# Anyone moved from LR Classic to LR Cloud?



## NicholasG (Dec 7, 2020)

I've been using LR Classic for a few years but my annual subscription is up for renewal soon so I'm thinking about alternatives.

I'm not a great fan of Classic. For my use its probably too powerful and the GUI is so ugly, I also find the fudged cloud sync annoying (and not 100% reliable).

My wife and I both take photos which I load and edit on my iMac. She likes to make books, calendars etc. from the photos and both of us like to show photos to friends on our iPads.

I'm thinking what I lose in functionality going from LR Classic to LR Cloud (for me) is not a big deal.

I can only see 2 issues - i) Cloud does not support JPEG+RAW, it just shows them as 2 separate photos; ii) we have c. 750 TB of photos, so getting near the point of having to pay for an additional TB (which is pricey at $10/month).

Anyone here made this move? Are there any other gotchas OR another eco-system that does every LR cloud does (access to photo library from PC, phone, tablet; synchronized edits; interfaces to 3rd parties like Blurb; camera app)?

Thanks!

Nicholas


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## kimballistic (Dec 8, 2020)

I'd recommend trying it out by syncing your entire catalog of photos from Classic to the cloud.  This won't incur any cloud storage costs as every photo will sync as a smart preview that doesn't count against the 20 GB that comes with your Classic plan.

Then just use LR Cloudy on your iMac for a few weeks on those synced images (you already have a license for it as part of your Classic subscription).  Just remember to use Classic for importing new images, or you'll use up your 20 GB plan fast.

Eventually ask yourself: Do you like it?  Do you find the interface significantly different enough, or "not ugly" enough, to be worth incurring the time cost of switching programs and switching to a cloud-based storage system?

Some questions for you in the meantime, in response to your two issues:

Why keep the JPG sidecars if you are shooting & editing in raw, while they are just hidden unused sidecar files in Classic?  They're just wasting space, right?
I'm guessing you meant you had 750 GB of photos, not 750 TB.  Either way, that's a LOT of data to upload to the cloud.  Based on your description the only benefit you get from storing them in the cloud is being able to occasionally show photos on your ipads to your friends.  But you can do that now with syncing and Lr Classic... so, why bother with switching to the cloud at all?  Also, don't you cull?  Or select just the "best" images to put into a collection?  It seems like you only need to show those "bests" to your friends, not your entire 750 GB of photos.
If all of this is motivated by you just looking for a fresher UI that isn't "so ugly" to use on your iMac... I don't know man.  You may eventually realize Cloudy has prioritized form over function, and even worse, it's form is not actually _that_ different from Classic.  I get it, aesthetics are important, but there's nothing about Classic's UI that's _wrong_ or _sloppy_ or _unprofessional,_ and I say that as someone with pretty high standards for GUIs.  One of the reasons it hasn't changed much over the years is, quite frankly, it hasn't needed to.  It gets the job done.

Regarding your last question, about other apps: The only possibility I can think of is Apple Photos with iCloud storage.  That might work if you never really got into heavy editing of your images.  Apple Photos also supports showing raw+JPG pairs as one photo, where you choose whether you're viewing the raw or JPG.  It checks every box you listed, but you'd have to share iCloud accounts with your wife for her to access the photos on her devices, which is a _huge_ headache and generally a big no-no.


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## Paul McFarlane (Dec 8, 2020)

Hi Nicolas

Good suggestion from kimballistic on trying. Check the Cloud Sync Chapter of your Classic book. That way you can be sure the Cloud version does all you want (it is a lot more expansive than it used to be).


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## NicholasG (Jan 21, 2021)

Thanks for the replies. Yes, only 750GB. 

Agree I probably need to cull more (and have started to be more fussy). I'll probably stick to Classic for the time being.

One advantage to LR Cloudy is that you can download it via the Mac App Store, so do not get all the Creative Cloud cruft all over your SSD.

I really wish the Adobe long-term LR roadmap would leak. I can't believe they plan to support 2 applications that do (more or less) the same thing forever.


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## Paul McFarlane (Jan 21, 2021)

NicholasG said:


> One advantage to LR Cloudy is that you can download it via the Mac App Store, so do not get all the Creative Cloud cruft all over your SSD.


I believe you still end up loading the CC App locally - that's how it's all kept updated.



