# Move from LR to LRC



## jamesooley (Mar 16, 2021)

I have LR desktop cloud and I'd like to convert to  LR Classic. I've tried twice and found it to be so frustrating that I gave up both times. Is it possible to move several thousand images from LR to LRC?


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## Rob_Cullen (Mar 16, 2021)

It should be easy.  If you open Lightroom-Classic and turn on the SYNC in the Cloud icon, then all your photos in your Cloud storage will download to a folder on your local hard-drive (given sufficient time!)
They download to a default folder (not recommended) unless you specify it in Preferences/Lightroom Sync/Location. Use the 'Dated sub-folders' option!





After removing the photos from the Cloud, some users then sync selected images in Collections back to the Cloud as proxy (Smart previews) that do not occupy any space in your Cloud space.


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## clee01l (Mar 16, 2021)

I-See-Light said:


> all your photos in your Cloud storage will download to a folder on your local hard-drive (given sufficient time!)


The "Sufficient Time" is important.  as you will be downloading and limited to your carrier provided band width.    If you have saved a copy of the originals to a local folder, you can import these into the Lightroom Catalog (be sure to copy them to a new location).   This will go much faster but you will lose any edits mage in the cloud.  (I haven't tested this but you should be able to recover those edits   by since the LrC cataloged images back to the cloud).


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## Jim Wilde (Mar 16, 2021)

clee01l said:


> If you have saved a copy of the originals to a local folder, you can import these into the Lightroom Catalog (be sure to copy them to a new location).   This will go much faster but you will lose any edits mage in the cloud.  (I haven't tested this but you should be able to recover those edits   by since the LrC cataloged images back to the cloud).


I'm not sure I'd do that (in fact, I know I wouldn't do that), as that's risking ending up with a pile of unexpected VCs if you import them from the local hard drive first. After doing that, then turning on sync, LrC will download all the same images from the cloud, and the risk is that it thinks what's being downloaded is a duplicate of what's already in the catalog (which it is), but instead of simply marking the existing imported originals as "synced" it creates a virtual copy of them all and it's that VC which is flagged as synced. I've seen that scenario a few times (including with my own system), so I personally wouldn't risk it.


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## hrboyce (Apr 5, 2021)

I don't know if this is a valid approach or not as I am a neophyte at all of this so reader beware... and your results may vary.
I attempted this by using the downloader tool from adobe which brought down all my originals and the sidecar XMP edit files organized by year/date from the cloud (that part of the process I would recommend everyone do occasionally).  I then imported the images into a new LrC catalogue on a different PC (AFTER MAKING ABSOLUTELY SURE SYNCH WAS OFF ON LrClassic) and it seemed my edits were preserved.  I don't use much POST meta data but I can't imagine that things like keywords, color coding, and flags etc. come along for the ride.  My plan was to do a year at a time into different catalogs to avoid duplication and ease organization but eventually I abandoned the whole idea because of time constraints and the decision to learn something other than LrC for editing photos as an alternative to the Lr Cloudy.


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