Lightroom 4

Well, I'm just saying. Those are some of the features you give up by going to Lightroom. It's designed for a user who is looking for image portability more than the full-featured Lightroom that has been around for years. That's my opinion. If you subscribe to the photography plan it's possible to install both versions. If you have two different computers it's probably best to install Lightroom Classic on your primary computer and Lightroom on another computer such as a laptop. However, it is possible to install both on the same computer. I have done that. But don't try to force perfect synchronization between the two if you do that because it will simply drive you crazy. I speak from experience.

Lightroom is evolving. When or whether printing will ever be a feature that is part of it is something that only Adobe knows. You will have to decide for yourself which version is best for you. As I indicated previously, it would not be a good plan to subscribe to Lightroom simply for the purpose of putting the images in the cloud as a "secure backup". Even if you have them in the cloud it would be essential for you to have a secondary backup either on a hard drive or another cloud service to ensure positive security for priceless images.

No, Lightroom Classic works similarly to Lightroom 4 in that it utilizes a local catalog and stores images locally on your computer hard drive or connected external hard drives. The new Lightroom does store your images in the cloud and, optionally, a backup on your local hard drive. The user interface is notably different and lacks many of the features you may have become accustomed to in Lightroom 4. For instance, there is no printing capability in the new Lightroom for the cloud. You only have one catalog. The typical subscription to Lightroom will provide you with 1 TB of storage, and when that is depleted your choice is to remove images or purchase additional storage. There is no book module, there is no map module, and I have found that some tasks that are easy to do in Lightroom Classic are just more cumbersome to accomplish in Lightroom. But that's a personal opinion that I express because I prefer Lightroom Classic.

The good part about the new Lightroom is that the images are available to edit on all of your mobile devices such as your mobile phone, IPad, any device on which you can install the mobile Lightroom application. Editing performed on any device will affect the master images. To be fair, collections can be created in Lightroom Classic and shared as smart previews and have the same editing capability on the same mobile devices with no space limit.

Regardless whether you choose Lightroom Classic or Lightroom, it would be imperative for you to have your own separate backup system to ensure that you have a good secondary resource to recover your images. You can't rely on your own hard drive, and you can't simply rely on Adobe and their cloud service as your sole source of images.

It would be necessary for you to install Lightroom Classic, the trial version, long enough to allow it to upgrade your catalog. Once the catalog has been upgraded, then it could be migrated to Lightroom. Are you certain you want to go to Lightroom and not to Lightroom Classic?