Transitioning from LR 1-6 to Adobe Photography Subscription

[pknoot]

Lightroom Version Number

LR 6

Operating System

1. macOS 10.13 High Sierra
2. macOS 11 Big Sur

I'm finally ready to make the transition away from my trusty old LR 6 stand-alone installation to a subscription to Adobe Photography package. I'd like to better understand what I should do in preparation to protect my current catalog and photo files (~ 300,000), presets, plugins, etc.

My main photo database is on a 4TB removable hard drive, which is backed up regularly to another removable backup drive, an NAS backup drive, as well as to the Backblaze cloud. In case you're wondering, many of these photos are very valuable revenue generators from my professional career. I currently access the photo files either from a Mac Pro or a Macbook Pro; I also keep backup copies of the LR catalog on the database drive.

I don't believe I need cloud-based storage for my office work (please feel free to convince me otherwise), but understand it may come in handy when traveling or on assignment. I currently use a removable hard drive and copy everything to the main database once I return to the office. I don't typically need access to my database while away.

Does it make sense to preserve my old LR 6 installation somehow, perhaps as a Time Machine backup?

Do I leave the old LR 6 installed when transitioning? Will the transition modify or damage the old LR 6 installation? I assume LR 6 cannot be reinstalled at this point.

Any other items of concern or caution?

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[clee01l]

With your subscription, you will install the Adobe Creative Cloud Application Manager. It will run as a background app. You use it to install Lightroom Classic. When Lightroom Classic is installed and running, you open your LR6 catalog file. That’s it. LrC will read the LR6 catalog file and convert the contents to the LrC10 structure.


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[johnbeardy]

I don't believe I need cloud-based storage for my office work (please feel free to convince me otherwise), but understand it may come in handy when traveling or on assignment. I currently use a removable hard drive and copy everything to the main database once I return to the office. I don't typically need access to my database while away.

But if you had it, you might find needs or advantages. You might add more text to a caption while it's on your mind, or decide to play with how an image is cropped. Plus you have your portfolio on your phone when you're chatting to a guy across the table (remember that!) .

Does it make sense to preserve my old LR 6 installation somehow, perhaps as a Time Machine backup?

Maybe you might take the opportunity to review/validate your existing backup of the presets and templates folders and of your catalogues, but there's nothing special here.

Do I leave the old LR 6 installed when transitioning? Will the transition modify or damage the old LR 6 installation? I assume LR 6 cannot be reinstalled at this point.

You may as well leave it for a while, but there will be no damage to it. The old LR6 catalogue's previews folder will be taken over (renamed) when LR10 upgrades the catalogue.

Any other items of concern or caution?

Big question! But not really.

 

[LRList001]

Any other items of concern or caution?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Possibly, once you have migrated and made changes to the LR10 catalogue, you can't convert it back to LR6. So, should you decide later you no longer want LR10 and if you are able to keep LR6 running (which is increasingly difficult for Mac users and is slowly losing functionality for Windows users), you would have to redo your work (and of course, not take advantage of the new LR10 features).
Others on this forum can tell you what will stop working in LR10 if you stop your subscription. Develop is one. The Library keeps going, so you don't lose access to your work.

 

[Philippe Coudé du Foresto]

Only module Develop and Map are disabled when LR Classic without a valid subscrition. All other modules are fully functional. Note you will still be able to make some developement to your image using the Quick Develop in the Library module.

 

[Ollie]

When I close LTR 5.7 I backup the catalog to a folder titled Backups, in a larger folder named Lightroom. But in that larger folder there's another folder (this one showing the LTR logo) titled "Master Lightroom Catalog Jan 2020". I think that's when I updated from 5.6 to 5.7). When I put the cursor over the "Master Lightroom Catalog Jan 2020" folder it says "date modified 3/29/21". What's the difference between these two folders? There's a sub-folder with today's date in the Backups folder, so I'm not sure what's in the Master Lightroom Catalog folder, nor why it says it was modified today. I'm getting ready to upgrade to the subscription Classic model. So when Cletus says "open your LR6 catalog file (5.7 in my case)" after installation, am I right in thinking it's the latest sub-folder in the Backups folder that I should open?

