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blueeyes2's avatar
blueeyes2
Explorer | Level 4
7 years ago

Lightroom and Dropbox Pro Nightmare

I'm a photographer and was hoping that upgrading to Dropbox Pro would help my workflow but it's been a nightmare and I'm wondering if anyone can help.  I am using lightroom and I have one catalogue ...
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  • Lusil's avatar
    Lusil
    7 years ago
    Hi there blueeyes2!
     
    Initially, please note that many processes on your computer may look at files that you may have not manually opened and, in order to fulfill these requests, Dropbox syncs the files. Such examples include:
    • Backup services.
    • Antivirus.
    • Recently used file lists.
    • Third party applications that monitor files in general. 
    Please note that if there are apps that constantly look at your files, your files may come back following the behavior described above if you didn't recall them manually. 
     
    If this is the case, I'd kindly recommend to test this out by temporarily quitting or disabling relevant apps until you see that the issue no longer occurs. If you do, it could be that the last app that you closed may be the one performing this action.
     
    However, please remember that when you set a file to be online-only, only information about the file, such as the name, the location, and the date that the file was updated, is downloaded. You can find more info about this here. 
     
    Having said that, from what you describe in your post, it sounds like the third-party app you use requires access to these files you set to be online-only so as to preview them, hence why they could be downloaded as local. 
     
    In any case, let me know what you find! :grinning:
Lusil's avatar
Lusil
Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff
7 years ago
Hi there blueeyes2!
 
Initially, please note that many processes on your computer may look at files that you may have not manually opened and, in order to fulfill these requests, Dropbox syncs the files. Such examples include:
  • Backup services.
  • Antivirus.
  • Recently used file lists.
  • Third party applications that monitor files in general. 
Please note that if there are apps that constantly look at your files, your files may come back following the behavior described above if you didn't recall them manually. 
 
If this is the case, I'd kindly recommend to test this out by temporarily quitting or disabling relevant apps until you see that the issue no longer occurs. If you do, it could be that the last app that you closed may be the one performing this action.
 
However, please remember that when you set a file to be online-only, only information about the file, such as the name, the location, and the date that the file was updated, is downloaded. You can find more info about this here. 
 
Having said that, from what you describe in your post, it sounds like the third-party app you use requires access to these files you set to be online-only so as to preview them, hence why they could be downloaded as local. 
 
In any case, let me know what you find! :grinning:
  • blueeyes2's avatar
    blueeyes2
    Explorer | Level 4
    7 years ago

    Thanks Lusil.  I am sure what you are describing is true, Lightroom is calling those files as previews when I scroll but the issue now is that when I go in to my Mac storage settings to see what is taking up so much space, there are files listed from 2016 that I am not using and are marked as online.  Now my synching has stopped because my hard drive is full so I can't tell it to stop syncing these files from 2016. 

    I have no idea how to fix it other than figure out how to uninstall and revert back to the non pro version because then at least when I unsynched a file it remained unsynched and didn't cause this issue.

  • Christian E.9's avatar
    Christian E.9
    Collaborator | Level 9
    5 years ago

    Lusil - Using Smart Previews in Lightroom and then setting the original photo files to 'Online Only', is there a way for Dropbox to only look at the Smart Preview of the photo instead of trying to access to original file, i.e. to look at the original file as being

    disconnected' - as described here: https://helpx.adobe.com/dk/lightroom-classic/help/lightroom-smart-previews.html

    "Continue to work with your Smart Preview files even when the device containing your original photographs is disconnected. You can perform all edits that you would perform on the original file."

    I'm wondering if this is actually a question for the Adobe community...?

     

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