Lightroom cloud-based: moving content to a new computer

[liamf35072555]

Hi all,

I bought a new PC recently and finally just got round to moving all my Lightroom content over to the new machine.

I'm on the baisc photography plan with only 20gb of storage. I've far exceeded that so I have a lot of images and edits sitting on the old PC but not in the cloud.

I didn't think that'd be an issue: I'd just plug the hard drive from the old machine into the new one and surely everything would still be there -- but apparently not. 

I spoke to support who told me that it's essentially impossible -- the only solution is to buy more cloud storage so that all of those unsynced photos and edits get uploaded and will then be available on the new machine. Can that really be the case? It seems like it should be such an easy solution and I had no idea going for Lightroom over LrC would leave me in this situation. 

I've got this nagging sense that there has to be a workaround somewhere?

Thanks for any help!

[Jim Wilde]

A possible workaround would be to export all the unsynced images from Lightroom on the old system, using the "Original" option to preserve full image data and stored edits, then import the exported images into Lightroom on the new system. But that just gets you back to the same position, i.e. a whole bunch of images and edits will remain unsynced until you acquire more cloud space. If you aren't using Lightroom Classic, why not convert your current Photography Plan to the basic Lightroom-only plan, as the latter includes 1TB of cloud space. The cost is that same, but you would lose Photoshop of course, which may or may not be an issue.

The whole point of the Lightroom "ecosystem" is that your images are uploaded to the cloud and are managed from there, so trying to run a Lightroom-only system with only 20GB of cloud space seems incredibly high-risk.

[liamf35072555]

Thanks for that -- I actually have all of the originals on an external hard drive. If I import those to the new system should it have all my edits preserved? I always figured it'd be a very simple case of moving local files between systems so it never occurred to me to bother with more cloud storage. I might now bite the bullet and pay the extra £10 a month for the 1TB + PS + LR

[Jim Wilde]

That won't work. Lightroom is a non-destructive editor, so the edits are maintained in the catalog (initially the local catalog but they are also expected to sync to the master catalog in the cloud). So at the moment, those edits are stuck in limbo in the local catalog on the old system, so the only way to get them out of there is by doing the "As Original" export then importing to Lightroom on the new system.