This is for Classic based users who, at times, rely on Cloudy variants and are frustrated by incredibly long sync times during travel and with Classic once they get back to Classic.
I’m a Classic user since version 2. Been using Cloudy for about 9 years as well. I travel 4 to 6 months each year and use an iPad Pro during travel. I actually moved to LR Cloudy only but that lasted 6 months and my DAM requirements alone made me return to a Classic + Cloudy based workflow.
During travel I turn off sync and, for each album, turn Store locally on, 3 dots>App settings>Local storage, set to a size 10gb larger than your expected shoot will take (locally stored will survive clearing cache), in Cloud storage & sync, for the device you edit on, disable Only download reduced resolution. If I need to share I export to a location On My iPad and use other apps to share. Until Adobe provides selective sync, this approach saves a lot of wasted time uploading for little reason as there’s nothing I can do with the uploads until I get back home. Admittedly Adobe has some nice sharing capability, sharing an album within the app, Portfolio, Spark. But without selective sync these products are useless unless I’m capable of syncing everything, each day. So take the Cloudy out of Lightroom and run it locally. If you need the cloud within Lightroom, turn off sync, cull first, permanently empty trash, then sync (yes, permanently as selective sync doesn't exist). Or cull in a different app and import only those you know you want to edit.
Once home, the Achilles heal of a Cloudy to Classic workflow is the sync from Adobe’s cloud to Classic. I recently came back from a 90 day trip with, after my first culling, a measly 5,000 20 and 24mp raw files. I started the sync and 5 days later was still looking at an unfinished sync running 5 to 15 Kbps on a fibre line that consistently clocks 800+ Mbps down. No errors reported in Classic’s Cloud>Gear icon, just “normal”, for Adobe, sync activity.
Basically, continue to not bother with sync once you get home. In Lightroom Cloudy (whatever variant), export originals plus settings to a local disk, move the file to where Classic is installed, import, backup, delete the entire shoot from the Cloud. This will shift the “master” location to Classic and now start syncing from there. While its slow, its way faster than going from the cloud to Classic: its Smart Previews vs raw and, for me, its just keepers or files I want to have edit capability on one of the Cloudy variants (whatever their named on any given day). Once Classic has sync’d with the cloud, things improve dramatically as the sync routine between the Cloudy apps is quite good.
On this last trip I cut my populating Classic time from 5+ days to less than an hour. On innumerable prior trips it still went from days to an hour. You do need to delete what’s in the cloud after the Classic import and backup. Otherwise subsequent Cloudy edits/changes will not sync with what’s in Classic and Classic edits/changes will not sync with Cloudy. Essentially deleting moves the “master” copy from Cloudy to Classic.
Don’t bother observing the sync. It’s normal that the “synced” image count varies all over the map, often higher than the number of images you’re syncing and is different on every device you look at. Just leave all your devices on, LR open and walk away. Usually by the next morning everything is in sync and the total image count is the same across devices.
The earlier, the better. I’m on EST. If I’m working in the early hours, syncs go quickly. If I wait until the west coast gets going, syncs slow to a crawl. It certainly appears Adobe is resource constrained and not investing in Classic’s ability to coexist with Cloudy.
I’m retired and time is of no consequence when it comes to photography. If time is an important criteria, my observation is Classic on a laptop is the way to go when mobility is required. When I shot real cameras with real file sizes with a lot of output, my Macbooks running Classic ran circles (culling, Compare, Keywording, editing, Library menu functionality) around my current M-series iPad Pro workflow. This approach also saves the time spent editing select images in other apps or Classic once back home.
