns into a missing folder_", I can only conclude we are talking about Lightroom Classic. Missing folders do not exist in Lightroom CC.


I'm going to show my ignorance here, but maybe the answer will also educate others.

If you are using a sync'd Lightroom Classic catalog, you are sync'ing to Lightroom CC's cloud, right?   (Noting we are talking Classic 7.2).

So if you start on the phone, go through the CC cloud to Classic... doesn't CC at that point consider it to be the "original"?

So absent other action to sever that in Classic, if you delete it on the Cloud, doesn't it delete it in the Classic collection to which it sync'd? 

So if you want to preserve it in Classic, while getting rid of the cloud, mobile and all things CC (and that may not have been the OP's intent), don't you have to sever that connection in Classic?  Is that as simple as removing it from the sync'd collection?   Do you have to move it to a separate folder first?  Or does it always remain in Classic regardless, and no Cloud action affects it at all?


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## Johan Elzenga (Mar 28, 2018)

Kath M said:


> I try to organize my pics and everytime I move something it turns into a missing folder.





Ferguson said:


> If you are using a sync'd Lightroom Classic catalog, you are sync'ing to Lightroom CC's cloud, right? (Noting we are talking Classic 7.2).
> 
> So if you start on the phone, go through the CC cloud to Classic... doesn't CC at that point consider it to be the "original"?


Yes, the original iPhone photo will remain stored in the cloud, but a copy is downloaded to Lightroom Classic.



Ferguson said:


> So absent other action to sever that in Classic, if you delete it on the Cloud, doesn't it delete it in the Classic collection to which it sync'd?


It removes it from the synched collection, but not from the catalog or the disk.



Ferguson said:


> So if you want to preserve it in Classic, while getting rid of the cloud, mobile and all things CC (and that may not have been the OP's intent), don't you have to sever that connection in Classic? Is that as simple as removing it from the sync'd collection?


Correct. If you remove the image from the synched collection, it will be removed from the cloud and so from all devices running Lightroom CC, but not from Lightroom Classic.


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## Linwood Ferguson (Mar 28, 2018)

JohanElzenga said:


> Correct. If you remove the image from the synched collection, it will be removed from the cloud and so from all devices running Lightroom CC, but not from Lightroom Classic.


That's the part I did not know, and did not want to answer risking it might then vanish everywhere.


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## Jim Wilde (Mar 28, 2018)

Just to clarify what you mean by "remove the image from the synced collection", are you meaning the All Synced Photographs special collection (which will indeed delete the image from the cloud and all other LRCC synced devices, but not from Classic), or a normal "synced collection"? In the latter case what happens will vary depending on whether the image happens to be in another synced collection.....when you remove the image from any synced collection a dialog will appear asking if you want to retain the image in All Synced Photographs after removing it from the synced collection.  The dialog will also advise that even if you say "No", the image will not be removed from the ASP if it's in another synced collection.

If the intention is to delete the image from the cloud, but keep it in Classic, removing from ASP is the cleaner and more certain option.


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## Kath M (Mar 30, 2018)

JohanElzenga said:


> That means that you organize the pics outside of Lightroom. That's the only mistake you make. You should organize them from within Lightroom. Drag & drop the pics from one folder into another in the Lightroom folder panel. That is all. That way you can organize them as you want, without Lightroom losing track of them.




Thanks everybody for all the replies and info. 
One thing I know for sure, I am not trying to move things/organize pics outside of Lightroom. 
It is something else that I believe has to do with Lightroom CC. 
As one person said, there isn't a catalog for Lightroom CC, it is all in the Cloud and organized by Lightroom.  There are folders representing those same pics in the Lightroom Classic catalog because they are in a collection that has been synced. Moving those pics in the Lightroom Classic catalog, and trying to organize the catalog that has many pics that were synced and are now  "controlled" my Lightroom CC causes problems in the Classic catalog.


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## Kath M (Mar 30, 2018)

JohanElzenga said:


> Yes, the original iPhone photo will remain stored in the cloud, but a copy is downloaded to Lightroom Classic.
> 
> 
> It removes it from the synched collection, but not from the catalog or the disk.
> ...



Interesting. My intent originally was just to clean up my Lightroom Classic cataglog. 
I am not real happy that the coolest thing about the Lightroom /Photoshop plan originally was the synced collections! Making the pics available for editing on mobile devices. 

I am not very happy that the trade off for having a catalog of my pics, in my control, is that the mobile features don't work the same.  I will have to study all the replies here to see if I am interested in using Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic together. I was still learning Classic when Adobe made this change. 

And, I have done quite a bit of searching in tutorials etc. on this subject and I have to say the documentation of this new issue when using Classic is not documented very well if at all. Many of the tutorials ignore it. Talk about Classic and Mobile like nothing is different.  

It would have been nice to have some examples of workflows for folks that didn't want to give up mobile features or Classic. Does anybody else feel this way?


