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Tbar23
Participant
January 21, 2024
Question

Looking for advice migrating from Lightroom Classic (using 3rd party cloud storage) catalog to LR

  • January 21, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 160 views

I have probably created my own mess here, but I am looking for advice. I have only been using Adobe products for a couple of years and have done it intermittently enough to be far from an expert.

I initially resisted Adobe's push to the cloud and tried to keep my photo management to one computer (a Macbook) using Lightroom Classic. However, that MBP has limited storage, so I used Microsoft 365 OneDrive (personal) to store all of my photos.

This has largely worked well, though I do occasionally have issues if OneDrive has offloaded a particular file or folder and I need to make sure I download locally copies.

As time has gone on, I have found the convenience and ability to edit photos on other devices while traveling to be quite valuable.

I am thinking of going ahead and migrating my Lightroom Classic work (which is about 20,000 photos) to Lightroom.

However, I am concerned that the source files are Cloud-based and don't necessarily reside on my HDD. Will that cause problems during the migration? I could connect an external drive and ensure that I have everything locally at the same time, but I don't know a good way to change the LRC catalog path links.

 

Anyone have a suggestion?

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    1 reply

    Sameer K
    Community Manager
    Sameer KCommunity Manager
    Community Manager
    January 22, 2024

    Hey, @Tbar23. Welcome to the Lightroom Community. I'll help you with the migration.

    It'll be a few extra steps & precautions. What would be the total size of all your original images?

     

    Good thing you have external drives. If you follow the migration path, You'll need a few things:

     

    1 - All the original images stored locally on the external drives & Lightroom Classic to have no missing/unlinked images in the catalog. You can check the steps here to re-locate/re-link images: https://adobe.ly/48HaxHn

     

    2 - Lightroom & Lightroom Classic with full disk access: https://adobe.ly/4b42cPM

     

    3 - Equal or more free space on the Mac. The lightroom desktop needs enough space to copy your photos and videos before uploading them to the cloud. Once uploaded, Lightroom cleans up the local Lightroom library.

     

    Please check the possible errors & steps to take/prepare for the migration: https://adobe.ly/4916Bkx

     

    I hope this helps to some extent. Thanks!
    Sameer K

    T
    Tbar23Author
    Participant
    January 25, 2024

    Thanks, Sameer. I was a bit leery of the fact that my originals were on a 3rd party cloud service (Microsoft OneDrive Personal), but it looks like the migration largely worked.

    For my "local" location, I chose a NAS-based volume on my home network, and that looks like it went okay.

     

    Out of ~20,000 items, there were only a handful of assets that did not migrate. Few enough that I can do those manually.

     

    One remaining question I do have: the log file says, "Develop setting not migrated for 582 Asset(s)"

    One of the primary reasons I wanted to migrate was to maintain develop settings.

    Is there a way to figure out what went wrong with the develop settings migration and still migrate those to the new LR environment?

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