How does 'store a copy of originals' work?

[timeasley]

Been looking into migrating over to Lightroom CC from Lightroom Classic.

Right now I do all of my photography work on my laptop, and I archive older RAW files to an external drive to stop my laptop from filling up. It looks to me as if Lightroom CC will be able to solve my problem of finding it hard to share my workflow between my laptop and desktop. However, I have a question about how the 'store a copy of originals' works.

As far as I understand from watching about a thousand YouTube videos on the subject today, you can specify a location for originals to be stored, then wherever you import RAW files (be it on your laptop, desktop, tablet or phone), those files will turn up in that location. So if I specify the location as being on my desktop machine, everything will turn up there after being uploaded. Is that correct?

If that's the case, do those RAW images still need to be stored in the cloud? Or is there a way to have them automatically deleted once they've been imported and downloaded to my desktop via the cloud, storing only the smart previews in my cloud account?

Thanks in advance

[michanne5 · Accepted solution]

With LRCC the images are still stored in the cloud so you need to plan to store for full image size. The original image folder is like a backup. I have it back up to an external drive connected to my laptop and it works fairly well.

[missedbeat]

What happens when you open Lightroom on your laptop without the external drive connected? Does Lr add the new files to local storage when the drive is re-connected at a future time?

PRH

[Theresa J]

Store locally is just a synced local storage of what is in the cloud. If you use Lightroom CC, all of your master photos are in the cloud. If you delete something from the cloud, it gets deleted from the local copy as well. Local storage is there to speed up your workflow and allow you to work without internet. It is not an option to storing files in the cloud.

[99jon]

With Lightroom originals are always stored in the cloud. Delete that and the local copy disappears also. Only Classic enables smart previews to be sent to the cloud from a syncd collection. Before you migrate, consider whether you have a fast internet connection. It can be quite slow uploading large raw files after import into Lightroom.

[timeasley]

Thanks for the replies everyone!

I have a fast enough Internet connection, I have 20TB+ backed up into cloud storage already so that's not a problem at all.

If you're meant the store every single photo in the cloud, and there's no way to avoid doing this, then I guess it's a pretty useless app for anyone who takes more than a few snaps every now and then, because I can't see myself paying the hugely extortionate cloud storage fees that Adobe charges to get more than the default 100GB that you get with the standard 'all apps' CC subscription.

Is there really no way to move files offline ie only have your latest couple of shoots in the cloud, store older RAW files locally, and keep smart previews in the cloud like you can with Lightroom Classic?

[99jon]

You could install Lightroom on your laptop and keep Classic on your desktop. Going forward import everything using the laptop. Enable sync in Classic and originals will upload and then download into folders in your storage location. You can then delete what you don’t need in the cloud. Everything will remain in Classic; nothing gets deleted there.  You could probably use the dynamic default cache on the laptop rather than electing to store a copy locally bearing in mind you would have all originals stored on the desktop in the Classic catalog. Only you can decide if 100GB is sufficient in that scenario.

[Theresa J]

There is no way to selectively put files in the Cloud like you are asking for. That would be nice if it worked that way, but it doesn’t. Your only option is to us Lightroom Classic, and sync smart previews to the cloud for the images that you want access to from the cloud.

[timeasley]

Thanks for the answers again! Just gonna clarify below before I mark as solved.

So basically if you use the cloud based Lightroom CC, then literally every single one of your RAW images needs to fit within your storage allowance, which is only 100GB if you subscribe to the full suite of CC apps. You can store local copies of any of these files on any machine that you have Lightroom CC installed on, but if you delete them from the cloud, they'll also be deleted from all of your devices.

I really hope that in the future Adobe sorts this out, since their pricing tiers for storage are astronomical and also pretty stupid (ie 1TB would cost me an extra £10 ish per month, but 10TB would cost me an extra £120 per month?!?). If you could just choose folders inside your catalogue to store offline then it'd be a great option for me. I'll be sticking to using an external drive for now I guess, which is slower than storing files locally but huuuuugely cheaper.

Thanks again for the help.