using Lightroom classic with RAW files in CC. Possible?

[benjamingordon]

Hi all.

Im a photographer using lightroom desktop on mac.

I much prefer lightroom classic for various reasons but would like to move my RAW photos from an external hard drive to the creative cloud.

Firstly is this possible using lightroom desktop and secondly how do i get my RAW images into the cloud?

Cheers!

[JP Hess]

If you mean that you want the actual raw images in the cloud, and not smart previews, then it will be necessary for you to use the Add Photos option in Lightroom Desktop and import those raw files using that program. It is not possible to add the full-sized raw files to the version using Lightroom Classic. Classic will only add smart previews. But be advised that it is not recommended to try to use the two versions on the same computer.

[Jao vdL]

As Jim says, you than have to use Lightroom Cloudy to upload the raw files. The problem wth this scenario is that Classic will download all the images to its local store. You can't use this to not have to have an external disk if you want to use Classic and your internal disk is too small. So Adobe's cloud doens't solve this problem if you need the features of Classic.

My advice in this scenario is to get yourself one of the external 1terabyte SSD disks that you can buy for very little nowadays. Sandisk, Samsung, etc. all sell these, they are tiny and fast. You can simply doublesided tape it to the back of your laptop and leave it always plugged in. 1TB is more than enough for most people's immediate access need.

Another thing you can in principle do is to put your images in a dropbox or iCloud folder that you have set to smart sync. Both of these cloud services (and there are probably more that do this) dynamically offload files that haven't been used recently and then when requested, redownloads them. This works as long as you know you will almost always have good and fast internet service. If you don't have internet and you accidentally need to access a raw file, you can mess up your catalog, so I do not recommend this. 

A last thing you can do is to buy a NAS and put it on your network. Move the older files onto it and reference them from Lightroom Classic. As long as you're home or at your shop they will be accesible. There are even some of these that you can mount over the internet and acces the files from wherever you are, basically giving you a personal cloud storage. This works well but can be slow.