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## Kath M (Mar 30, 2018)

Ferguson said:


> That's the part I did not know, and did not want to answer risking it might then vanish everywhere.




One issue with that is that the pic that is taken with the phone, "ingested" into LR CC, and then downloaded to the LR Classic catalog ends up in the catalog with a name given to it by the phone. In my case, it is not always unique and certainly doesn't follow the standardized name that I give other pics that are imported by me into the catalog. 
So  part of the workflow with be renaming pics that are automatically sent to the Classic catalog by LR CC.


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## Jim Wilde (Mar 30, 2018)

Kath M said:


> I am not very happy that the trade off for having a catalog of my pics, in my control, is that the mobile features don't work the same.  I will have to study all the replies here to see if I am interested in using Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic together. I was still learning Classic when Adobe made this change.
> 
> And, I have done quite a bit of searching in tutorials etc. on this subject and I have to say the documentation of this new issue when using Classic is not documented very well if at all. Many of the tutorials ignore it. Talk about Classic and Mobile like nothing is different.



I have to say that I'm not at all clear about what you are saying. What is the "new issue" that you're referring to? People talk about Classic and Mobile as if nothing is different for a good reason....there is nothing fundamentally different in the way that Classic interacts with the "LRCC ecosystem" compared with the way that LRCC2015 interacted with LRmobile. The names have changed, and there's a new desktop component of the cloud ecosystem which has probably caused a lot of confusion, but I'm using LR Classic with the cloud in virtually the same way that I did when I was using LRCC2015. Some new features have been added, and some new controls have been made available to better manage the Classic/Cloud synchronisation, but the underlying "rules" have not changed. The overall experience is now a lot richer that it was 3 or 4 years ago, and seems to get better with each update.

In terms of documented workflows, you'll have to wait for the third party educators such as Victoria to finish writing the book on that. I doubt Adobe will do it, as their recommendation for using Classic and LRCC in a hybrid workflow is "don't". Despite that, many have already tried it, and some have run into issues due to their not fully understanding the underlying policies. In trying to help those users, the forums are now awash with helpful posts from people such as myself and the other Gurus, attempting to shine a light on the various complexities, which should be easy enough to find by searching.

If you could clarify what you see as the new issue, I'll be pleased to try to help you work your way through it.


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## Linwood Ferguson (Mar 31, 2018)

Jim Wilde said:


> (Adobe's) recommendation for using Classic and LRCC in a hybrid workflow is "don't". Despite that, many have already tried it, and some have run into issues due to their not fully understanding the underlying policies.



I'm one of the opposites, I find that Classic does all I need, and the intricacies of using it together with CC was not worth it.  But even so I agree with everything Jim said -- the key is to figure out YOUR needs, and see which tool (or both) meet them best.

I think the people who have had the worst experiences have been that just dove in and decided to use both, at the same time, without understanding how they relate in minute detail.  It's a level of interaction you cannot just glass over, the details matter - where you ingest, what options you set, how you use Classic (e.g. are you doing tricks to use it on multiple computers, are you using multiple catalogs).

You're in the right place, and there are a number here like Jim that use both together.  If you think you have a reason to want to do so, just ask about it (but with some specificity). 

If you want life to  be more simple, just use EITHER classic OR cc alone.


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## Kath M (Apr 7, 2018)

Hi. One question I have for the gurus is ... if I want to use LR Classic and use LR CC for mobile pics and being able to edit pics on more than one  device, should I download LR CC desktop app and use it sometimes when dealing with pics that are in CC? Or should I just have one LR desktop app.
Thanks.


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## Jim Wilde (Apr 7, 2018)

I'd say it's a matter of personal preference. If you use Classic and it's sync enabled they obviously you won't *need *to have LRCC installed on the same system....but equally it wouldn't hurt either, and it can be fun to run the apps concurrently to see how the apps develop. One thing you maybe wouldn't need to do if you do install the LRCC desktop app is to use the LRCC option to store a copy locally of the cloud-based originals.....they'll already be held locally in the Classic catalog's folder system.


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## Kath M (Apr 9, 2018)

Thank you for your response. One more question. 
I have over 4000 pics in collections/albums being synced. I’d like to bring that number way down. 
Can I just delete those pics by deleting albums?  I have them on my Mac, LR Classic. 
Or did I read that a better way is to delete them from synced smart album. 
Gracias


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## Jim Wilde (Apr 9, 2018)

There is no such thing as a synced smart album in LRCC, so not sure what you mean by that.

Deleting synced albums does not delete the images from the cloud, they'll still be in the All Photos collection. You can select images in All Photos in any of the LRCC apps and choose to delete them, or you can select them in All Synced Photographs in LR Classic, right-click and choose "Remove from All Synced Photographs". The images remain in the catalog, but are deleted from the cloud.


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