Can I move/migrate all my LR assets to a new CC account later?

[Oliver_Lightroom_Fan]

Hi Folks,

I just started using Lightroom CC with a CC student account provided by my education organization. I'd actually love to import over 10'000 photos and reorganize and edit some. As all of you know, this is extremely time intensive and quite a personal investment, which also binds you to the Lightroom platform/product long-term.

In the mid-term I already know I'll be forced to discontinue the CC Student Account and move to a self-financed CC Personal Account. My question is simple. Once forced to discontinue the Student Account (bond to the school):

a) can I create a personal account and migrate all CC contents, especially Lightroom photo library with all photos, folder structure, albums, picture ratings, tags and photo edits to the new account?

b) if so, could you point me to clear-cut (proven) instructions on how its done?

I simply don't want to invest a lot of blood, sweat and tears into the Lightroom CC platform over the next year or so, only to find out I have to start all over again when I'm forced to move to my own private account. Some hints would be highly appreciated!!

Regards, Oliver

[cmgap]

Is your student account in your name? When you are no longer eligible for a student discount, you should be  able to renew your subscription and select the appropriate plan level. You may want to check with your school’s terms to see what their recommendations are.

[Oliver_Lightroom_Fan]

Hi, the terms are simple - use CC Apps during the school tenure and then figure out yourself how to secure and transition data. No help. No guidance. They simply have enough licenses to cover their students for the time at the school. The email addresses used to create the Adobe CC Account are even tied to the school. Students names are bound to specific accounts.

This is, by the way, not in the US, but in Switzerland. Nevertheless, the same move/migration problem I described applies. This is not about a simple "plan change". This is - as mentioned - about being able to move my complete CC assets (specifically Lightroom) to a new personal account at some point in time.

I'd really appreciate a straight forward answer if this is technically possible without loosing all my work. Even if that answer is "NO" - also OK, at least its an answer. That way I won't both using the products and investing the time. Thanks.

[Theresa J]

Technically it should be possible to accomplish a migration to a new account. There is an option in the Lightroom CC preferences to store your images locally. You would need to do this on your own personal computer though, not a school one. I recommend changing the location of the stored copy to an external hard drive. When the time comes to start a new account for yourself, you should be able to import the images that were saved locally on the external hard drive. I'm not exactly sure what this process would look like though, because I haven't actually tried it myself.

I'm a little surprised that your school is using Lightroom CC and not Lightroom Classic. If you use Lightroom Classic, all of your images are stored on a local drive. You could put your images, and catalog on an external drive, allowing you to take it back and forth from home to school. There is no migration required for this workflow. You simply open the catalog with whatever account you are logged into. My recommendation is for you to build your catalog with Lightroom Classic while you are a student. Later on when you are done with school, you can migrate your Classic catalog to Lightroom CC if that's what you chose.

[Oliver_Lightroom_Fan]

Thanks for taking the time to respond - much appreciated. After having researched a bit I constantly find options from Adobe to officially "migrate" contents - not only the photo files themselves, but also all the metadata and image edit data - from a personal CC to an Enterprise CC Account. I was hoping this method could be reused or adapted for my case (personal account), but I neither found references to that effect, nor other user experiences in that sense.

I guess its just more commercially viable for Adobe to invest better supporting Corporate Clients rather than really doing much in the same space for the personal CC account user population.

I guess in the end I will simply go with your suggested work-around via Lightroom Classic CC and local storage for the time being. I could still potentially just use the Adobe Creative Cloud option in parallel as a temporary back-up space - actually kind of lame though for such a professional cloud-based software environment...

It's a shame Adobe isn't more straight forward and transparent with clear cut migration tools supporting what I (and potentially many other users) occasionally may need to do. It actually significantly deters talented young people from utilizing the Adobe CC the way it was intended, originally designed and how its being strong-armed into the marketplace. Exactly those users could represent Adobe's future loyal customers... be it "private" or "enterprise". A bit short-sighted if you ask me...

[Theresa J]

Oliver, I agree with your assessment. There is much that could be improved with Lightroom CC and migration support. Lightroom CC is still relatively young though. We can hope that improvements will be made in the near future, but for now you are better off using Lightroom Classic.