Because of your confusion, it’s very difficult to be precise about answering your question. However, it is possible to provide some details about the implications of cancelling a subscription which appears to encompass both Lightroom Classic and the Adobe cloud.
Dealing with Lightroom Classic is easy…..when the subscription is cancelled nothing happens to your images on your local hard drives, they remain exactly where they are now. Similarly your catalogs will also remain as they are now. Furthermore, you can continue to run Lightroom Classic after the subscription ends, using the same catalogs and their images. All that happens is that some of the functions of the LrC app will no longer work. Specifically the Develop and Map modules will be unavailable, and cloud syncing will also be unavailable. However, all other features will still be accessible so you can continue to access existing images, import new images, organise and add metadata, print, export (and even do some limited development using the Quick Develop panel in the Library module). So no need to be concerned about losing data in LrC should you cancel your subscription.
The Adobe cloud is somewhat different, and a lot depends on how you have been using it (though from your post you’re not too sure yourself). If you have synced images to the cloud FROM Lightroom Classic, there’s no issue as only smart previews of the originals are uploaded to the cloud, the originals remain in LrC so no concern if those smart previews eventually are deleted.
But….if you have imported/added images directly into one of the cloud apps (e.g. Lightroom Mobile on your phone) then those images exist in their original form and would eventually be deleted from the cloud a year after the subscription is cancelled. However, if you have synced one of your catalogs with the cloud, a copy of all of those original images will have downloaded from the cloud into LrC and so would already exist on your local hard drives. So there would be nothing to be concerned about provided syncing is kept up to date until you eventually cancel the subscription.
But if you haven’t synced any of your catalogs with the cloud you will need to download all your images that are stored in the cloud if you don’t want to lose them. There are various ways of doing that:
- Export all the cloud images to a local hard drive using the “Original” setting, which will preserve both the original images plus any edits and added metadata.
- Sync one of your LrC catalogs (or a new catalog) with the cloud, so that a copy of the cloud images download into that catalog.
- Use the Adobe Downloader service (https://lightroom.adobe.com/lightroom-library-download) to download all the images, easy to use but still has some limitations (notably the loss of any metadata added in the cloud).
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