Lightroom CC migration to Lightroom Classic

[SVShooter]

Hi all.  I think this is my first post to the Adobe community.  I have a problem that I have found one post about out here but it didn't really address my issue.

I jumped in feet first with LR CC on my Mac as I am a heavy iPad user too and they two integrate really well.  In LR CC, I am saving all my master photos off to an external drive as my Mac's HDD is only 250Gb.  I find myself now with about 1.2TB of photos in my library.   LR CC doesn't give me a way thought to control what syncs to the Adobe cloud and I find myself now paying for 2TB of storage at the Adobe cloud.  I am already backing all these up with my personal files and BackBlaze.

I'd like to move back to LR Classic, not only because I want to be able to control what syncs, but also because of the tools and plugins in Classic.   But I cannot figure out how to point to those master files with Classic and have it sync the corrections from LR CC.  What's worse is as soon as I sign into LR Classic, all my photos start to download again from Adobe Cloud.  I stop it, but if I let it go, I am going to spend days downloading 1.2TB of photos that I already have on my system.  It looks like if I want to do this I have to duplicate my library locally with a download and then go back later and remove LR CC and all the master files.

Does anyone know how I can migrate back without downloading my whole library again?  Thanks.

[Todd Shaner]

Unfortunately, there's no way to have your LR Desktop edits added to the original files as XMP data. You will need to sync a copy of the files back into LR Classic or use the Adobe Lightroom Downloader app. With the Downloader app you can preserve your collections by adding a unique keyword collection identifier to the files in each collection. You can then use the LR Classic Filter bar to sort by this unique keyword and move the files in each collection to a new collection folder in LR Classic.

I forgot to add that you will need a destination hard drive with sufficient freespace to download the file copies. Once downloaded and setup you can remove the original files using LR Desktop app.

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-cc/kb/download-lightroom-photos.html