# Learning hiccups - advice and help?! Disappearing collections...



## Minivini (May 20, 2014)

Twice now, while working with my iPad as the initial source (camera to LRM and building collection from there), my finished mobile collection has disappeared leaving me with no collections on the iPad. Are the collections not saved? They don't appear on either desktop machine (even though LRM indicated that it was syncing). Short of spending another hour and a half completely rebuilding, is there a way to recover a collection??


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## Victoria Bampton (May 20, 2014)

Hi Minivini. That sounds very odd.  At what point exactly did they disappear?  Yes, they should be saved if you've created them, both on the iPad and on the desktop.  Can you just try creating a collection on the iPad with a few photos and check they sync back to the desktop ok.  If not, we need to try some troubleshooting.


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## Minivini (May 22, 2014)

The common thread has been "catalog sync" related. 

If I boot my desktop (which has seen a marked decrease in use since getting a Surface Pro) and open LR (5.4) I was informed that it was trying to sync with a different catalog. Presuming it was trying to sync my "mobile catalog" (is there such a thing?) I clicked ok and that seems to be what deleted my LRM catalog (collections?) on my iPad and the lightroom.com site. It the happened the second time when the same scenario repeated when I booted my Surface Pro - thus deleting my new iPad collection. 

I took me a few days to connect the dots and see the correlation, but I still don't understand the deletions. Is there not a way to keep the collections intact on the iPad and online regardless of the desktop sync? I don't wish to disconnect from my desktop usage totally as that's the most effective way to maintain many terabytes of image files, but I'm beginning to question the effective use of Mobile in conjunction with standard LR. 

Any advice ice or suggestions related to this would be greatly appreciated!


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## Megamoze (Jun 24, 2014)

I think I'm having this same issue.

I setup a collection on my iPad.  It syncs up to my PC desktop LR 5.5 just fine.  But when I open LR on my Mac, it insists I sync the local catalogue or it turns the sync off.  And when I switch to the local catalogue, it removes all of my previous collections.

I want to sync both my PC and my Mac to my LR Mobile collections but this doesn't seem possible.  Am I missing something?


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## Victoria Bampton (Jun 25, 2014)

Hi Megamoze, welcome to the forum!  No, you're not missing anything - you can (currently, at least) only sync to a single desktop catalog.


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## ozdefy (Jun 30, 2014)

*Disappearing Collections from iPad LR*

I too have suffered this, but in a slightly different way...



while on the road, I shot about 1800 Raw/JPEG photos
then imported them to the iPad Photos library using the official Apple SD card reader
imported the photos from the Photos library into LR mobile
spent many hours culling (flagging), cropping/rotating as well as some basic trial colour balancing
then when I returned home, I hoped to be able to sync my culling and cropping to my Mac
ideally on the RAW files - but I have since learned that I can't yet do this - but that's a side issue for now 

I could see that my LR mobile was syncing (by the animated dots at the top right)
while iPad synced, I fired up my Mac's LR latest version) - my last project (a desktop only project) was still open, so I created a new Catalog
at this point, I can't remember if I was prompted with the "change sync catalog" or not
what I do know is that I then looked at my iPad and the 2 collections that were on screen only seconds earlier were now gone! :|

so 2 things:



what did I do wrong to cause the iPad collections to vanish?
and can they be recovered, as there's a good 8 hours of work there that I would dearly love back

thanks in advance for any advice
Geoff


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