NicholasG said:


> I really wish the Adobe long-term LR roadmap would leak. I can't believe they plan to support 2 applications that do (more or less) the same thing forever.


They are aimed at different markets (largely) and have distinct differences. Cloud is simply neither practical not desirous for many, while it's easy and accessible for others.

Adobe have other similar lines that might be seen to overlap but are also for different needs; take Photoshop and Photoshop Elements for example.


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## tspear (Jan 21, 2021)

@NicholasG

You missed a point there. If you are shooting in raw plus JPEG, then classic treats the two files as a single file. Classic does all edits from the raw, the JPEG is just there in the disk and kept as a pointer in the software. Unless you split it, the JPEG is never seen, used, viewed or anything. It is just wasted space. I would guess you likely wasting between between 20 and 30% of your 750Gb on JPEG you never see/use.

I am actually making this evaluation right now; but for different reasons. My wife and started traveling a lot more the year before COVID hit, and expect to restart this year. Doing so, I want the ability to work images when traveling; and my wife has just started to tackle her digital image library from before we met, and looking to start a scanning project of old photo albums when that is all done.  So having a single computer, my desktop, as the only machine to manage the images, and handle post processing is becoming a real bottleneck.

The big items I have open still (so far):
1. I would end up back in some type of Folder/Album structure for managing workflow. I currently use smart collections for managing my post edit flow. Looking closer at this, I can use manual folders for a lot of what I do via keywords/labels/colors, but I do lose some functionality on validations, suck as smart collection that looks for images with no development, or no title.
2. I really like my keyword hierarchy. Not sure how I will like a flat structure. This one is TBD.
3. Picture publishing, I currently use some cool plugins to manage a publish service to OneDrive which i have attached to some digital picture frames. Have not figured out how to accomplish that in Lr.
4. The develop process is somewhat opinionated in my opinion. In LrC you can take many approaches to get to the same point. In Lr, they really want you to take a single approach. However, I am not good enough in post processing editing to care about this, I just need to learn the new approach.
5. Lr seems to rely more on PhotoShop for editing images. I have never learned Ps, and do not really want the duplicate images in my management system. Have not decided how much of an issue this is.
6. The facial recognition seems completely different, not sure if this is good or bad or just different. You seem to lose the whole regions aspect, but I am not sure I care about that 
7. My wife has decided that starting later this year she wants to create multiple books a year for family/friends. I never liked the book module in LrC, and always went direct before. So not sure if this will be an issue or missing functionality.
8. GPS reverse location mapping. I have a plugin which gives me much better results than Adobe LrC. Have not figured out how good/bad Lr is.

That is it so far.


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## cyben (Feb 16, 2021)

Hi NicholasG and others,

I would never move everything "only" to the cloud. Rather, I only upload the smart previews to Lightroom (Cloud-based) and especially use the Adobe Sensei functions on them. That way, my 140,000 images Lightroom Classic library (full of raw images) takes up only around 2-3 Gigabytes of storage on the cloud and I can make use of both "ecosystems" (the "classic" and the "cloud-based" one). In Lightroom Classic, I am using an offline plugin called "Excire Search" which is a non-cloud-based image classification plugin that performs even better than Adobe Sensei!

Anyhow, using both versions in parallel works great for me and I simply love Adobe Lightroom Classic - it may be complex but it has many features that its cloud-based cousin doesn´t have,

Finally, cloud-based stuff is never really safe - big companies sometimes do get hacked and it would be disastrous if all my raw images would suddenly be available to hackers world-wide. That´s why I rather keep my raw files on my private hard drive and make regular copies to external storage.

Best wishes and I hope these comments are of help for you!
C


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## Jim Wilde (Feb 16, 2021)

cyben said:


> That way, my 140,000 images Lightroom Classic library (full of raw images) takes up only around 2-3 Gigabytes of storage on the cloud and I can make use of both "ecosystems" (the "classic" and the "cloud-based" one).


Welcome to the forum.
If you really have synced smart previews of all 140k of your images to the cloud, they'll be taking up a heck of a lot more space that 2-3 Gigabytes.....as each smart preview is typically between 1 and 2 megabytes each, 140k of smart previews will be taking up between 140 and 280 gigabytes. Happily, Adobe do not count any of the smart preview usage against the user's cloud allowance, which I think is incredibly generous of them.


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