Caption and Local Backup Issues with Lightroom CC

markwclark  wrote Captions Question 1 - captions search. I cannot a find a way of doing text searching in Lightroom CC. Is there one? Is there likely to be one? I am not sure about relying on face recognition. Say I take a picture of Baby James on his birth date - will facial recognition work for his wedding day! I suspect not. My old fashioned text searching for 'Baby James' or 'James' might work out to be more reliable. Alright it will bring up lots of James's but I tend to find I can get the picture I want quite quickly - especially when I refine the search by time period. Question 2 - caption capture. When I added a caption to a photo in PSE6 it also put this information into the same photo in the My Pictures library - under 'details'. When I put in a caption in Lightroom CC it does not do this. So if I ever fall out with Adobe or they go bust I will lose all the captions I make going forward. I have tried a workaround by using Bridge - adding a caption as a description. This appears to work most of the time - it puts the caption into the Pictures Library - under details - as well as into Lightroom CC as a caption - usually! But every now and then it doesn't work - so I am not totally convinced by my workaround. Anyone any experience of this?  Anyone got a better idea? Maybe it's me doing something stupid when there is a more obvious and elegant way of captioning to photos in Lightroom and getting the caption information showing in 'details' in the photo in the Pictures Library. Question 3 - caption displayed/presented. Sometimes you want to see the photo with it's caption underneath or above - whatever. Again there seems to be no way of doing this in Lightroom CC. Incidentally, I tried exporting using 'save to' and no caption information is exported at all as far as I could tell. Also sometimes after copying a caption to paste as the basis of captions for other photos Lightroom will occasionally throw a 'wobbly' and only allow a few uses of cut and paste. Weird! PSE 6 was no problem in this regard.

Question 1: there is not a specific "caption field only" search, though the caption is one of the several elements that would be searched when doing a free-form search in the Search Bar. Although I do use the title and caption fields, I also use keywords which have the benefit of a more targeted search/filter option. So "James" might appear in a caption, but would definitely appear as a keyword, and it's the keyword filter that I'd turn to first when looking for pictures of "James".

BTW, face recognition can be astonishingly good at recognising faces in images spread over years and decades....sure, a single picture of Baby James and a single picture of him on his wedding day 25 years later might not be matched, but is that a typical scenario? Wouldn't there also be many images of James throughout his life, and in that scenario you'll find facial recognition works very well when new images are imported.

Question 2: I'm not sure what you are trying to achieve here. Lightroom (both "cloudy" and Classic) are non-destructive editors, so any changes you make to an image, e.g. adding a caption, are not written to the image but are instead stored in the catalog. Those changes are typically only incorporated into an image during the export (Save To) process, but the original remans unchanged. So what are you trying to achieve by looking at the images in the My Pictures library? If you can tell us that we'll probably be able to suggest something.

Question 3: No, the desktop version of Lightroom doesn't have the option to display captions above or below the image, though it is available when you have the Info panel available. But even that isn't great, as you can't see the complete caption if it extends beyond the narrow field of view that the Info panel provides. A far better option is to browse the images using the Lightroom Web app in your browser, as the caption is displayed below the images when using the loupe view. Also, when using the Info panel in the Web app the caption field is displayed multi-line, so the complete caption is always visible. In fact, I'll typically do any caption entering using the Web app instead of the Desktop app.

I will add to Jim’s comment by saying, when you sync a Lightroom Classic catalog, all images in the cloud (by way of Lightroom) will download to your computer. Nothing will automatically upload, but images will automatically download.

Lightroom does not have the search capabilities of Lightroom Classic. It relies on web based artificial intelligence to find images.

Lightroom stores everything in the cloud and does not have a folder structure. Organization is done by creating albums. The files on your local drive are only a mirrored sync of the cloud. They are NOT the master files. Do not think of them as a backup. They are there so that you can work when you don’t have internet.

Use Lightroom if you want all of your work in the cloud and automatically synced everywhere.

Use Lightroom Classic if you want your images stored on local hard drives. Use Classic if you don’t want to incur extra cloud storage fees. Use Classic if you need features like printing and import presets (plus many more, see link).

Do not use Lightroom and Lightroom Classic together on the same computer.

Use Bridge for images that you don’t want included in your Lightroom catalog.

Lightroom vs. Lightroom Classic | Adobe

The only comment I'm going to make regarding all of your questions is that there is no need to be scared of Lightroom Classic. The only images that get synchronized with Lightroom CC are images that you choose to put in a collection and that you choose to share that collection with Lightroom CC. Otherwise, all images in Lightroom Classic remain in their folders, on your computer, not shared, completely private. That is, unless you make what I consider to be the mistake of migrating your Lightroom Classic catalog. In that case, all images get migrated to the cloud. I'm not a proponent of doing that.