# Synced Duplicates?



## stivi (Jan 16, 2019)

Hey there,

when I am looking in my Lightroom Classic at the Catalog Panel, I can see that I have 969 Synced Duplicates that all of a sudden appeared from nowhere. 
I was looking it up and googled a lot but there is no definitive answer, at least from what I have seen, what these are or where they are coming from. I am using Lightroom CC on my iPad as well as on my iPhone (although I am trying to figure out the workflow for that still). 

I have also tried to run Lightroom CC on my mac (as a test), so maybe this is actually where these Duplicates are coming from? 

I, for some reason, also have, in the same panel, 1800 missing photographs that are pointing to a folder "/downloaded-smart-previews/filename.xxx". 

Bottom line I have a little bit of a construction site here and hope you can help me figure it out and clean up the mess 

I am using Lightroom Classic CC on my Mac with the Catalogue located on the mac itself, Photos from the current year also stored on the internal hard drive and all other photos stored on an external 500 GB sandisk flash drive. 

I was thinking now to move to Lightroom CC, but wanted to test first how it behaves when I am back onboard (working on a cruise ship with crap internet).
Can I do this test without actually interfering with the rest of my synced photos?

Thanks a lot,
Stefan


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## Califdan (Jan 16, 2019)

> when I am looking in my Lightroom Classic at the Catalog Panel, I can see that I have 969 Synced Duplicates that all of a sudden appeared from nowhere.
> I was looking it up and googled a lot but there is no definitive answer, at least from what I have seen, what these are or where they are coming from. I am using Lightroom CC on my iPad as well as on my iPhone (although I am trying to figure out the workflow for that still).


Once you turn on Sync in LR Classic, and associate your LR Classic system with the same Adobe Account that is used by your CC apps, anything you put in any of the CC apps (Phone, Tablet, etc.) is automatically downloaded to your Classic system.   The "All Synced Photographs" collection in the Catalog panel shows all synched images.  Right Click on one and select "go to folder in Library" to see what physical folder LR put the downloaded image into.   If you added photos to one of the CC appls from within that app (ie it was not brought into the app by syncing it from LR Classic) then that "added" photo will come down to Classic and show up in the synced photos section.  If that photo also happened to be in LR Classic, then you have duplicates.



> I, for some reason, also have, in the same panel, 1800 missing photographs that are pointing to a folder "/downloaded-smart-previews/filename.xxx".



This collection is ONLY updated when you run the "Find All Missing Photos" command (Library menu).  So those 1800 may be old news.  Run the command again and see what it shows.   Not clear on why they would be showing a download folder for smart previews, but implies that you downloaded a smart previews folder from someplace and imported those images, then later deleted or moved that folder.   Do the file names look like file names you're used to or something like this  5B088EE5-EC9E-4B3C-9A92-D9452302603D.dng?    



> I was thinking now to move to Lightroom CC, but wanted to test first how it behaves when I am back onboard (working on a cruise ship with crap internet).
> Can I do this test without actually interfering with the rest of my synced photos?


If you want to "simulate" working on CC without Classic try this.  First of all know which folder images from the CC eco-system will go to in classic.  Then add images to one of the CC apps.  this can be done by taking images with the app or by uploading random images from the web or your camera.  Those images will sync down to Classic into the default folder but just ignore them.  Continue playing with them in CC to get a sense of the CC apps and performance.  to see what happens without an internet connection turn off WiFi and cellular data on the device.  After turning on WiFi and cellular data back on you may want to mark various albums on the device as "store Locally" (click 3 dots at end of album name row and turn it on).  Wait for the images to download from the cloud.  Then disconnect from the internet again and play some images that are now "stored locally".  With the Internet disconnected you can do much more if you have a local copy of the image on the device.

Hope that helps.

Dan


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## stivi (Jan 17, 2019)

Hi Dan,

thanks a lot for your reply and information.

What I somewhat accomplished in the meantime is clean up all the "legacy" pictures that I had synced before into the cloud and ended up now with only one collection which is synced correctly across all devices including my Mac.

