Sync photo to local device

[Thibault5E88]

Hello, what is the working process of lightroom cloud?

Imagine on the laptop, I open Lightroom software and add a photo, modify it. And then, according to the description in the tutorial, the photo will be synchronized to all the devices, computers, phones, etc.

But, does it means that the original photo from my laptop has been replaced, or the original file now is the copy in the Lightroom software?

If I add 100 photos to lightroom, modify all of them, should I export them to the laptop and replace the original 100 photos?

Thanks.

[Jim Wilde]

There are a couple of things that you need to be aware of:

1. When you add a photo into Lightroom, no matter where that photo is (internal hard drive, external hard drive, camera memory card, etc.) Lightroom first of all copies that photo into Lightroom's own designated "originals" folder. It's that copy that Lightroom uploads to the cloud, and once in the cloud Lightroom treats that version in the cloud as the "original"....the photo on the source device is now completely ignored by Lightroom, and it's up to the user to decide what to do with it. So from now on when we talk about "the original photo" that refers to the version in the cloud.

2. Lightroom is a non-destructive editor, which basically means that the original photo is not changed when you modify it, you're are always being shown a preview of the image and it's the preview that is updated when you apply develop edits. So, the way it works is that when you add a photo you will see a locally-generated preview while the actual image is uploaded to the cloud. From the cloud, previews of that image will be made available to any other connected devices, such as phones or tablets. When you modify an image, no matter which app you use, those edits are synced to the cloud, and from there to the other connected devices, and the previews that you see are updated to reflect the changes that you made. Only when you export an image will the original photo be used and the edits are "baked-in" to the derivative file that you create by the export process. That export can be repeated whever you need to, or when you make further changes, and there's no need to export a set of edited imnages and use those to replace the "originals" (in fact that's a really bad idea, very much like throwing away negatives in the film era and just keeping a print). The original file is always available should you want to go back and start the editing process over again.