Revert Lightroom CC back to Lightroom Classic

[FäbuWäbu]

Hi there

I have switched to Lightroom CC a little while ago. But since I don't like the cloud-integration and miss a lot of features from the old LR classic, I'd like to switch back.

I still have all the original pictures on my PC, but I don't want to lose all the work I've done organising, rating and editing all of them.

The easiest solution would probably be to export the catalogue from CC and open it in Classic, but I can't find a way to do this.

Anybody got any ideas?

[Akash Sharma]

Hi FäbuWäbu,

Sorry that you're missing some feature in the cloud based Lightroom CC that are there in the Lightroom Classic CC and would like to switch back to Classic CC.

Lightroom CC is not an upgrade from Lightroom Classic CC, its a migration that uses your Lightroom Classic CC catalog to upload the data in Lightroom CC library that can be synced across connected devices. To sync between Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic, you must use Lightroom Classic version 7.0 or later.

Note that any photos that you've synced from Lightroom Classic are available in Lightroom CC as a Smart Preview. If you import photos into Lightroom CC, the full resolution originals of your photos sync back to Lightroom Classic.

If you have Lightroom Classic CC installed on your computer, your catalog and images should be there as such with all the editing done in Lightroom CC considering you had them synced to the cloud.

Note that the following data in your Classic CC catalog might not have the following data for the images that you've worked in Lightroom CC:-

• Snapshots
• Creations: books, slideshows, and print/web creations
• Shares on Lightroom for the web
• Map-saved locations
• Folders and folder hierarchy
• Smart collections
• Develop history
• Color labels (migrated as keywords in Lightroom CC)

Let us know if that helps.

Thanks,

Akash

[FäbuWäbu]

Hi Akash, and thank you for your response.

I switched to Lightroom CC through migrating my old (LR Classic) catalogue using the "Migrate Lightroom Catalogue..." option. Because I only have the "basic" 20GB of cloud storage and over 100GB of pictures, I chose the option to save everything locally. This made LRCC copy all of my pictures to some separate location on my hard disk ("D:\...\Lightroom CC\[some string]\originals").

I do have the ability to sync LR Classic to the cloud, which makes it start downloading all the images again, which is unnecessary. But since only a fraction of my pictures are stored in the cloud anyways, this option is useless to me anyways. The photos imported into LRCC don't show up in LR Classic automatically (btw: I'm only using 1 PC).

So as of now, I could re-import my photos into LR Classic, but would lose all my time rating, categorizing and editing them. It would be a lot better if there simply was an option to "export" the LRCC library into a catalogue useable by LR Classic?

Greetings, FW

[Akash Sharma]

So as of now, I could re-import my photos into LR Classic, but would lose all my time rating, categorizing and editing them. It would be a lot better if there simply was an option to "export" the LRCC library into a catalogue useable by LR Classic?

There is no such option available as of now. We'd love to get this request and feedback submitted officially as a feature request so the engineering team can get this recorded. Could you please post this feedback here: Lightroom Classic CC | Photoshop Family Customer Community

However for convenience, one can download the synced data from Lightroom CC on computer. Please refer Download synced Lightroom photos and videos from the cloud to a computer

Thanks,

Akash

[clementime]

I was really frustrated with how difficult Adobe has made it to switch back to Lightroom Classic from CC when I ran out of online storage space. Originally I thought what you thought -- that I would have to export all my originals + XML files and import those to a new Classic catalog.

But! I figured out a better way to do it using Lightroom's sync feature. I wrote a quick guide on moving back to Classic from CC to help others out in the same situation: http://austenclement.com/how-to-revert-from-lightroom-cc-to-lightroom-classic/

It's still a hassle but at least there is a route! Any feedback on the guide is welcome and appreciated.

[GeoMike]

Hi Austen.

  Thank you for your guide on moving back to Lightroom Classic CC from Lr CC.

I found Lr CC to be much less capable for editing than Lr Classic CC.

Adobe seems to want to lock their customer base into Lr CC by not making it easy to go backwards, or forwards to an alternative software photo editor ... well, that convinced me to stop using Lr CC.  I'll just continue using my Apple Photos to sync among my phones and iPad, and use Lr Classic CC and Photoshop for serious editing. 

And in the future I'll be looking at Luminar, Aurora HDR, ON1, Capture One, etc.  as alternatives also.