Option to filter for photos *without* camera info?

[dwarfland.com]

In Lightroom, i can filter to only see photos taken with any one (more multilpe) cameras. That's great. But i cant seem to find a way to show *only* the photos that do *not* have a camera assigned (e.g. hptoz imported from the iPhone camera roll that ended up there from a non-camera source (screenshots, saves from whatsapp, etc).

Am i missing some way to do this?

[dwarfland.com]

Bump.

[Jao vdL]

This doesn't seem to be possible in cloudy Lightroom. You can very easily do it in Classic by filtering and selecting "unknown camera" but this option doesn't seem to be available in the cloud based Lightroom version.

[dwarfland.com]

Yeah. "Unfortunately" (not really, but...), i've switched to cloud-based Lightroom CC ages ago, pretty much as soon as it came out.

I recall it was very basic then, and I was hoping it would catch up and surpass Classic "soon."

But, while it has many, many benefits I would not want to miss, and has gotten a lot better, it is crazy to see how – years and years later – it still struggles/has not been able to catch up to Classic, in many ways :(. Often in really simple things (like an option to not force-eject your SD after import, as I just noted on a different thread). It's disheartening, sometimes — especially since it is often trivial-seeming things like this where it continues to lag behind and that year after year simply don't get addressed.

That said, I don't regret making the switch, as I love the cloud-based approach of having my full library on laptop, iPad and phone.

🤞🏼

[Jao vdL]

Yeah I didn't switch for the reasons mentioned. I love the feature that all your images are identical everywhere and I use cloudy all the time as a sidekick to Classic but it misses so many features and still does after many many years that I think we will never get simply because it seems that the intended audience and basic premise of the program just don't align in Adobe's mind with having those features. I mean it still can't print!

[dwarfland.com]

Yeah. It really is a shame, though, as I don't really find it feasible to use both, with a reasonable workflow :(. Do you mind if I ask how you do that?

I'd love to know what Adobe's official stance on this is: is it by design that the two are still so different, and the intent is to never bring CC to parity as they really target totally different audiences (if so why/how?), or it really just a matter of time and resources...

It's been a long time since I even looked at Classic, maybe I should install it again one of these days and have a play, to see what else I'm missing 😅...

[Jao vdL]

The only way that works is to use Classic as your main repository. From there there are two workflows I use. One I simply sync a few collections to the cloud from Classic that I want to have available. Disadvantage of that is that Classic only uploads smart previews. That is good enough for most editing and definitely good enough for showing of images on my iPad. If I want to have the full images I simply also import them in Lightroom Cloud and they get connected automatically. The second workflow is when I travel. I sometimes have a laptop with me (if I don't take my main but somewhat big and heavy laptop which runs Classic) and run Lightroom Cloud on that. I import everything and do some edits, export some images and share online. The images will show up fully edited on my Classic install when I get back which is great. I also sometimes since I got an iPad mini which has a usb-c port only take the iPad mini. I import directly to it through the usb-c port from my XQD card reader (which is amazingly fast) and edit on the iPad. Again images just show up at home on my Classic machine. This is very convenient since the iPad is so small and light and I can work it anywhere basically. Nice thing too is that afterwards, I can just unsync stuff on the Classic install and images disappear from the cloud but remain in Classic. So this helps save on cloud space. I have something like 4 TB of images in Classic stored on a NAS at my home so really do not want to pay for cloud space for all that.

Adobe's official stance by the way is that you shouldn't use Cloudy and Classic together but it obviously works just fine. There are some annoyances such as keywords not syncing between the two but apart from that it works great for me. If only Classic could sync full raw (see here for feature request) and if keywords would sync between the two I would have the perfect workflow for me

I don't think however, that they will ever be brought to parity. A few features have been added to cloudy over time but a whole slew is still missing after many years so I must conclude that they are simply not interested in bringing these over.  Some that I think are essential (but many couldn't care less about I think) are simply not possible in Cloudy such as hierarchical keywords due to the way they structured the metadata in Cloudy. Others are mindboggling they are not there (printing (including printing to file), slideshows in the desktop app, GPS-track mapping, etc.) but I think this is really caused by the audience they envision for Lightroom Cloud so are probably very low priorities.

[Jim Wilde]

I think when we bemoan the lack of feature parity between Classic and the Cloud we tend to overlook some factors. @Jao vdL has already talked about the different audiences for the two product sets, which has obviously been a factor in the initial development path for the cloud apps, but there are other things to also consider.

First, let's not forget that Classic has had a 10 year head start in terms of development, so to my mind it's unrealistic to ever expect full feature parity while both apps are still being developed. Yes, I'm sure if the Classic development was stopped and the resources switched to cloud, then we'd see much faster progress in closing the gap (but imagine the howls of protest from the currect Classic user-base if that were ever to happen).

Also let's not forget that whereas Classic only has to be developed for Windows and MacOS, the cloud stuff has iOS, Android, and Web platforms to incorporate as well. And some of those differences most definitely affect the ability to keep all the apps in sync from a development perspective.

Then consider Camera Raw, which is a separate develpment team whose work has a direct impact on the development resources of both Classic and Cloud (masking being a really good recent example, with both the Classic and cloud teams still trying to iron out the syncing issues which arose from that implementation). So would Camera Raw development also have to stop to allow Cloud to catch up? Rather unlikely, I would have thought.

Also, it's probably fair to say that the majority of people disaffected by the fact that Classic has more features than Cloud are in fact existing Classic users. So what do Adobe gain by adding those missing features to the cloud, if all it does is encourage more users to switch from Classic to the cloud? The question for marketing (and thus the development roadmap) is whether adding Print or Map to the cloud, or allowing keywords to sync between Classic and the cloud, will bring in significant NEW users for Adobe. They gain nothing by having existing users switch from one to the other.

So with that said, it's left to the Classic user to find ways of incorporating the cloud into their workflows (should they be interested, there are many Classic users who have zero interest in the cloud). I'm still mainly Classic-based (though it wouldn't take much to persuade me to permanently switch) and largely because my library is small enough to allow me to store all originals in the cloud within the 1TB figure, I have developed a workflow which allows me to continue to use Classic and Cloud and keep them in sync with each other. That mainly means importing into Classic (into a "holding" folder), developing and adding most metadata there (mainly the keywords and location data which does not sync). Once that stage has been finished I convert to DNG (which embeds all the metadata into the file), then remove the images from Classic and import into the Cloud. So the originals are in the cloud, complete with all the metadata, and a copy of them are synced back to Classic and are stored in my standard date-based folder scheme. I wouldn't be doing it that way if I was a power user with several TB of images, but I'm not so what I have works very well for my needs. If I didn't want or need originals in the cloud, the simple syncing of SPs from Classic to the Cloud would work OK.