The Creative Cloud ecosystem is powerful, and I’m confident I’ve finally wrapped my head around a way to keep things easy to ingest on any device, yet continuously backed up, with only a single import. To preface, I’ve been using Lightroom for a bit now, with my primary workhorse being Lightroom Classic. I still can’t get rid of classic as it offers a lot of features I still use that aren’t available in the CC app. The CC app continues to get better and better every month, I hope to one day move over entirely. Until then, here’s how it works.
“The Cloud" at work.
The ingest point – Lightroom CC
I have 1TB of creative cloud storage. This offers me a pretty massive working library at any time, and ingesting into Lightroom CC, whether it be on my phone, my Surface, or my desktop, means I get RAW files available on all other Lightroom CC installs. Easy, right? It doesn’t matter where I am or what device I have, I can always start uploading and editing as soon as I’m done shooting. Backups are safe (provided there’s an internet connection) so I have no need to worry about lost files. For mission critical stuff, there’s a lot of redundancy here – Dual SD cards in the camera, cloud backup with Lightroom Creative Cloud, my Western Digital My Passport Pro Wireless, etc. The only issue here is there’s limited space with the 1TB that Adobe offers at the 20 dollar a month price point, and once you delete a photo from the CC app, it’s gone from the cloud and all other devices. How do I work around this?
Lightroom Classic – The backup
Lightroom Classic is still used! I keep my Classic library running and set it to sync with Lightroom Creative Cloud. My data lives on my NAS, and I keep the subfolder format set to how I had my library prior to using the cloud functionality – It’s pretty seamless. Any files uploaded to Creative Cloud are downloaded into my Classic library, show up in my normal folder structure, and reflect any changes made to the images across devices. The neat part is, that whenever an image is deleted on a Creative Cloud app, it doesn’t delete the local copy from Classic!
Bringing it all together
Think of Creative Cloud storage as a scratch drive of sorts. Anything you’re currently working with is stored there. Once you’re done with a project and everything is showing up on your backup (Lightroom Classic), delete it in a Creative Cloud app. This frees up your cloud storage and local device space while also providing you with a backup. Here’s an example of how things work: I finish a shoot somewhere. Immediately I start ingesting photos on my Surface Pro into Lightroom CC, and flagging/rating photos. As these photos are uploading, they’re downloading to my running Lightroom Classic on my desktop at home, along with any changes/flags/ratings made to the images. Since I have a large working space with the 1TB of Creative Cloud storage, I can just run off that for a bit. When I get home and verify backups of all files are done, I can remove all but my working picks from Lightroom CC on any of my devices, which deletes them from the cloud. They’ll all remain backed up on Classic though, just in case! From here, I just keep editing on whatever device I’m on – be it my Surface Pro, Pixel 3, or desktop, with all changes syncing between seamlessly.
The future
I love the idea of being “digitally nomadic” and not really tied to any specific device. Creative Cloud enables that for me, but the issue is still the offline backups and ensuring my data is retained. I’m tied into Classic right now for that, and honestly, it’s working alright. Classic is still required for several things – For instance it does HDR and panoramas which don’t exist in Lightroom CC yet, and the print and export modules are very robust which I think is a necessity when you’re ordering prints or ensuring best quality for web exports. Until those are in Lightroom CC Classic will continue to be a thing.