P: Migrate a copy of Lightroom Classic Catalog without the files

[CollinRit]

First, I'm sure that has been discussed, so feel free to point me to that conversation.

I am a professional photographer who shoots thousands of raws weekly. I keep ALL of my files and I don't mind paying for the external drives to do so.

As such, I fill up a couple of 4TB drives per year. These are all categorized, marked by date, and meticulously organized by client, location, project, etc in my Lightroom Classic catalog.

The problem? The new Lightroom, even with its local storage option, is completely useless to me. I LOVE the UI and would be very happy to migrate from Lightroom Classic, but making copies of my terabytes upon terabytes of files is asenine, and I have no desire to wait 5 years to upload them to the cloud.

Why can I not migrate my lightroom classic catalog to the the new lightroom without copying files, keep them on my drives, and keep all of my folders and metadata in the same structure?

If I can, please let me know how 🙂 

[Jim Wilde]

Given the amount of data you have, I would suggest that if you want to use the Lightroom UI then the new Local function in Lightroom would be the only option. But even that depends on the way you have organised your image data.....if you have used folders to do the organising, you would be OK (though you'd have to ensure you save all existing Classic metadata to XMP in order to access it in the Local tab). However, if you've organised using collections/collection sets in Classic, you would lose all of that organisation if you switch to Lightroom Local and the only way to retain it would be by using the Lightroom migration option which puts everything into the cloud, but that just isn't a viable solution for you with that amount of data.