# Switching to Lightroom from Classic?



## fbx33 (Sep 28, 2020)

I may have made a grave error in the way I tried to do this.

Been using Classic for half-dozen years. Have 25K photos. Did not like Lightroom (CC) when it arrived. Now seems fine. So I "added" all my pictures (25K) to Lightroom (online) yesterday. Seems to have simply uploaded them to LR as desired. 

Now, question is, are they there? 

I did NOT "migrate" or do anything involving the word migrate. I have both LR and Classic on my hard drive. What I think I did was copy (upload or add) all photos from "Pictures" folder (which I use in Classic) to Lightroom online. This didn't take too long. Couple hours maybe, maybe a little longer. Now I can see everything on Lightroom online (in the Lightroom Online desktop app) and the file sizes show up as they should be for various pix (I shoot JPG with Sony RX100 VI or Panny FZ1000 and iPhone, of course).

So now I was thinking of UNINSTALLING LR CLASSIC from HD and DELETING all pictures in the Pictures folder associated with CLASSIC, on assumption they are now in cloud and managed by Lightroom Online. But I don't know what LR(online) is doing for local copies.  Could it be that it is using the files I uploaded from my Pictures folder as it's local copies?

If so, this is the easiest way I can imagine to switch between Classic and LR. On other hand, I have a feeling, and all my reading supports this, that the change from Classic to LR Online CANNOT be this easy.

I would appreciate any/all ideas and opinions about this.

fbx


----------



## Jim Wilde (Sep 28, 2020)

Can you be more clear about what you actually did? You say what you think you did was "copy (upload or add) all photos to Lightroom online", but later on you refer to the "Lightroom Online desktop app"....but there are two different apps that you could have used: Lightroom desktop, which is a stand alone app which runs on the desktop in much the same way that Classic does, or the Lightroom Web app (often called Lightroom Online) which runs in a browser on your desktop. Which one you used can make a difference (the Lightroom desktop app creates an interim copy of the source images, the other doesn't), so which did you use?

If you are just using the LrWeb app, you will have no local copies of the images, however the Lightroom desktop app has an option to store a copy of all the images locally. But either way, neither of them would reference the original images in your Pictures folder, but before deleting them from Pictures you really need to make sure that you have got them safely uploaded to the cloud, and you also need to address the next point as well.

Another issue is your decision not to use the migration tool. The potential problem is that if you have simply imported your images into either the Lightroom desktop app or the LrWeb app, you may not have picked up all the develop and metadata edits which you have made over the years (you would have needed to save to XMP for all images in Classic prior to importing them to the cloud). The migration tool of course does automatically import all that data as it obtains it from the catalog that you are migrating. So....did you save to XMP before you imported to the cloud? If you Classic catalog was set to automatically write changes to XMP you should be OK, but you do need to check that.


----------



## fbx33 (Sep 28, 2020)

Jim Wilde--Thanks for taking a look at this. As far as how I did it, well, alas, that was yesterday and the brain does not go back that far. 

Think I just worked from Lightroom (cloudy) and imported all pictures from the Pictures Directory where all the Classic pictures were. 

What I do know, from checking this morning, is that almost all of the pictures in Lightroom (the desktop version of the online application, not "Adobe Lightroom" which I believe is the name of the wholly online minimal editor Web app), show up as both Local and Cloud "Original".  

A few (like 50-100 fairly recent things) show up as--

Local:  Smart Preview
Cloud: Original

But the vast majority of the 25K are 

Local:  Original - JPG
Cloud: Original -JPG

Don't really know anything about XMP.


----------



## fbx33 (Sep 29, 2020)

What I think I did was point Lightroom Desktop to my folder with all my Classic images in it.  And told it to upload all.

I did not use Lightroom Web (though I have in past).

i was thinking of uninstalling Lightroom Classic as the next move.

Kind of like Lightroom Desktop now. Seems fast and straightforward. Get pretty much same look for my pictures. Don’t need a lot of the books and similar stuff from Classic, and somehow Classic seems a little dowdy now.

If my pix are indeed in the same directory they were before they should show any edits made in Lightroom Desktop.  And when it says local and cloud are both originals, I take that to mean both are full res originals with all edits included.  Would that be correct?

Finally, everything is pretty much backed up repeatedly in three or four local external SSDs and in Time Machine, and on Backblaze,  so I don’t see a big risk involved (though I could be wrong about that).

Does this sound more or less correct?

& many thanks for your help—

fb


----------



## Jim Wilde (Sep 29, 2020)

fbx33 said:


> If my pix are indeed in the same directory they were before they should show any edits made in Lightroom Desktop.  And when it says local and cloud are both originals, I take that to mean both are full res originals with all edits included.  Would that be correct?


The image files in your Pictures folder may still be in the same place, but that's not what Lightroom is now using. When you import images into Lightroom from a hard drive or memory card, Lightroom *copies *them into Lightroom's designated location (the default is in Lightroom's "local library" which in turn in inside Pictures fiolder, but that can be changed in Lightroom's Preferences>Local Storage tab), and it's those copies that are uploaded to the cloud. The local copies should eventually be deleted by Lightroom, but that can take time....which explains why some of the assets show Original local, while others show Smart Preview local. At this point Lightroom has lost all interest in the original images that you imported.

But the big issue is going to be edits. All versions of Lightroom, including Classic, are non-destructive editors....that means that any changes to the images are only stored in the catalog, and the internal preview that you see inside the apps is updated to include the changes, but the images on disk remain unchanged. It is possible to embed the changes into the XMP section of the file headers, but that doesn't happen by default, the use has to enable that themselves. It sounds as though you weren't doing that in Classic, which in turn means that the images that you imported into Lightroom would not have included any develop edits or any metadata that you added in Classic (such as Keywords, Titles, Captions, etc.). You really need to check some of the images in Lightroom that you know you have edited to see if those edits are showing up (check the develop sliders to see if any of them are not at the neutral position, or check the Info tab to see if any of the keywords or other metadata shows up).


----------



## fbx33 (Sep 29, 2020)

Hmm...

I *attach* a screenshot of my Pictures folder now. The "Photos Library.photoslibrary" is for *Apple Photos*.

The *Classic* pictures themselves (26,107) were & are in the "All pictures here" folder.

The "LightroomLibrary.lrlibrary" was created & modified 5/25/20, so it's not new from  when I told Lightroom Desktop to add  pictures Sunday.

Still, "LightroomLibrary.lrlibrary" is 153 GB which is about what my pix take up (Classic's "All Pictures Here" folder is 144.13 GB).

I don't caption, keyword, etc. but I edit a fair number of pix. Will   look Tuesday, compare Lightroom Desktop pix to same in Classic.

Thanks for your help and advice in this matter.

fb


----------



## Johan Elzenga (Sep 29, 2020)

fbx33 said:


> The "LightroomLibrary.lrlibrary" was created & modified 5/25/20, so it's not new from when I told Lightroom Desktop to add pictures Sunday.


The Lightroom Library.lrlibrary is a so-called 'package'. That is a folder, disguised as a file. When Lightroom adds pictures to this package, the Finder will sometimes not show that in the modification date.


----------

