Lightroom Classic CC and Lightroom CC
TL;DR
Harness the power of both Lightroom Classic CC—photo organisation and fully-fledged features—with Lightroom CC—multiple device access, no hard drives, and a nice UI—by syncing the two platforms together.
Import all your images through Lightroom Classic CC, process/edit them, and select photos to sync with Lightroom CC; either because they are your favourites and you want access to them anywhere, or because you want to edit them on a different device at a different time. You do this by syncing specific collections only (see the process described below).
Once set up, this combination is awesome — Lightroom provides an incredible workhorse synced to a versatile platform that provides you with the freedom to access and process your favourite photos anywhere.
Introduction
For a long time, I didn't realise the customer experience Adobe was trying to achieve, they launched two Lightroom products that stood side by side and because of this, to me, it appeared that Lightroom Classic CC and Lightroom CC were targeted at different customers. Lightroom Classic CC was focused more at the professionals with large amounts of photos, whilst Lightroom CC was targeted at beginners or those looking for a simpler platform.
However, frustrated that I couldn't have both the versatility of Lightroom CC and the features of Lightroom Classic CC, I recently too deeper look into all of this, and I found some pretty cool stuff! In short, there is a way to leverage the power of both platforms, and it is not hard to do.
Below I will cover:
how you combine the platforms & what benefits this offers
how you sync the two together
how, if like me, you need to migrate from Lightroom CC back to Lightroom Classic CC (note: this is not fun)
The Power of Two
As mentioned, I have, until recently, believed that the discussion was always around Lightroom Classic CC (or v6) vs Lightroom CC (even the names are confusing!). This was a challenge as the new Lightroom CC not only offered a nice UI but the concept of seamless editing across different platforms, and no need for hard-drives. However, Lightroom Classic CC's full-fledged features and folder organisation is invaluable, the only real challenge was that I had several hard-drives and so going back to find photos was not the nicest experience.
Until fairly recently I had been pretty poor with Lightroom. I had an old version on an old laptop and had never taken the plunge onto the new subscription models due to cost. However, last year I jumped onto Lightroom CC to try it out, and after a bit of testing and enjoying the new design, I decided to switch. But the problem was I had never really investigated how it was all meant to work and ended up importing about 700gb onto Lightroom CC. This wasn't too much of a problem to begin, there was the 100gb storage that I quickly filled up, but all the photos were stored on my storage device. The problem came when I looked to use Lightroom Classic CC for some editing and found myself unable to move the photos. In short, I wanted both platforms, and my subscription was paying for access to both. It turns out, you actually can......
Syncing Lightroom Classic CC to Lightroom CC
This is simple to do, and once you have this up and running, I must admit, it is awesome. I have a few collections of the photos I want to access anywhere, or still have to edit stored here, giving me easy access to them across all devices.
Process
Open Lightroom Classic CC
Link the Lightroom Classic CC with Lightroom CC cloud by opening Lightroom Classic and clicking on where it says your name towards the top left. Here, you will have the option to sync accounts, go ahead and do this.
This should open the 'Lightroom Sync' tab also (alternatively this can be found by either clicking on the photos syncing just above your name, or edit>preferences>Lightroom Sync), where you can choose how and where the downloaded images should be stored into Lightroom Classic CC — i.e. when you add photos via Lightroom CC.
Next to each collection you now have the option to sync with Lightroom CC, select the collections (or make new ones) that you want to sync.
You are now all good to go and everything should start syncing!
However, if you were originally using Lightroom CC only, but are looking to leverage the power of both these platforms, then see below and yea, good luck with it! It looks like Adobe fell short here (unless I have missed something).
Migrating from Lightroom CC to Lightroom Classic CC
As mentioned, I struggled to understand the relationship between these two products for some time and so ended up using Lightroom CC as a standalone product for the best part of a year, with about 700gb of photos organised on it. From my understanding migration from Lightroom CC to Lightroom Classic CC does not exist; to go from Lightroom Classic CC to Lightroom CC you can simply export and then import a catalog and you are good to go, but that solution does not exist the other way around.
This is the process I would suggest:
Open CC and record the total number of photos (you will want to reference check this at the end of the migration process).
Open Lightroom through your browser, I used this to monitor the link between the two software platforms. There is an important distinction here; I will refer to uploading photos as between the Lightroom CC software and Lightroom CC cloud; as I was limited to 100gb, not all my images were stored in the cloud. I will, therefore, refer to syncing as between Lightroom Classic CC and Lightroom CC cloud. In short, I'm differentiating Lightroom CC further to software (unsynced) and cloud (synced). Lightroom Classic CC will, naturally, only sync photos that are synced with the cloud.
Link Lightroom Classic CC with Lightroom CC by opening Lightroom Classic and clicking on where it says your name towards the top left. Here, you will have the option to sync Lightroom Classic CC to the cloud, go ahead and do this.
This should open the 'Lightroom Sync' tab (alternatively, it can be found by either clicking on the photos syncing just above your name, or edit>preferences>Lightroom Sync), where you can choose how and where the migrated photos should be stored.
