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leishaj
Participant
February 14, 2018
Answered

Workflow and Licensing with Lightroom Classic CC

  • February 14, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 423 views

Good morning.  I do not currently own a Lightroom Classic license (perpetual or cloud-based).  I believe the features of Classic will help me organize and clean up my photos and slides.  Two questions:

1) I have a desktop PC at my office and a MS Surface Pro at home which I plan to use.  Do I need two licenses?  Does Adobe constrain the number of simultaneous logins per account, or number of activated desktop downloads?  I only need one access at a time.

2) I would like to keep all of my photos/jpg/raw in my MS Cloud storage (not Adobe Cloud), and tag all files using MS Explorer rather than Lightroom, to allow the photos independence with other applications I use (e.g. to create and on-the-fly slideshow for a client).  Will this create a workflow problem for me?  What about potential issues with the catalog which is created by Lightroom?

Thank you for any guidance here.  I am a small business and can't afford the time to make a mistake.

Best wishes, Leisha

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer dj_paige

    1) Lightroom licenses allow installation on two computers that you own for your own personal use, as long as you are not using LR on both computers simultaneously.

    2) I can't answer specific questions about MS Cloud, but in general for LIghtroom use the photos must be stored locally, on one of your hard disks, or on a network drive. Cloud storage of the photos, if possible, will slow you down greatly (and it may not be possible). Furthermore, the idea of inputting keywords via two different sources of "organization" (Lightroom and Windows Explorer) will cause problems for you, because the information that you provide using one source will not automatically be recognized by the other organizer. And this causes problems because your two different sources will differ in their content. Even if you manually update each source to match the other source, humans aren't perfect and make mistakes, and you will have mismatches in the content, and of course, it is extra work. So, I strongly recommend doing all keywording in Lightroom and then have Lightroom automatically write the keywords to the files. The general rule which I advise everyone is to use only one organizing software!

    Also, you can certainly produce "on-the-fly" slideshows using Lightroom.

    1 reply

    dj_paige
    dj_paigeCorrect answer
    Legend
    February 14, 2018

    1) Lightroom licenses allow installation on two computers that you own for your own personal use, as long as you are not using LR on both computers simultaneously.

    2) I can't answer specific questions about MS Cloud, but in general for LIghtroom use the photos must be stored locally, on one of your hard disks, or on a network drive. Cloud storage of the photos, if possible, will slow you down greatly (and it may not be possible). Furthermore, the idea of inputting keywords via two different sources of "organization" (Lightroom and Windows Explorer) will cause problems for you, because the information that you provide using one source will not automatically be recognized by the other organizer. And this causes problems because your two different sources will differ in their content. Even if you manually update each source to match the other source, humans aren't perfect and make mistakes, and you will have mismatches in the content, and of course, it is extra work. So, I strongly recommend doing all keywording in Lightroom and then have Lightroom automatically write the keywords to the files. The general rule which I advise everyone is to use only one organizing software!

    Also, you can certainly produce "on-the-fly" slideshows using Lightroom.

    L
    leishajAuthor
    Participant
    February 14, 2018

    Thank you for the prompt response!  I will consider the slideshow feature.

    One more clarification -- I noted that when i loaded a photo into the Lightroom trial version, which was keyworded/tagged in Explorer, Lightroom recognized the tags and would sort on them.  Does that mean that they are not stored in the "catalog", however?

    dj_paige
    dj_paige
    Legend
    February 14, 2018

    All keywords used by Lightroom are stored in the catalog file. When you import a photo, if the photo has keywords, Lightroom reads them and then stores the keywords in the catalog file. If you add a keyword via Windows Explorer after the file is imported into Lightroom, this is not used by Lightroom unless you manually tell LR to read the metadata from the file.

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