Download Lightroom CC library to Lightroom Classic

[Belinda5F8D]

Hello, I have been using Lightroom CC (cloud based) for a year and have a large photo library containing many folders and albums. I now want to move my Lightroom CC library to Lightroom Classic becasue it has better functionality. Is there a way of downloading my Lightroom CC library to Lightroom Classic and keep the folder and album structure?  Thanks, Gavin.

[Jim Wilde]

Clarify what you mean by "move the Lightroom library to Lr Classic" as "move" implies "copy then delete the original", is that what you want to do? Or do you mean to leave the images in the cloud and additionally add them to LrC? That's an important distinction which needs to be sorted out first, i.e. are you abandoning Lightroom in favour or LrC, or are you intending to use both?

[Belinda5F8D]

Thanks for your reply. I would like to abandon Lightroom and use LrC exclusively (I'm increasingly aware of the functionality advantages of the latter over the former). My Adobe subscription includes Lightroom, LrC, and Photoshop, but I can see no real advantages to sticking with Lightroom, except maybe the flexibility of access via different platforms, and using both Lightroom and LrC may lead to photo version control hassles.  

[Jim Wilde]

If you sync a Classic catalog with the cloud, a copy of ALL the existing originals in the cloud will automatically download into that Classic catalog, and they would be stored on a local drive. The default location for those downloaded files is an obscure location on the system drive, but you can change that location to one of your own choosing by using the Classic Preferences>Lightroom Sync tab, where you can also optionally choose to have the images stored in one of the standard date-based folder structures. If you do decide to set the location to one of your own choosing, I suggest you do that BEFORE you start syncing the Classic catalog.

Once you have all the images downloaded, and have started to back them up, it would be safe to delete them from the cloud....the easiest and safest way is to open the All Synced Photographs special collection in the Catalog panel in Classic, select them all, right-click on any one and choose "Remove from All Synced Photographs". That unsyncs them, which causes them to be deleted from the cloud.

If you then decide you'd like to have access to your images on mobile devices, organise them into collections in Classic, then sync those collections. That will upload smart previews of the originals (2560pc on the long edge), which are good enough for viewing on the mobile devices, or even for making basic edits (which of course sync back to the original in Classic), and those smart previews do NOT count against the 20GB cloud space allowance.

[JohanElzenga]

Further to what Jim said: if you do it this way, then your albums will come over to Lightroom Classic as collections. The folders you used to organize your albums will not come over as collection sets however. You will have to create collection sets in Lightroom Classic manually.

[Belinda5F8D]

Jim and Johan, many thanks for your helpful responses. Greatly appreciated. regards, Gavin.