How in hell do you leave Adobe Creative Cloud and keep your images intact!

Question

I am amazed! I have searched the internet and either Adobe has rigged Google or no one ever leaves Creative Cloud! After years of of using Lightroom (now on CC) I now want to leave, I've had enough of the subscription model, I don't use it and its a waste of money just sat there - so, please, how do I do this?

I have used an external drive to make a copy of the originals by opting for local storage (there wasn't enough room on my HD) - but even so Adobe has insisted on saving all files since 2001 into daily (YES DAILY!) sub folders - how in the world am I ever going to import those into anything else - one **** day at a time!!

So I've givien up on that and they'll just have to be a failsafe backup. But now I want to get at all the editied images out of Lightroom, around 3,000, in some sort of non lossy format (Adobe just seems to offer JPEG or Originals with edits - the later I presume means sidecar files, which also I presume would only be of use if importing back into Lightroom?

I ideally want export them in one go, with all metadata intact, especially location. Has anyone ever done this - surely someone must have - or has Adobe just made ot so hard to leave we all just put up and pay up?

Sorry - I'm a wee bit miffed... not with you guys, your always great at solving my problems! 🙂

JohanElzenga · Answer

Why would you need to import these daily folders one at a time? Most alternatives for Lightroom will allow you to import a parent folder with all its subfolders in one go.

It's true that Lightroom desktop offers very few export options at this moment; only jpeg or original + edits. And indeed those edits can only be read by other Adobe software. What you might be able to do is install Lightroom Classic as trial and then sync the Lightroom Classic catalog to the cloud. That will download all the images from the cloud into Lightroom Classic, so you can then export them from there in a non-lossy format like tiff. You can also setup a different folder structure for downloaded images. Do this before you enable the sync and start the download.

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