CC and Classic

[R. Harris]

Do I understand this right.... If I want to work in individual catalogs I would still use "Classic" CC is only for keeping catalogs that you want to share across devices?

TIA

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen · Accepted solution]

If you want multiple catalogs, yes, you need Classic.

CC keeps all your photos in a single cloud, so you can access them from multiple devices.

[R. Harris]

So as a professional photographer I won't use this as my primary import application right?

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

Not unless you need all the originals in the cloud, and have time to wait for them to upload to the cloud and back down to Classic.

[Rick Gerard]

Let me get this straight. If you use the new CC Lightroom there is no way to pick which photos will be loaded to the cloud, they all go, and there is only one catalog. If that is the case it's pretty useless for a professional photographer. It is not uncommon for me to capture a close to a terabyte in a day. From that volume, I need to share a couple hundred watermarked low-resolution copies with clients.

I am already syncing my mobile device with the previous version of LR and pushing review copies to the Adobe cloud storage I have. It sounds like I should stay with Classic. Introducing a hobbled version of LR with only one catalogue does not seem to make much sense for a professional.

I guess the real question is can you use both at the same time and switch back and forth?

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

Yep, you've nailed it. At least at this point in time, Classic is your tool. That may change in future, but not right now. If you have a laptop, you might find the new CC desktop app useful as a "Lightroom mobile for laptops", making it easy to access your photos synced to the cloud from Classic on other devices.

[Jao vdL]

Let me get this straight. If you use the new CC Lightroom there is no way to pick which photos will be loaded to the cloud, they all go, and there is only one catalog. If that is the case it's pretty useless for a professional photographer. It is not uncommon for me to capture a close to a terabyte in a day. From that volume, I need to share a couple hundred watermarked low-resolution copies with clients.

yeah for this workflow CC is not a good option. I would import in Classic and use your normal workflow. If you want to use the cloud there you can always do it the old fashioned way and just Sync collections instead of your entire catalog.

I am already syncing my mobile device with the previous version of LR and pushing review copies to the Adobe cloud storage I have. It sounds like I should stay with Classic. Introducing a hobbled version of LR with only one catalogue does not seem to make much sense for a professional.

I would agree. CC is I think a good option for somebody just starting with Lightroom that doesn't generate an enormous amount of images or has ultrafast internet (very few people in the US do) and doesn't have a lot of pro needs such as being able to print, advanced develop features, syncing develop settings over lots of images, publish services, nested keywords, etc. If you don't need all that Lightroom CC is actually quite nice.

I guess the real question is can you use both at the same time and switch back and forth?

Yes. Lightroom CC will work fine next to Lightroom Classic. It will only show you what has been synced with the cloud from Classic but you can edit those images in CC anywhere and changes will be reflected in Classic. If you import in CC, the images will be synced eventually to Classic but that is not what I would recommend as you end up duplicating or triplicating your storage need for images which is not a good idea if you shoot terabytes a day.

[Rick Gerard]

I think the marketing team completely missed the mark. Lightroom CC needs to be named something like Lightroom Lite or Lightroom Mobile. If it is just going to be called Lightroom CC then Lightroom Classic needs to be called Lightroom Pro or Lightroom Professional. This would eliminate more than half of the posts I see on this forum and others. Lightroom Classic just does not cut it as a name that would draw a professional. It sounds old and outdated.

[woodsinfall]

I have this same question - I'm upgrading to both LR CC and LR Classic and would like to keep my catalog in the cloud but want the heavy-duty features of LR Classic for the photos where I do some advanced editing/printing/publishing etc.  How and when do things sync up?  I tried just adding all the photos to LR CC and they were uploaded to the cloud - at least the thumbnails - but things weren't syncing up at all with LR Classic.

Another question I have is how things sync between 2 macs.  I upgraded LR on two macs - one desktop and one MacBook Pro.  I use an external drive to move from computer to computer to keep things in sync, which is a pain and a big reason I thought the cloud would be a good idea.  I uploaded photos from the desktop by adding (not importing) photos in LR CC.  Only a fraction of the photos showed up when I installed LR CC on the MacBook Pro.  Even though Adobe is happy to sell packages with both LR products they only seem to provide information about the difference between the two products, not how they might work together. 

[Jao vdL]

woodsinfall, for your workflow, the trick is to ingest images into Lightroom CC. Let them Sync to the cloud and then they should automatically download into Classic (man this naming is confusing). Note that this all depends strongly on how much bandwidth you have. Most US households have anemic upload bandwidth of (if you're lucky) 5 Mbits/s. This means that a typical single raw file from a modern camera (say about 30 megs) will take 48 seconds to upload if conditions are ideal and it maxes out your bandwidth. A thousand images will take 13 hours at that rate! So this is a patience game. If and when your images are online (you can check by going to http://lightroom.adobe.com btw) Lightroom Classic will see and download them. Note that there is a lot of duplication of images going on in these scenarios but in general Lightroom should eventually manage that and only download what it needs. You might need to stop and restart syncing in Lightroom Classic or go to the Preferences->Lightroom CC tab in Classic and see if there any sync errors that are keeping Lightroom Classic from Syncing. It is very finicky and sometimes you can clear sync issues by unchecking syncing on the offending images that are stuck.

Another question I have is how things sync between 2 macs.  I upgraded LR on two macs - one desktop and one MacBook Pro.  I use an external drive to move from computer to computer to keep things in sync, which is a pain and a big reason I thought the cloud would be a good idea.  I uploaded photos from the desktop by adding (not importing) photos in LR CC.  Only a fraction of the photos showed up when I installed LR CC on the MacBook Pro

This is the same issue as above. It just takes a very long time. Eventually they should all show up on the other machine. Everything has to go up and come back down the internet in this scenario and in general this is not as fast as plugging in an external disk. Eventually when you have your catalog in the cloud this should stabilize a bit as long as you don't regularly shoot 1000's of images but keep it more moderate.

[Califdan2]

Right on Rick.  The PR on this is horrible.   what were they thinking, taking an old name (LR CC) and applying it to a completely different product and then renaming the original product to a name that means something different in English.  "Classic", as in old, or historical or obsolete.

Absurd, unless....... They are looking forward to a day when they remove classic from their list of products, leaving ONLY CC.  Ha!  If they thought the backlash they got when they destroyed the Import Dialog in LR CC/2015.2 was loud, wait till they try to kill Classic.  In fact, we should start that feedback now so they will know what they face and hopefully don't even go down that path.