I set a new folder up for this ('Lightroom Migration') so that I could differentiate the migrated photos, but it is up to you where you want these photos located.
The photos will start syncing and there is an 'All Synced Photographs' catalog that will show you all photos that have been synced. This process will take a few hours, so check that it is up and running and leave it (make sure your computer won't go to sleep — this can be set in the 'Lightroom Sync' tab). If this stalls for some reason, see the troubleshooting section below.
Once complete add all these photos to a new collection called 'Lightroom Migration' (or something to that effect). Once they have been added, go back to the 'All Synced Photographs' catalog, select all the images, right-click and select 'remove from all synced photographs catalog' — this will remove the photos from the catalog and therefore from the cloud storage (it will show you this warning). By doing this it will only delete the images from Lightroom CC and not Lightroom Classic CC, they can be easily now found in the collection. Try with a few photos if you are worried about this step.
Use Lightroom in the browser to see these photos get deleted, this will not be immediate but pretty quick so just refresh the browser a few times. Once they have been removed from here, the migration is complete.
Check that the number of photos you originally recorded match that in the 'Lightroom Migration' collection.
If you only have a 100gb of images or less then you should be good to go. However, if like me, you have more than 100gb of images, then you will need to do the following:
Close Lightroom Classic CC and open Lightroom CC — this will let the next batch of photos start uploading.
Once the next 100gb of images is complete (can verify by checking Lightroom in the browser), close Lightroom CC and reopen Lightroom Classic CC (start back at step 1)
Continue this loop until all images are complete (the number of photos in the migrated collection should match the number of photos you originally had in Lightroom CC.
Check that the number of photos you originally recorded match that in the 'Lightroom Migration' collection.
The reason for this is that Lightroom CC (cloud) only has 100gb of photo storage on their basic package. This means that the remaining photos are just stored on your storage device and not in the cloud. Due to this, we are uploading photos from Lightroom CC software to the cloud, syncing these photos to Lightroom Classic CC, removing them from Lightroom CC, and repeating this process in batches of 100gb.
Troubleshooting
Classic randomly stops syncing
However, I encountered the next challenge here; sometimes Classic would get stuck, i.e. for some reason stop syncing. To troubleshoot this, follow the steps below;
Close Classic CC
Go to the folder location of where the catalog is stored, here you will find a folder titled '[catalog name] Sync.Irdata. Go ahead and rename this (or delete it).
Reopen Classic and it will kick this off again.
Additionally, sometimes this wouldn't work, but when I opened the Lightroom Sync tab to see the activates, it seemed to kick things off again (maybe I was being impatient by this point and just needed to wait)
Lightroom CC only partially syncs photos
I also encountered another challenge that I couldn't find much about online. Once I synced the first 100gb and went for the next round I found that my 100gb was comprised of a large number of photos that were only partially synced. It simply said the sync had stopped due to storage running out, but there was a handful of completely synced photos and 1000s of partially uploaded photos that could therefore not be synced. To get around this I did the following (a little risky but worked):
I deleted the majority of my photos in CC — they can be restored within 60 days so I figured if they were here they wouldn't sync.
The remaining photos then uploaded and I could continue with the migration process
Once that batch was complete, I then restored the next batch of images to upload from the deleted folder, and so on.
The big challenge here is knowing which photos have been synced and then deleted and which photos have been deleted to be synced later. To do this, even within the delete folder they show if they were completely synced or partially and I relied on this to figure that out.
Check that the number of photos you originally recorded match that in the 'Lightroom Migration' collection. This is when recording the number at the beginning becomes super valuable. If they don't match, then start going through the deleted folder in Lightroom CC and see what photos are missing from Lightroom Classic CC 'Lightroom Migrated' collection
Next time/other solutions
One thing I didn't try but would consider next time would be:
Importing (you can just add them instead of importing them to another location) the images directly from the Lightroom CC folder on your storage device onto Lightroom Classic CC. Then trying to sync, and see if this prevents the whole downloading the photos from Lightroom CC to Lightroom Classic CC. However, I suspect that you will still have had to upload the images from Lightroom CC software to the cloud regardless. Could be wrong, and if this works then this is the way to go. The reason I didn't try is that I had some photos that were on both and I just got duplicates.
Migration Summary
To recap the process looks like the following
Open Lightroom CC and upload from CC into the cloud
Close Lightroom CC and open Lightroom Classic CC, and sync images to Lightroom Classic CC
Store the images in a collection (so you know where they are and easily reference)
Remove images from sync catalog
Repeat steps in 100gb batches until all photos are now on Lightroom Classic CC
In short, I hope that I did this completely wrong because it was incredibly time consuming, a terrible customer journey, and I could find no clarity online on the best approach. As I mentioned, perhaps adding the images to Classic CC first (via import) may have stopped downloading photos but I would have still had to upload them in batches onto the CC to sync them. Ultimately, it is just a ridiculous (and data consuming!) process that could have been saved if you could export a catalog from Lightroom CC, import it into Lightroom Classic CC, and then sync the two platforms.