On my mac I turned off local storage for now as I don't want them to fill up space until I am ready to do more testing. For now I am spending time playing with my new iPad pro and the pencil, which as far as I can tell works very well. 

Now, if I go and transfer raw pictures via the SD card reader on the iPad into Lightroom CC, these pictures will then eventually also end up in classic in the same folder as all the files are going (from Lr mobile folder) and I would simply after fully synced move all of them to the different place I want them to be correct? And if I then want to remove them from the cloud storage I simply remove them from the Synced photographs in the Catalogue panel in LR classic right?
I currently plan to only use one collection which is synced with one project at a time so it doesn't get too crowded on my iPad and everything stays organized.

Regarding the missing photos. I ran the command again and increased my number now to 1917 .

the filenames of most of these pictures are normal filenames like IMG_42.jpg (mainly pictures taken with the iPhone from what I can see at first glance. I will have to dig into this a bit more and see whether these pictures are actually worth taking the time and effort to try and ressurect from an old backup or I just remove them completely.

I still try to understand the Synced Duplicates, they seem to be pointing to random pictures of all sorts and sizes in my library. 

The sync speed from what I can see has certainly improved a bit, but I just can't imagine how long it would take to move my whole library which is currently around 40.000 pictures into the cloud. 

Thanks again for your help Dan and of course anyone else helping here out as well


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## Califdan (Jan 18, 2019)

> Now, if I go and transfer raw pictures via the SD card reader on the iPad into Lightroom CC, these pictures will then eventually also end up in classic in the same folder as all the files are going (from Lr mobile folder)



Yes.  any image that gets added in the CC ecosystem is stored in the Cloud and is synced to Classic where it will be seen in the synced collection and a copy of the image physically stored in a default folder as you mention




> And if I then want to remove them from the cloud storage I simply remove them from the Synced photographs in the Catalogue panel in LR classic right?



Yes.  If you remove an image from the "All Synced Photos" collection in the Catalog Panel it will be removed from all of the CC applicaitons.  However, it will remain in a folder on your Classic computer.   Once the images from the cloud have found there way to your Classic computer, you can move them to different folder if you wish.  That's what I do.  I have a folder called "LR Mobile Captures" in Classic and have told Classic to put any new images coming down from CC into that folder (Sync tab of preferences dialog).  I then drag images from that folder to where I want them to live permanently (ie where I would have put them had I imported them from a memory card in Classic)

Images I want to go the other way with (Classic to CC), I create collections in classic for these (which become albums in CC) and mark them to sync.  then anything I put in them goes on up to the cloud apps.  In Classic I have these in collection sets and once the album appears in the CC app, I put those albums in similar folders (collection sets don't coordinate with album folders).

Syncing 40,000 images, especially if they are RAW images can take some time, but for images that originate in Classic (be they RAW or not) only Smart Previews sync to the Cloud  UNLESS YOU TAKE THE ONE TIME OPTION TO SYNC YOUR ENTIRE CATALOG.   If you take this option then your original image files (RAW, TIFF, PSD, JPG, DNG or what have you) will go to the cloud in their original file format.  BUT, if you are considering this, take the time to read up on it first as it changes much of the behavior we've been talking about and in many regards is a one-way street that pretty much locks you into the CC ecosystem and removes Classic from the equation.  I don't know all the details, but have read enough to decide it's not for me unless CC incorporates all the features of Classic that I use and they are no where near that at the current time.


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## stivi (Jan 18, 2019)

Thanks again! Your last paragraph basically confirmed my thoughts, to rather stick to the current setup and use lightroom CC maybe for the occasional edit on the mac as lightroom classic runs soooo slow already.

However, to go back to my question regarding the Synced Duplicates. Is this something I should worry about? These are random pictures and I am not entirely sure what it means as I currently have 1 collection synced with 23 pictures, and they are exactly the same on all my devices. 

