# Advice needed on the best way to move original photos to Cloudy



## DrBarryS (Nov 17, 2019)

Hi everyone,

As I have contemplated my LR eco-system setup for 2020, I want to shift to work primarily in Cloudy going forward. That means editing and always importing using LR instead of Classic.   
Advanced asset management, in my opinion, is still too hard to do in Cloudy, until we get Smart Collections and other advanced filtering options and better bulk editing tools.

I have the 1 TB plan but I have never added the originals because I added all my photos in Classic via the ALL SYNCED PHOTOS route. Therefore I am only using about 50Gb of the plan since all my photos are Smart Previews (except for the ones getting added via devices).

I have my originals backed up in various ways but as I look to simplification, it seems wasteful to not be using the 1 TB plan for originals.

Victoria in Missing FAQs writes:

_“• Add all of your photos to the All Synced Photographs collection in Lightroom Classic’s Catalog panel, wait for the smart previews to all upload to the cloud, wait for all of the photos to download to Lightroom CC on the same machine, and then add the same original photos into Lightroom CC. Lightroom CC should be smart enough to recognize that these are originals of existing synced photos, and just upload the originals to the cloud, without duplicating the photos.
Remember, these are not officially recommended or sanctioned workflows, so they won’t undergo official testing. However, I know many of my readers like to push technology to the limits, and I’d rather you were aware of the known issues before experimenting by yourself!”

Excerpt From: Victoria Bampton. “Adobe Lightroom Classic - The Missing FAQ (v9.0-2019).” Apple Books.
_
So I did a trial yesterday and added about 5,000 photos from 2011 to LR Cloudy from my folders that Classic looks to. Before adding, I did hit SAVE to write all metadata to files. Of course, all photos were duplicated when I got done adding them. But now, after a 12 hour wait, LR has not made any effort to match them and I am showing 10,000 photos in my 2011 collection. UGH!

I am looking for advice on how to proceed to move my originals (which total about 700GB) to Cloudy, without disturbing my sync with Classic.

Also, referring to Victoria’s text above, how does the uploaded original come to have the SAME editing adjustments as the uploaded Smart Preview? See my screen shot: both versions show the EXACT same editing.

Does it take a series of days for Sensei to de-duplicate?  

I did read on another forum that someone advised filtering for “synced from Lightroom” and then deleting those.  Thoughts?

PS: I do not want to use the migration tool because of it being a 1 way process (I am not giving up Classic to that degree yet!)

Thanks


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## Jim Wilde (Nov 17, 2019)

DrBarryS said:


> So I did a trial yesterday and added about 5,000 photos from 2011 to LR Cloudy from my folders that Classic looks to. Before adding, I did hit SAVE to write all metadata to files. Of course, all photos were duplicated when I got done adding them. But now, after a 12 hour wait, LR has not made any effort to match them and I am showing 10,000 photos in my 2011 collection. UGH!


Can you confirm that those 5,000 images that you added to LR Desktop were definitely already synced as smart previews to the cloud from Classic? If they were, then the cloud should detect that the new additions already exist and so replace the existing smart previews with the newly added originals. You shouldn't expect to see the 5k images double to 10k.


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## DrBarryS (Nov 18, 2019)

Jim Wilde said:


> Can you confirm that those 5,000 images that you added to LR Desktop were definitely already synced as smart previews to the cloud from Classic? If they were, then the cloud should detect that the new additions already exist and so replace the existing smart previews with the newly added originals. You shouldn't expect to see the 5k images double to 10k.




Yes, in fact if you look closely at the screen shot I supplied you will see the icons in the lower right of each picture indicating as such.


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## Jim Wilde (Nov 18, 2019)

OK, could you look at the images in Classic and let me know if each "pair" of images are both original files or is one of each pair a Virtual Copy?


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## DrBarryS (Nov 18, 2019)

Jim Wilde said:


> OK, could you look at the images in Classic and let me know if each "pair" of images are both original files or is one of each pair a Virtual Copy?



A-ha!   You nailed it!  They are indeed virtual copies, and I removed them, and now Cloudy is just showing the originals.

Thanks, that was a good thought.  Do you know why LR decided to make VC instead of replacing the SmartPreview with  the  original?

Back to Victoria's recommedated workflow:  should I contiunue to follow that to get all my orginals to the cloud?  Of course, this time, I will clean up the VC on the Classic side.


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## Jim Wilde (Nov 19, 2019)

DrBarryS said:


> A-ha!   You nailed it!  They are indeed virtual copies, and I removed them, and now Cloudy is just showing the originals.
> 
> Thanks, that was a good thought.  Do you know why LR decided to make VC instead of replacing the SmartPreview with  the  original?
> 
> Back to Victoria's recommedated workflow:  should I contiunue to follow that to get all my orginals to the cloud?  Of course, this time, I will clean up the VC on the Classic side.


To be honest, I'm a little surprised that "Cloudy is now just showing the originals" after you removed the VCs in Classic. Prior to importing those 5,000 images into Cloudy, you had a situation where the originals in Classic synced with the Smart Previews of those images in the cloud, yes? So, when you imported those same 5,000 images directly into the desktop Cloudy app, we would have expected that the cloud recognised those as duplicates of the current 5k images, and should have simply replaced the SPs in the cloud with the originals. Nothing should have happened in Classic except it is made aware that the original exists in the cloud.

