How to move from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom CC

[Carl Aspler]

I just signed up for Lightroom CC. However, I have been using Lightroom Classic and want to move everything from Classic to CC. I have over 13,000 photos in dozens of albums in Classic. I have looked around the discussions  and tutorials and maybe I've missed something, but I need to find the process of moving all my Classic photos, albums keywords, etc, to the new Lightroom CC. Can anyone help?

Many thanks,

Carl

[kglad]

[moved from Adobe Creative Cloud to Lightroom — The cloud-based photo service]

[Theresa J]

First, are you absolutely sure you want to do this? Second, are you sure your plan includes enough storage for all of your images? If yes, here is the help page for migrating from Classic to Lightroom Migrate photos and videos from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom

Most important thing to understand is that you will lose your folder structure. You will need to create albums (same as collections in Classic) to be organized.

[Carl Aspler]

Thanks, Theresa. I think I will be keep using Classic..

[Jao vdL]

Except if you really want to have all your images in the cloud I would strongly emphasize Theresa’s caution. the Cloud Lightroom misses almost all of classic’s essential features such as printing, export to anything but jpegs, hierarchical keywords, slideshows, books, virtual copies, smart collections. Only go to cloud Lightroom if all you ever do is share low res jpegs on the web once in a while (and ironically the desktop cloud Lightroom is bad at that too) and like that your images show up on all your devices in the same way. Cloud Lightroom is pretty neat if you have very limited needs. For almost everybody Classic is where you should be. Just make sure migrating is the right decision for you. Adobe’s marketing materials do not actually help you make this choice well.

[Carl Aspler]

Thanks for the suggestions. I am now deciding that I should keep using Classic. I also can't imagine changing my folders to collections, etc.. I upgraded to CC because I also wanted a newer version of Photoshop. Mine is ancient and stopped working...

[JP Hess]

Classic is a "newer" version of Lightroom that is being updated as aggressively as Lightroom for the cloud. They are just two different versions of Lightroom for users with different needs. I think others have fairly cautioned you about making the decision to switch.

[Jao vdL]

If you got the subscription that includes Photoshop (i.e. the photographer collection) you should also have the newest Classic. You can ignore Lightroom "Cloud".  The naming is extremely and unnecessarily confusing by the way. We now have Lightroom Classic for the Lightroom that we know and love and the cloud version is now simply called Lightroom or Lightroom Desktop. The CC monikers are no longer used. I try to add Cloud to the thing now called Lightroom that used to be called Lightroom CC to make sure people understand what I am talking about. Lightroom with no modifier will remain what Adobe calls Classic.

[Theresa J]

If you purchased the right CC subscription (any offering except the Lightroom Plan). You have a choice between two different Lightroom apps.

You want to instal this one.

No this one.

It is very confusing. If you didn't know this before coming to the forum to ask, you are not alone. We are here to help you make sense of it all.