Cloud/local storage Lr workflow

[DavidKb]

Last april I left behind my laptop and began using an iPad Air as my main tool as a professional photographer for ingesting and editing all my raw files on the road with Lr Mobile.

I use a folder per month and, inside of each month's folder, an album per assignement. So now I have 5 folders with about 40-50 albums inside each one of them. About 430 Gb and 12.000 files.

The catalog is in sync with my LrC -which I use for puntual complex edits- and everything ran like a charm until today, that I realized I'm getting out of space on my almost unused for months laptop...  I discovered LrC backups locally every file of the catalog...

So now, that my Adobe cloud is getting fuller and fuller and my laptop is running out of space, here come my questions:

- Is there a way of dowloading all my 12.000 files in the same structure of folders and albums I have in the catalog for a local ordered backup copy?

- Is there a way to use LrC on my laptop -which I like more than Lr- without having all those raw files stored locally or in an external HD?

Thank you very much in advance

[Sameer K]

Hey @DavidKb. Welcome to the Lightroom Classic community. I'll help you figure this out.

Lightroom Classic works with images stored locally, so the images must be downloaded at the default location by Lightroom's logic.

In Lightroom Classic, you can go to Edit > Preferences > Lightroom Sync > Set the default location to an external drive of your choice.

Try to keep the hard drive connected to the machine when Lightroom is in use, or sync might misbehave.

Let me know if this helps. Thanks!
Sameer K

[DavidKb]

Hi! Thank you very much for your answer, Sameer K. I understand what you say and I'll change the sync folder right now 🙂 That solves my second question. Thank you.

But the fact is that I don't need to keep all the stuff I create and store in the cloud forever. I don't need it even in that external drive in sync or in the current Lr Catalog in a few months time, but I need to store it. 

Before using Adobe Cloud my workflow was copying the images to my HD with this structure of folders 2023_01>20230101_[shortdescription] that I would keep inside the Lr Catalog. Every now and then -when those images were no longer suitable to be needed- I stored those folders out of my laptop, even of my Lr Catalog.

When I began using Lr Mobile and Adobe Cloud I no longer used a local structure of files. I ordered them inside Lr (with folders (of months) and albums (of assignments). But I still need to store offline all those aging images. Is there a way to get the images out of Lr keeping that structure in a local copy, with the exact folder structure to store all my stuff?

That's exactly were I'm lost and afraid. I hope not to have to make it manually, because it would reduce drastically the benefits I thought I was getting from this new Lr mobile approach to my workflow.

Thanks for your time

[DavidKb]

I'm confused too with the diskspace Lrc uses and the number of files it stores. It doesn't much the information in Lr. 

Space/files in my laptop: 504 gb, 18.755 files

Lr Mobile/Cloud 408 Gb, 10.383 files