Cheers again


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## Califdan (Jan 18, 2019)

I don't think I fully understand what you're seeing in classic in regard to duplicate images?  Can you explain it with a bit more detail?   For one such pair of duplicates, what folder does each reside in?  Are either of them in any Synced collections?  Does one or both show up in the "All Synced Photographs" collection in the Catalog panel?


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## Jim Wilde (Jan 18, 2019)

stivi said:


> However, to go back to my question regarding the Synced Duplicates. Is this something I should worry about? These are random pictures and I am not entirely sure what it means as I currently have 1 collection synced with 23 pictures, and they are exactly the same on all my devices.


Typically, "Synced Duplicates" occur when the user imports directly into LRCC some images which already exist in the synced Classic catalog, but those images *were not themselves synced from Classic* (remember, Classic allows for selective syncing, i.e. the catalog may sync with the cloud but the user determines which specific images will be included in that sync). So, in the scenario where you have not synced an image from Classic to the cloud, and you then import the same image directly into LRCC, LRCC will download that image into the Classic catalog. Classic, however, will recognise that the image coming down from the cloud already exists in its catalog so it simply creates the "new" image as a Virtual Copy rather than download a new full version of the file (and it records it as a "Synced Duplicate" in the catalog panel). It also leads to the situation that in Classic the VC will be synced, though the "Master" original is not.

To check, simply click on the Synced Duplicates collection to see if the images in it are VCs.


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## stivi (Jan 18, 2019)

This is what I see here. I don't see any duplicates and none of these are part of any synced collection.


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## stivi (Jan 18, 2019)

Jim Wilde said:


> To check, simply click on the Synced Duplicates collection to see if the images in it are VCs.



Hi Jim,

actually, looking at the file path now it would show /Copy1 - does that mean its a Virtual Copy right?


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## Jim Wilde (Jan 19, 2019)

Well, looking at the screenshot you'll see the "upturned corner" (bottom left of the thumbnail) which is the icon that denotes it's a VC.

But they also show the "missing image" icon, which means that the master copy is also missing. Is that expected?


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## stivi (Jan 19, 2019)

Jim Wilde said:


> Well, looking at the screenshot you'll see the "upturned corner" (bottom left of the thumbnail) which is the icon that denotes it's a VC.


is there a way other than visually to identify them as virtual copies so I can get rid of them? (EDIT: I answered my question with a quick google: How to Filter Virtual Copies or Master Files | Lightroom Tutorials) you can filter them in Lightroom.


So I guess its safe to delete these virtual copies amirite? 



Jim Wilde said:


> But they also show the "missing image" icon, which means that the master copy is also missing. Is that expected?



well this is one of the mysteries I need to solve. its mostly from what I gathered iphone pictures that seem to have been in a different folder than the rest of my pictures.




(side question) I see you have a MBP from 2013, how are you holding up with LR performance wise?


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## Jim Wilde (Jan 19, 2019)

stivi said:


> So I guess its safe to delete these virtual copies amirite?


Really, only you can decide that. If you delete those VCs, even though the original is "missing" in Classic, that will also delete the images from the cloud. If that's what you want, then go ahead.

Re the MBP, yes I'm OK with the LR performance still. But your expectations might be completely different to mine, which is often the case when people talk about "performance issues"....


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## stivi (Jan 19, 2019)

Jim Wilde said:


> Really, only you can decide that. If you delete those VCs, even though the original is "missing" in Classic, that will also delete the images from the cloud. If that's what you want, then go ahead.



Mainly for those that are not missing I would simply remove the copies first and then try to figure out what happened to the rest of the pictures, wasn't totally clear there.



Jim Wilde said:


> Re the MBP, yes I'm OK with the LR performance still. But your expectations might be completely different to mine, which is often the case when people talk about "performance issues"....



I mean, if I work on some panoramas with a couple of pictures my MBP from 2015 meets its maker I feel. Which is why I went ahead and got the iPad Pro now and pending a workflow I am very happy with it thus far 

I think then we have covered my questions so far, thanks so much for your help, this was very helpful for sure.


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