So in your situation, it is apparent that the duplicates detection in Cloudy did not work, resulting in those 5,000 images being added to the cloud and regarded as new images....and the original 5,000 SPs still remain, which are still synced with the originals in Classic. Then, because the cloud regards the newly-imported 5k images as new files, they are synced down into Classic. However, Classic's duplicates detection is a different process to the cloudy one, and it would seen in this case that it worked correctly....thus in this situation the standard Classic action is to create VCs of them, rather than downloading and cataloging a separate set of the 5k images. So, I would have expected that you would then end up with the situation that the original in Classic is syncing to the SP in the cloud, and the VC in Classic is syncing with the newly-imported original in the cloud.....*thus removing the VC in Classic should have deleted the original from the cloud, not the Smart Preview.*

So, if you really have ended up with originals in the cloud syncing with originals in Classic (please check again!), then I'm surprised at that. It may be that something has been changed in this area by Adobe, though if so it's not a change that we've been made aware of. 

The key thing to investigate is why the duplicates detection in cloudy didn't work....I have an itch that thinks maybe the Ctrl+S that you did before you added the files to Cloudy could be the problem, but I'd have to try to setup a test of that (but I don't have the time right now).


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## Victoria Bampton (Nov 19, 2019)

Jim Wilde said:


> The key thing to investigate is why the duplicates detection in cloudy didn't work....I have an itch that thinks maybe the Ctrl+S that you did before you added the files to Cloudy could be the problem, but I'd have to try to setup a test of that (but I don't have the time right now).


That's my guess too.


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## DrBarryS (Jan 15, 2020)

Hello, I am just getting back to this thread after traveelling and the holidays.

Help me understand how the CTRL+S was the likely culprit.   I need help to figure out what my next step is since I still have about 120,000 photos that are not "original" in cloud, only as SmartPreview.


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## Jim Wilde (Jan 15, 2020)

We don't *know* that the Ctrl+S was the culprit, it's just a guess on our part (remember, this is an untested, unsupported, and not designed workflow which may work for now but may not always). Consider the sequence of events:

1. You synced your existing files to the Cloud as smart previews.
2. You then did a Ctrl+S on those files in Classic and, assuming they are all Jpegs as per your screenshot, that would have embedded the XMP data into the header of those Jpegs. In other words, the files themselves were changed by that action (not the image data, just the header.....but still it creates a file that is different to the one that was originally synced).
3. You then imported those files into Lr Desktop ("cloudy") and for some reason the duplicates detection failed to recognise those as duplicates of the files already synced as smart previews. But the only thing that deviated from the instructions was that Ctrl+S, so it becomes a not-unreasonable guess that the Ctrl+S was the cause of that duplicates detection failure.
4. Because those imported files in Lr Desktop were not detected as duplicates, they were then synced down to Classic. In Classic, however, you did now have "proper" duplicates, i.e. both sets of files were the result of the Ctrl+S, so Classic's duplicates detection worked, thus the new set of downloaded files were simply tagged as Virtual Copies of the original set.

You could try the process again, using a small set of different files, but leaving out the Ctrl+S.....i.e. sync a few files from Classic to the cloud, wait for them to appear in LR Desktop, import them into Lr Desktop and see if the sync status icon on the thumbs in Lr Desktop changes from the hatched to a solid icon (with of course no duplication in either app).


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## DrBarryS (Jan 15, 2020)

Thank you very much Jim for your reply.

I did some tests:

Test 1
1.  Selected a few photos in Classic that are synced to Cloudy
2.  Changed some metadata, including adding new keywords
3.  Uploaded same photos from folder into LR Cloudy.
4.  Watched the photos in LR Cloudy change files status from SmartPreview to Original.   Hurray! 
5.  New keywords did not sync (as expected)

Test 2 
1.  same as test 1
2.  same as test 1
3.  Hit CTRL+S
4. Uploaded same photos from  folder into LR Cloudy.
5. Watched the photos in LR Cloudy change files status from SmartPreview to Original.   Hurray! 
6. New keywords did not sync (I was hoping they might since they are now embedded in the file)

Summary
1.  Photos were reconcilled as expected...this is wonderful news, and I am not sure why this step failed for me in the past.
2. Hitting CTRL+S did not seem to interupt the reconcilliation
3.  Keywords dont sync even if they are saved to the original file and then re-uploaded (darn it all)

So, I will continue to add in originals to Cloudy in small batches and see how it goes.


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## Jim Wilde (Jan 15, 2020)

Good to hear.

Regarding the keywords not syncing, that's probably because the *initial* smart preview upload was done *before* the Ctrl+S.....the way to get the keywords from Classic to the cloud is to do the Ctrl+S *before* syncing the images from Classic. If you have some not-yet-synced images in Classic, you could try things that way round, i.e. add some keywords, then do Ctrl+S, then sync them to the cloud. At that point, even though they're only in Smart Preview form in the cloud, they should have the keywords as well. After that, importing them directly into cloudy should convert the cloud files to full resolution originals whilst retaining the keywords. Note, however, that ongoing keyword changes will NOT sync between Classic and the cloud.

PS One other potential complication....if you have already created Smart Previews in Classic, the above workaround will not work as the initial sync of Smart Previews from Classic will use any existing SPs rather than create new ones....and the existing SPs would not have the keywords embedded in them. You have to ensure that no SPs currently exist in Classic, then do the Ctrl+S, then do the sync from Classic (which creates new SPs, which will thus include the embedded metadata).


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