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I have an ancient version of Lightroom on my Mac (5.7.1) which has suited me fine, but now it's understandably laggy and glitchy. I need to upgrade to the most recent version Lightroom + Photoshop package. I'm happy to pay the monthly fee, my main concern is that I will lose all my previous LR images. If I export the images from lightroom to archive them using an external source they will be jpeg images, and not RAW. I'd prefer to keep the RAW images as I sometimes revisit them to edit much later. Can someone offer me some advice? Many thanks.
{Moved from Lightroom Cloud to Lightroom Classic Forum by Moderator}
You will not lose anything!!!
You must subscribe to the "Photography Plan (20GB)" which includes Lightroom-Classic!
You install the Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop App,
Then you install Lightroom-Classic from the Desktop App,
You 'Open' Lightroom-Classic from the Desktop App,
Lr-Classic will recognize your Catalog (from v5.7) and ask you to allow an upgrade for it to work with Classic v10.1.1 (a copy of the v5.7 catalog is saved).
Continue exactly as before! Your Catalog Library and photos will loo
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You will not lose anything!!!
You must subscribe to the "Photography Plan (20GB)" which includes Lightroom-Classic!
You install the Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop App,
Then you install Lightroom-Classic from the Desktop App,
You 'Open' Lightroom-Classic from the Desktop App,
Lr-Classic will recognize your Catalog (from v5.7) and ask you to allow an upgrade for it to work with Classic v10.1.1 (a copy of the v5.7 catalog is saved).
Continue exactly as before! Your Catalog Library and photos will look just the same.
Your photo files ALL remain exactly where they are. For the upgrade- You do NOT have to Export anything. You do NOT have to Import anything.
(Note: In the very rare instance- If you experience an 'empty' catalog, or folders and files that do not appear- a 'new' catalog may have opened, or an 'old' catalog has upgraded. You would need to search your system for your 'current' v5.7 catalog, and open this with Lr-Classic.)
Edit: Forgot to ask- Is your system compatible with Lr-Classic? ! Lightroom-CLASSIC System requirements
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Thanks so much for the help, and for taking the time to reply.
I have checked my system is compatible, so I'm good to go!
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Great detail @Rob_Cullen !
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I have lightroom 5.7.1 with everything completely organized in folders. I downloaded lightroom Clasic, but I cannot find the catalog for the current 5.7.1 version. I found a catalog for an older 4.1 version and the new Classic imported it. My computer is an imac with macOS Catalina 10.15.5. 16 GB MHz DDR3 memory.
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Catalogs are identified by the 'file-type' suffix of .LRCAT
Use Finder to search your entire system for .LRCAT files.
Unless you (unknowingly) deleted your current 5.7 catalog, it will be there, somewhere!
A [double-click] will open each (as an upgrade for v10) to check its content.
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Use your operating system's search feature to find all files on all disk(s) whose name ends with .LRCAT. Probably the largest one, or the one with the most recent modification date, is the one you want.