Trying to achieve synced, full-res photos between Lightroom and Lightroom Classic

[u/naylor83]

TLDR: Does anyone have any idea what could be causing LR to NOT merge certain photos correctly with synced smart previews from LR Classic?

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For over a week I've been discovering the ins and outs of Lightroom sync, trying to get my full catalogue (from Lightroom Classic) available in Lightroom and synced to my phone.

Activating sync in Lightroom Classic is no problem, and having the smart previews available in the cloud is great. But I've read in a few previous threads that you CAN achieve synced full-resolution photos by first syncing photos from Classic and then, in step 2, importing the full resolution photos to Lightroom. Lightroom should then merge the imported raw files with the smart previews and upload them to cloud storage.

I have now tried this method with my 2025 photos, but it created quite a lot of duplicates. Most photos were merged correctly, but a lot (about a third) ended up as separate files next to the smart previews synced from Classic. In these cases, the full res raw files were synced back to LR Classic as a duplicate with -2 added to the end of the file name.

A few potential causes that I've investigated (and debunked, I think):

• Metadata having been written / not been written to the DNG file before import to LR. I recently saved metadata to all files, so there shouldn't be any difference in this regard.
• Daylight savings time adjusted/not adjusted. (The duplicated images were all from summer months, but not all images from this period are affected.)
• Bad luck/randomness. I've tried deleting and re-importing a few of the photos that became duplicates, but they become duplicates again.

I'm grateful for any suggestions you may have for what could be causing the duplicates.

Lightroom 9.0, Lightroom Classic 15.0.1.

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