# Syncing to CC from Smart Collection?



## John Vaughan (Oct 13, 2016)

Hello,

I have syncing enabled for a set of collections, but would really like to only sync a smart collection that is based on shots that are marked as keepers.

Can someone please tell me how I can do this?

Thanks

John


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## tspear (Oct 13, 2016)

I am pretty sure you cannot sync smart collections.


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## clee01l (Oct 13, 2016)

Welcome to the forum.
Smart Collections do not exist as a list of images in the catalog database. They are the result of a database query and it is only the results you see in the Collection panel.  These results disappear as soon as you click away from the Smart Collection.   The query is rerun the next time you open the Smart Collection.   For this reason, only images that exist as static collection image assignments in the database can be sync'd to the LR Mobile.  
The best that I have been able to do is create a Smart Collection that defines the images that you want to sync and then Drag'nDrop these to a static sync'd collection.

If 5 stars are your keepers and your sync'd static collection is named "Keepers"
you can construct a Smart collection with the following criteria:
{rating}{is}{★★★★★}
{Collection}{Does not contain}{Keepers}

Any images that show up in this smart collection can be selected and dragged to the static collection labeled "Keepers"


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## Johan Elzenga (Oct 13, 2016)

Cletus, you've made that statement about smart collections only being updated when you open them a few times before, but I think that is wrong. If you let Lightroom show the image counts of your (smart) collections, you will see that a 'five star' smart collection gets updated as soon as you add five stars to an image. You do not have to open the smart collection first to get it to update the image count.

It's true that you cannot sync a smart collection to LrM right now, but I doubt there is a technical reason for that. I think the reason is that it would require quite a few things in LrM too. LrM would also need to have search capabilities to support smart collections, or a synched smart collection would need to become a special 'locked' static collection on LrM. We may see it happen in the future.


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## clee01l (Oct 13, 2016)

JohanElzenga said:


> Cletus, you've made that statement about smart collections only being updated when you open them a few times before, but I think that is wrong.


You may be correct now.  Adobe may have changed the behavior to update all Smart Collections in the background. In the earliest version that I used with Smart Collections the image counts were not updated when the SC was not open.  
But the reason a SC can not be sync'd is that unlike static collections, there is no list of images in the database(catalog file) that corresponds to the images that currently meet the SC criteria.  This could be changed such that the sync process works off of a list created by the SC and is initiated every time a smart sync'd collection gets an image count change.


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