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How to export Lightroom data from one account to another?

Community Beginner ,
Jul 11, 2021 Jul 11, 2021

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So I've been using Lightroom CC through my school's adobe account and I've recenetly switched over to using Adobe through my work's account. I still have access to my school's account, which has A LOT of folders, images, etc. 

 

How would I go about moving, exporting, etc that stuff in order for it to be accessable through my work's adobe account?

 

Thank you in advance!!

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Community Expert ,
Jul 12, 2021 Jul 12, 2021

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I don't believe that Adobe have a way to automatically switch data from one account to another, so you have to do it manually. There are 3 ways to do this:

 

1. Use the Adobe Lightroom Downloader, which is designed to allow all existing cloud-based assets to be downloaded to a local hard drive. You would then have to import the downloaded images back into Lightroom under your new account, and wait for the cloud upload to complete. The images are downloaded into a dated folder structure, the sub-folders being based on the image capture date. There are several problems with this approach: you would lose all existing album organisation during the download, so you would have to manually recreate after importing into the new account.....you would also lose ALL metadata that you might have added in Lightroom in the old account (keywords, captions, ratings, titles, location data, all would be lost). There are various other issues as well, but that loss of metadata would be a total deal-breaker for me.

 

2. Export all images (using the Original + Settings option) from the old account to a local hard drive. More manual effort involved versus the Downloader, but at least all original metadata would be preserved. Also, if exporting one album at a time it would be possible to retain the original album organisation (though issues might need to be addressed if some images are in multiple albums in the old account).

 

3. A more creative solution, which avoids the need to re-upload all the images to the new account, would be to use the shared album contribution feature. Taking one album as an example, in the NEW account you would create a new empty album with the same name as one in the old account (though best to add something to the new name to differentiate from the old name in the old account, e.g. preface the name with NEW). Using the share and invite dialog, enable sharing for that new album, set Link Access to "Invite only", enter the email address used with your old account, then set "Can Contribute" as the access type. Send the invitation. If you are using the same computer, log out of the new account and into the old account, accept the email invitation by clicking on the link in the email, then start Lightroom. Under the Shared tab there should be a "Shared with You" section which should contain the new album shared from the new account. Go back to the album list and select the equivalent album, then select all the images in that album, then right-click and use the "Add xxx Photos to Album" option, obviously selected the corresponding NEW album. That adds the images to the new album, but you should get a dialog box where you choose what metadata you want to include, so make sure you enable all the boxes. Then wait while Lightroom syncs those additions (won't take long), when done logout of the old account and back into the new account and start Lightroom, where you should see that your album now contains all the images added from the old account. Because these images have been "contributed" they now belong to the new account and you can do whatever you want with them (they are copies, the originals still exist in, and belong to, the old account). All the metadata should have transferred, and the edit state should be as per the old account (though you can reset the image back to its original state should you want to start over). The originals that still exist in the old account can be removed when you are happy that you have everything transferred over.

Doing it album by album preserves the original album structure, but there's nothing stopping you from creating just one shared album then adding ALL the images from the old account into that one shared album. That's the quicker way of doing the transfer, but of course you would have to rebuild the album structure if you do it that way. 

 

If you decide to try the 3rd method, make sure you test it first with one album to make sure you have the process nailed down.

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Enthusiast ,
Jul 12, 2021 Jul 12, 2021

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@Jim Wilde 

 

I like that approach. Any reason you could not do the "old account" work using the web interface for Cloudy?

 

Tim

 

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Community Expert ,
Jul 12, 2021 Jul 12, 2021

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No reason at all, Tim....but Lightroom desktop (time to let go of the "Cloudy" moniker, perhaps?) is perhaps slightly easier for doing things like selecting all images in an album. Though it does have the advantage of being able to be logged into to two different accounts at the same time on the same system, i.e. use the Lightroom desktop app for one acount and LrWeb for the other (or even two different browsers, each logged in to the separate accounts).

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Enthusiast ,
Jul 12, 2021 Jul 12, 2021

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I like the name Cloudy 🙂

And I still find people confused over Lr Desktop and Lr Classic.

 

Tim

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Community Expert ,
Jul 12, 2021 Jul 12, 2021

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I know you like that term, Tim. And I know there are still some people confused between Lightroom and Classic, but all you're doing now is potentially adding to the confusion, not helping it. A lot of us on the forums are trying hard to get people to use the correct names, which should eventually eliminate the confusion, so it would be a great help if you started to use the correct names as well.

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Community Beginner ,
Jul 12, 2021 Jul 12, 2021

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Much appreciated! I'm surprised they just don't simplify things like this. I'll give this a good read once I get off and have a go at it. I appreciate the different options you gave me. 

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