Long time Lightroom user - tales from the trenches - from 1960's - 2022

[NYinDallas]

Hello, I am a computer engineer with a passion for photography going back to the late 60's when my dad surprised me with a fully Manual Canon TX (still actually works). I am both the youngest and the only software engineer in a large family. In the 80's when my dad passed on, I received boxes and boxes of assorted photos, negatives and slides going back to the 30's. My dad had all the work from his 5 brothers, and it took years of scans to digitize them. Using Windows directory structures was painful and then I was introduced to THE DAM Book by Peter Krogh and that was transformational. Early on started with iView media Pro a nice lightweight DAM program. Upon the demise of that program, I purchased Lightroom 1 and Apple Aperture 2. While I liked the UI in Aperture, I decided to standardize on Lightroom mainly because I wanted the option to use it with Windows and MAC. 

Things we simple back then. My workflow was to import into Lightroom and have Photoshop when needed. Then Adobe introduced Creative Cloud. For years I did not do much in the legacy version now called Lightroom Classic and I changed my workflow to import new photos into the Cloud based Lightroom CC. I am a Cloud Engineer, so the advantages of the Cloud based program were apparent.

Fast forward to the 2022 Creative Cloud upgrade. My 2011 I Mac and MacBook pro were getting tired. I have lots of computers because of my work. I had a 2018 i5 7th Generation with 16 GB of RAM. Lightroom CC worked great, but Lightroom Classic was painfully slow with my 50K plus image catalog. I changed some configuration settings and upgrade the RAM to 32gb and it help a little. At that point I had 17k photos on Lightroom CC and Mobile, but still had over 50k on Classic. I made the decision to migrate all the content from Classic to CC since the performance requirements were significantly lower. Followed Adobes recommendations from this article. https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-cc/using/migrate-to-lightroom-cc.html

The migration took 3 days. I have excellent bandwidth. After the migration a new problem came up that is still not fully resolved. The Sync status in Classic shows it has been running for 5 days. I have been working with Adobe support in India for 5 days now. I granted them remote access with Bomgar (a tool I use often with my clients. I am a ERP Techstack, and Cloud/Security Solution Architect). They are following a rational methodology to resolve this. Finally, after 2 support engineers could not provide a resolution, it has been escalated to a very senior engineer. I just created a large diagnostic file and they are in the process of reviewing it. The strange thing about the Classic Sync status is it goes up and down. Just this week it goes between 20K to 500 to sync. Then it goes back up and then down. In the meantime, I can see this process is totally CPU bound. That gave me the motivation to get my first new MAC in years. I went with the Mac Studio because of the CPU power of the M1 MAX.

I am looking forward to using the MAC studio for these products moving forward. I will not migrate until these open issues around the Eternal Sync are resolved. Assuming once it is resolved I will now have the option of importing photos via Lightroom CC, Lightroom Classic or Lightroom Mobile. My new camera transfers photos right to my iPhone Pro Max. I am assuming once the sync is done I will be able to manage my images from either of the 3 options. Would welcome any comments and suggestions.

One last question. Years ago my favorite filter back for Lightroom and Aperture was Tiffen DFX. I believe it is no longer available. Has anyone seen a worthwhile software filter pack that integrates to Lightroom and Photoshop 2022? I do mostly people and landscape photography. If you made it till far, thanks so much.

[Timothy.Spear]

After the migration, skip Classic. The sync between Classic and the Cloud is incomplete, and was never designed for a full sync process.

Either use Lr Mobile or the Lr Desktop clients to upload images. In theory, you can even take pictures with your phone directly in Lr Mobile. (I so rarely use my phone camera, I never bothered to learn how to do this).

For the filter pack, what exactly are you looking for?

Note: over the years of using Lr, I have largely moved away from using predefined "filter packs'. So I may not be the best person to answer this aspect.

Tim

[JP Hess]

With a lot of scanning work like you have, I would feel a lot more comfortable working with the toolset in Lightroom Classic. But that's my own personal preference. Adding a good external hard drive for images would be my choice. But to each his own.

[NYinDallas]

Hello, I was hoping that I could have my images on Classic and on CC. Then I could choose where to edit them depending on photos. I thought that was possible. Adobe even stated its not Classic or CC, it's a fully integrated ecosystem providing locak access, cloud access, a web browwer access and mobile access. Do you disagree? On my current i5 Dell that is soon to be replaced, I have 2 TB of SSD storage. The Mac Studio only has 512GB. So I am considering either a home grown SSD or a SanDisk Extreme,or Samsung T7. Thanks

[Timothy.Spear]

You can use both. Most commong use case is for Cloud to be used an initial ingestion point for Classic.

There are other use cases I have seen posted.

I believe all the photo edits come accross the sync; if not all, at least a majority of the photo edits do sync. What fails to come accross is most of the meta-data.

If you are only interested in the photo editing in the Cloud and keeping everything local, then migrating all your images is probably not the right way to go.

Personally, I have about 30K images in the Cloud, and consume 600GB. I have two laptops I use for travel/sofa usage. One with a 250GB SSD, the other with a 500GB SSD, and both work fine with the Cloud and stay in sync with my monster desktop (where I usually do final tweaks on the better images with a wide gamut monitor).

My wife and I have also started a digitilization project. So far, our current plan is to scan albums into dedicated folders. For each folder use exiftool to set the capture date from the album. Use Classic to import into a new catalog. Use a plugin (I forget the name) to copy the folder name into the title fields. Then migrate the Classic into Cloud.

Tim

[JP Hess]

There are basically two ways to approach this. If you use Lightroom cloudy as your primary version, then you import directly to it and then it will synchronize full-sized images to Lightroom Classic. You can edit images on either computer, and the edits will affect the images on either computer.

If you use Lightroom Classic as your primary version then you create collections to share in the cloud. The collections are smart previews and not full-sized images. But those smart previews can be edited on the other computer or other devices, and the editing done on those other devices will affect the master images in Lightroom Classic as well. The smart previews do not impact your cloud storage like the full-sized images do.

Since your new computer only has a 512 GB hard drive your decision has to be where you want your images stored. It is not possible to just store images in the cloud from Lightroom Classic. Master images must be stored on the local hard drive using LrC. There is no other option.