# Confused about "Moving Your Photos" after initial sync from external drive



## chris.stromberger (Feb 15, 2022)

I finally bit the bullet and moved off lightroom perpetual to lightroom (cloud). My old catalog was on an external HD. I finally got this synced to the cloud, and I'd like to remove the external drive from the picture. I had the "local storage" in lr set to the external drive because I had too many pictures to do the initial sync just using my internal HD, there wasn't enough space to handle it. Now that the sync is done, I have gone into settings to change local storage to my internal HD, and when I do that, lr seems to start moving all the photos from the external HD local storage to the new location (or downloading from cloud, I can't really tell what it's doing, it just says "Moving Your Photos"). This is many many more originals than I'd like to have locally (about 1Tb of space), but I'm not sure how to tell lr to not do this. I just want to disconnect from the external HD now, and use limited local HD for "cache".


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## Jim Wilde (Feb 15, 2022)

When you change the location for the locally-stored copy of originals, Lightroom doesn't know what the user specifically intended and so its default position is to move the stored originals from the old to the new location. So that's what it's doing on your system.

Assuming the Preferences>Local Storage option to store a copy of all originals locally is NOT enabled, the intention of that locally-stored originals cache is that originals are only stored there on a transient basis (typically import/migration copies and also originals which are downloaded as needed whenever editing an image), and then subsequently automatically deleted. The problem is that the algorithms which control that automatic clean-up are apparently quite complex and it's fair to say they need to be tightened, as local copies are hanging around in the local store for longer than required.
Because of that, it's not a simple task trying to limit the amount of disk space needed for the local originals store, and I personally don't bother. I have the local store on an external drive, which has plenty of free space, so I'm never worried about how much space Lightroom uses for the local originals.

However, if you really do want to switch locations back to the default system drive, you could delete the originals from the local store using the file system, not Lightroom. Lightroom won't be too bothered about that (don't delete the folder that contains them), but you need to be certain that all the images imported or migrated into Lightroom on that system have fully synced up to the cloud. However, that might be somewhat tricky in your case as presumably the move is already in progress, so deleting files that are in the process of being move may cause unintended issues.

An alternative, which is again dependant upon all existing images having been synced to the cloud, would be to delete the Lightroom local library (in your Pictures folder), then restart Lightroom. On restart reset the preferences (hold down Opt and Shift when starting Lightroom) to ensure that it loses awareness of the originals on the external drive, and Lightroom will then setup the local catalog again from the master catalog in the cloud. That way, the only originals which will subsequently be downloaded would be when you edit an image. Just be aware that over time the local store will increase in size, especially if you import directly into Lightroom.

One other thought....you've moved to the cloud-centric Lightroom from your old perpetual-license version, which used local storage. Did you not consider moving to Lightroom Classic instead of Lightroom....Classic is the direct descendant of your old version (it's currently at version 11.2), so the application would be much more familiar to you, and the upgrade to that would have been far simpler than the migration to the cloud.


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## mikebore (Feb 15, 2022)

Chris, Jim is the expert _sans pareil_  so I am very hesitant to say anything after he has replied so thoroughly.

Jim's first sentence was _"Assuming the Preferences>Local Storage option to store a copy of all originals locally is NOT enabled".  _

But from this quote in your OP it sounds as though you *do* have this enabled?

You wrote:


> Now that the sync is done, I have gone into settings to change local storage to my internal HD, and when I do that, lr seems to start moving all the photos from the external HD local storage to the new location



I thought Jim would say your setting should be to keep Smart Previews locally...not originals. My 575GB/80kpics Lightroom library is 90GB on my internal drive. This sounds more like what you intended. The originals are not required locally, the masters are in the Cloud, but you can edit Smart Previews while off line.

Apologies if I am off target here.


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## chris.stromberger (Feb 15, 2022)

Thanks for the info. I do not have that option checked. I finally just tried exiting lr, disconnecting the external drive, then restarting lr to see what would happen (and I also set local storage path to internal HD). On restart, it complained about originals missing and that it would use originals in the cloud, then rebuilt the local library or whatever of previews I guess, and that was that. Seems to be in good shape now. 

Your explanation Jim makes sense. Adobe could use some help with the settings and dialog boxes to make this clearer. I found it incredibly confusing. My assumption is that whatever it was doing, it would stop copying originals locally once it hit my designated cache size, but it ignored that and just kept on copying, so my fear was that it was downloading the entire set of originals to local disk.

As for lightroom classic, was not really aware of it. I had heard of it, but was pretty much completely confused on the different flavors of lr. I'll take a look at that as an option.

Thanks for the help!


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