Lightroom Classic requires local storage. Originals are stored locally, so even if you do sync some collections to the Lightroom Photos server on Creative Cloud, only Smart Previews are synced. You would still need to keep local originals.
Lightroom (not Classic) is cloud-first. You would be able to move all original photos into Lightroom Photos in Creative Cloud, so if you are OK with the smaller feature set of Lightroom and losing your existing folder structure, this could be an option for all-cloud storage of your photos. In Lightroom you can assign how much local storage is used to cache the cloud-stored images you edit.
Photoshop was originally designed for local storage, but there are two ways to use it with Creative Cloud storage:
- Photoshop lists Lightroom Photos in its Home screen, so you can open cloud-stored Lightroom images from there, then send the edited version back with the Share icon.
- Photoshop can also open/save the new Cloud Documents, which are Photoshop documents only stored in the cloud, not locally. Cloud Documents was designed for seamless document sharing between the desktop and iPad versions of Photoshop, but you can use it for Photoshop documents you don’t want to store locally.
- Lightroom and Lightroom Classic have no access to Cloud Documents on any platform. So if you use Photoshop to open an image from Lightroom, and then save it as a Photoshop Cloud Document, Lightroom will not be able to see the Cloud Documents version.
More very important info:
- None of the above involve the Creative Cloud Files folder on your Mac. From what you are describing, you don't want to use Creative Cloud Files anyway, because those require local storage. Creative Cloud Files do sync to the cloud and your other devices, but there is no way to do that and remove them from your computer. If you delete anything from Creative Cloud Files, it is deleted everywhere. So it cannot be pure cloud storage or a backup.
- If it isn’t already obvious, Creative Cloud Files, Lightroom Photos, Cloud Documents (and Creative Cloud Libraries which aren’t even discussed yet) are all different, separate types of Creative Cloud storage. These four cloud services are not connected to each other.
If all of the above is too confusing to you, do not move everything to the cloud until you do understand the difference between all the different kinds of Creative Cloud storage and how they connect to Lightroom Classic, Lightroom, and Photoshop. You must pay close attention to how you implement your exact cloud workflow if you don’t want files to end up in places you didn’t expect, taking up cloud or local storage space you didn’t intend to use up. There is not enough good Adobe documentation of the relationship among these cloud services and the applications.
1 Correct answer
3
Replies
AdChoices