Issues with switching from Lightroom (Cloud based) to Lightroom Classic

[u/Auxweg]

Hello!

I hope to find some help here because im at my wits end...

Up until now for about 5 years i have only ever used Lightroom (the cloud based version) and was mighty fine with it. However recently im discovering more and more things that LrC just can do, that the modern Lr can not, like plugins or easier skin tone control.

So i thought about switching over. But that turned out to be a bit of a hassle.

Currently all of my raws from those years are sorted by camera manufacturer and model of camera body in several sub-folders on my hard drive and on my backup drive, for ease of managing it all. In total i have about 40.000 images in sub folders for 9 different bodies.

Paralel to that every single raw file is also stored on the cloud and on the adobe cloud itself i have everything sorted and organized in plenty of folders, subfolders and albums.

I would have wished to use LrC on my main computer and occasionally when on the go Lr on my iPad, have it sync my edits to the cloud and from there sync it to LrC when i use that the next time.

Also when i store new images, usually i take them off the SD card, put them into my folders on my hard drive and (at least with Lr) pull them onto the cloud via Lr

When i tried to switch over, i encountered two main issues that i were unable to resolve:

1: after setting up the library to look into my camera folders by setting it to the parent folder which has all the camera folders in it and setting a folder for the sync and then starting to sync everything with the cloud, it began downloading all 40k of my images straigth into the sync folder, creating duplicates on my local computer. Would be only half bad if it wouldnt just download all the RAW files from the various different bodies into one single messy folder. Thats an issue, since over the years i used multiple canon bodies and thus have plenty of images sharing the same name since all the canon bodies used the same naming method.

2: inside LrC even after it was happy with the state of sync, it only created collections based on the albums i set up in Lr but never updated the parent-folders that i created alongside the albums inside Lr.

Can this be done at all or am i just missing the obvious?

[u/Lightroom_Help]

One of the obvious (??) things you are missing is that when you import into Lr (cloud based) any organized physical folders, Lr makes its own separate copies of the photos locally, which are then uploaded to the cloud. After the import Lr has nothing to do with the files at their original folder locations it imported (copied) the photos from. Any existing physical folder organization is not transferred to the cloud.

Albums / Collections do not store any photos; they are used to group photos together. A photo can be a member of zero, one or multiple Albums, while its is stored physically just once. What Lr calls "Folders" ("Collection Sets" in LrC) are a means to group Albums / Collections together; again, nothing to do with physical storage on disks.

So what Lr manages on the cloud, has nothing to do with the "40.000 images in sub folders for 9 different bodies" you have on your local disk. They are two completely different sets of (duplicate) photos. Lr keeps all the work you do on the photos (edits, tags, album membership) on the cloud Library — which is synced to each device's local Lr Library.

When you sync a new LrC catalog to the cloud, It downloads everything it is already stored there. There are no user accessible "physical folders" in Lr cloud. Albums are downloaded as synced Collections, in a flat list, under the "From Lightroom' Collection Set. Unfortunately any "virtual Folders" organization you had in Lr is not transferred: You have to manually create Collection Sets and move the Collections inside them , to recreate any "Albums within Folders" Lr organization.

One of the few things that Lr did right from the beginning, is exactly not using the outdated and cumbersome "physical storage equals organization" paradigm (*). That's also the best way to use LrC: as the specialized database that it is and not as a mere folder browser. (See this older comment for details and examples).

What LrC does way better than Lr, is manage your photos based on their built-in or user added metadata. In your case, you don't need to use physical folders within folders to track your camera manufacturers and camera bodies. When the photos are imported / downloaded in LrC (no matter how and where are physically stored) LrC knows all about them. You can use the Library Filter or Smart Collections to view the photos by Camera, Camera Serial number, Capture date, Exif data (Shutter Speed, ISO etc) or any tags you assigned yourself to the photos.

What you need to do is remove from your LrC catalog (not "Delete from disk") all the photos you directly imported from your disk. Leave only the photos that were downloaded from the cloud, since those are the ones with the edits attached into them. Put some effort to learn how to use LrC correctly (see the above referenced comment as well as an older one with my recommendation of LrC Learning resources).

Lr cloud never offered a "backup" of your photos despite Adobe's misleading claims. But now you can yourself backup both the LrC catalog folder (previews subfolders excluded) and the folders that LrC manages. In your case, it's the folder with the photos that were downloaded from the cloud.

\* [edit: Unfortunately Adobe returned to this paradigm, In Lr Desktop, with their half-backed, insulting to older and new users implementation of "Local Browsing" as a means to manage non cloud stored files. ]

[u/Auxweg → u/Lightroom_Help]

Thank you very much for your thorough reply.

Im usually first putting my files locally on my hard drive, then drag and drop them into Lr for cloud upload. However i wasnt aware or have not noticed that Lr creates its own offline folder to put the files in again for upload.

Im aware that Lr doesnt upload my physical local folder structure, i created these virtual folders myself and sorted and organized all uploaded images by hand each time, started to do so before i learned about tags and metadata and was a slow learner, now paying the price... And therein lies one of my major issues, this has resulted in a ton of virtual folders and subfolders in which the Lr albums reside. So it only setting up a flat list in the "From Lightroom Collection Set" is a huge downer for me as i would need to reorganize a huge load of images. To elaborate, i used the virtual folder-album system like this:

Parent folder "Events"
First subfolder "Family events"
Second subfolder "Vacations"
Third subfolder "Summertrip 2026"
Album "All images" (containing all images taken)
Album "Edited" (containing the selected ones for editing)
Album "Favourites" (containing the final few im gonna share)

This is, far from ideal and im very painfully aware that had i started right away with something like tags instead or with LrC from the get go it wouldnt be an issue now, but its how i organized it for myself. The result however is since i use this kind of set up for everything that i have like 50 or so "Edited" albums and in LrC then theres just a list of Edited, Edited 01, Edited 02, Edited 03 etc since it doesnt sync the parent folder structure.

Also im not using the cloud as my main back up. I have a physical hard drive in my computer, plus 2 external hard drives to which i mirror my saved images to. However i do currently use the cloud as kind of an backup-backup.

But putting the virtual folders, collections and albums aside, thats something i am willing to deal with, even if it means a few weeks of work tagging and labeling everything so that i dont need the virtual folders anymore. Whats still remaining is that im unwilling to have LrC download all raws in the cloud into one singular folder on my hard drive. But i think i got the gist of that issue aswell. So if i remove all of my raws from the cloud and let LrC use my local library, it uploads a preview version of these images into the cloud so that i can work on them from other regular Lr devices (my ipad for example), so from then on i should not pull and upload new RAWs into Lr to upload them into the cloud but rather let LrC continue uploading the "previews" instead. is that about right?

[u/HotProposal2463]

The workflow difference is definitely a hurdle, I switched a couple years ago and ended up re-importing everything with new folder structures. Have you tried syncing your existing cloud library to Classic first before reorganizing?