Possible to preserve older version when upgrading?

One of the things that makes this difficult is that a new major version of Lightroom Classic does not rename the application with a version. For example, if you upgrade Photoshop, your Adobe Photoshop 2020 becomes Adobe Photoshop 2021, but the new Adobe Lightroom Classic is still called Adobe Lightroom Classic, so you can’t have two. If Adobe decided they wanted to let two versions co-exist, they would probably start adding the version number to the application name like they used to.

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@martin-s9252021 wrote:

It seems the only way to have 9 and 10 installed side by side is to restore 9 from a backup after the upgrade… ?

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No; but although you can’t have them side-by-side, there is a way to change your mind later. In the Creative Cloud app that you use to install and update, go to the All Apps section, and click the … menu for Lightroom Classic. You will see two options. One is Uninstall and another is Other Versions.

If you uninstall the current version, you can then use Other Versions to install any older version that is listed, which currently goes back to Lightroom Classic 8.2.1.

To make this easier, make a habit of always including the major version of Lightroom Classic in the filename of the catalog. For example, add "v9" an "v10" to catalogs used by those versions of Lightroom Classic so that if you play around with versions, you are always able to verify which catalog goes with which major version of Lightroom Classic.

Adobe limits how far back those go, so if a Lightroom Classic 11 comes out, version 8 is likely to roll off that list of older versions you can go back to.

I think that ability is  in the  Advanced options in the Creative Cloud Desktop App.

this link out of date:

https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/kb/keeping-previous-versions-installed-when-installing-cc-2015-appl.html

What is your motivation for keeping an older version?

Hi Martin,

You could try that but it would be of limited value. 

There are times when I actually use two versions of PS at the same time and part of the reason that I can do this is that the image formats (psd, tif, jpg, etc.) will work on older and newer versions of PS.

But LRC is different in that when new versions are released, the catalog is updated to take advantage of the new features and earlier versions of LRC cannot open the new catalogs. You could keep a copy of the previous catalog but any new images and any corrections that you do subsequent to the update would not be available to older versions.

I hope that makes sense.