Marrying Lightroom Classic and CC/ Syncing with already populated catalogues

[Gilhin0308]

Dear,

after dealing with some issues with the pure Lightroom CC (especially lacking the possibility to simply start 3rd party programs), I decided to upgrade to the "full" photo plan.

What I had so far were that my pictures had initially been uploaded to LR CC when using it in beforehand. 

So I installed LR Classic (v9) on my systems (2 Windows and one Mac) and the LR app on all of my mobiles.

All of that just to find out that things are slightly more complex than thought :-D.

This is why I hope that you will guide me into the right direction - either with answers or with some links to read through.

1.  Best approach to work with already uploaded pictures?

As having written, I had already uploaded all of my existing pictures into the Adobe cloud. Now, when adding the picture folders to LR classic, I realise the the pictures are at least partially already uploaded. From my unterstanding, it might be the best option to delete the cloud based files and to start uploading the files (as collections) again.

Would that be a valid assumption? If not, what would be the best way?

2. What happens to doublettes?

This is somehow related to the first question. How can I quickly and simply find pictures that were uploaded from two different sources?

3. How to choose from which devices to sync?

In the left panel, I can see all devices that either have a current LR (classic/ CC) installation on or once had. How can I choose which devices to consider, since they are syncing files which is causing spared spaced on my HDD.

4. What happens to camera pictures that are uploaded via the LR app after importing them?

Once again a doublette related question. When I take a photo with my mobile, it is added to LR. It simply appears under the "All Photos" slider. When importing this file into the catalogue and moving it to my local harddrive, will I create a doublette, since it is stall available on my mobile and now an my HDD as well or will LR somehow realise that it is the same file?

Thank you for sharing your thoughts,

best regards,

Philip

[JohanElzenga]

I think you may be making life quite difficult for yourself with the choice of Lightroom Classic and Lightroom Mobile. The reason is that you can only sync one single Lightroom Classic catalog to the cloud, so you would have to choose which catalog that will be: the one on the Mac or on the Windows machines. The other computer will then not have any connection to the cloud. You can also only use Lightroom Classic on two machines, not three. That means that trying to work on one Mac and two Windows machines will add further complications, where you will constantly be forced to log out on at least one of the three machines.

I believe that Lightroom (CC) can currently be used on five computers, and because Lightroom CC uses the online library, it will sync happily with all computers. You will also have no problems with duplicates, because all your devices will use the same online library.

[Gilhin0308]

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I think you may be making life quite difficult for yourself

/Quote

Story of my life 😁

First of all Thank you for your feedback. As having said, I wanted to step away from pure CC due to the Limitation on

• 3rd party integrations (which might be workable using the Bridge)
• Plugins (I started loving Any Vision, which tags your photos using Google AI)
• Difficulties (rather the impossibility) with renaming files on import and
• having CC storing the original photos locally in just a bunch of photos (no possibility to add a folder structure automatically)

Whereas I would love to have the cloud access to curate my pictures in order to decide which ones to publish and which to reject.

When taking these things into consideration, I fear that I won't get over a combination with Classic and CC, right? Any idea or feedback would be highly appreciated.

[JohanElzenga]

Well, you can use a combination, but you have to be fully aware of the limitations I mentioned:

1: You can only sync one Lightroom Classic catalog, so one of the computers would have to be the 'master' computer, or you would need to place the catalog and the images on an external drive that you use with all computers. Because you would share the catalog between Mac and Windows, you would constantly have to 'reconnect' missing folders. The reason is that Windows uses drive letters and Mac uses disk names.

2: You would still have the problem of trying to use three computers with a plan that only allows two computers to be registered at the same time.

3: Most people who use Lightroom Classic on two computers use a main desktop computer, and a laptop computer while travelling. The create a special 'travel catalog' on the laptop, and use 'import from another catalog' when they get home. Maybe you can use a similar setup with one computer being the master computer with the master (synced) catalog, and the others using temporary catalogs.

[Gilhin0308]

Once again - thank you. so it is all "only" about building a reliable workflow...

Seemingly it would be the best option to have LR CC as the mainly used app to import and curate the photos.

As far as I know, there is a possibility to have the files downloaded into a defined folder automatically. From that folder, I could import the files into LR Classic when necessary and perform necessary adjustments. This could either be done by a manual "Resync this folder" and individual catalogs or by a dropbox-synced catalog.

Do you feel that this might be a valid option - taking the licensing issues aside (with this scenario, I would only need two instances)?

How could I send the tags I add via Classic to the cloud in such a scenario?

[JohanElzenga · Accepted solution]

Cloud images download automatically into Lightroom Classic if you sync its catalog. That means you could install Lightroom Classic on one computer, and use that computer as the 'master' for things like renaming files, printing images and anything else that Lightroom CC can't do, but Lightroom Classic can. Lightroom CC uses Adobe Sensei AI to tag imported images, so you may not need that plugin for this (keywords do not sync between Lightroom Classic and the cloud).

[Gilhin0308]

Dear Johan,

thank you for your guidance. In the last days I tried as you suggested and the idea you offered is perfectly working.

I'll be using LR CC as main tool and have Classic for further tasks. The content will be synced to Classic on one computer and the catalog will then be spread to my Mac using Dropbox.

Now I will just to see what Sensei can do and will (possibly) be happy then.

Best regards,

Philip