 

[clee01l]

So when Cletus says "open your LR6 catalog file (5.7 in my case)" after installation, am I right in thinking it's the latest sub-folder in the Backups folder that I should open?

The LR5.7 catalog backup file is not zipped. Without knowing your history, I think the latest date named folder folder would contain the latest backup. Prior to LR6, the "backup" process in LR just created a copy of the catalog in the date named folder. In LR6, Adobe started zipping the copy of the catalog in the date named folder to prevent it from being accidentally opened in situ by Lightroom.

Only you can answer why there is a "Master Lightroom Catalog Jan 2020" folder with a catalog file in it. This is not something that Lightroom does. A "date modified 3/29/21" message is a filesystem message, It gets update every time the folder is opened by the Operating System, You can ignore these on Folders On a file, they can indicated the last time the file was opened to write (even though nothing new was written).

You have a worrisome condition that you probably need to address sooner rather than later. By default, Lightroom creates a Backup folder in the same folder as the Lightroom Catalog file. This is because this is the only file path that Lightroom can identify in your file system. This is where your backup are today. When your hard Drive fails, it will contain your master catalog file AND the backup folder containing all of your backup catalogs. You should change that on exiting Lightroom to another folder location on another attached drive.

 

[Ollie]

So after installing the subscription LTR Classic I'll open the latest (3/29/21) folder in the Backup folder. I won't open the "Master LTR Catalog Jan 2020" and I'll delete it after the new Classic has converted my latest Backup folder to the LrC10 structure. I also see eight files named "Temp Import Data.db" with two of those ending in db-journal. The most recent is dated 12/18/20. Why are these still hanging around? I assume I should delete them.

I do alternate saving my backups between my desktop and two different external drives, rotating routinely from one to the other.

 

[Rob_Cullen]

I won't open the "Master LTR Catalog Jan 2020" and I'll delete it after

I might disagree! I suggest that "Master LTR Catalog Jan 2020" is in fact your most recent working Catalog! (irrespective of its name!)
You should NOT need to restore a catalog from the {Backup} folder (which may be an 'older' version of your catalog.)
So with Lr-Classic installed, [Double-Click] on "Master LTR Catalog Jan 2020" and a Copy will be created and upgraded to work with v10.2.
Only you can really know which is your 'latest' catalog version.
Catalogs can be renamed- RENAME CATALOG

 

[Ollie]

A new wrinkle: my new desktop computer arrived today three weeks earlier than scheduled. So now I conclude it's better to set up the new desktop and subscribe to LTR Classic on it rather than subscribing on my current desktop and then transferring computers later in April. Since all of my images and my LTR 5.7 catalog are backed up on an external drive (two, actually), can I just plug in the EHD and open the "Master LTR 5 Catalog Jan 2020" folder after I've installed LTR-Classic? (Despite the folder name it seems to contain an up-to-date catalog.) Which is one of the things I don't understand: when I exit LTR I usually click the Backup tab and a folder is saved in the Backups folder shown above in my earlier screen grab. So is LTR making TWO backups--one in the Backups folder I direct it to, and another by default in the "Master Lightroom 5 Catalog Jan 2020" folder, the one with the small LTR logo?

But there are still things I don't understand. After I've installed the subscription LTR Classic, do I then open the Master LTR 5 Catalog...Previews folder? I copied it tonight from my C drive to one of my externals. While copying and pasting it told me it had "discovered" 91,742 files. This puzzled me because I have about 185,000 images in the catalog. After the pasting to the EHD was complete (about 20GB worth) the "Properties" tab showed me "52,989 files." I can't reconcile these differing numbers. With 185,000 images in the catalog shouldn't I have 185,000 previews?

 

[Johan Elzenga]

Victoria has written instructions on how to move Lightroom to a new conputer. That applies here too: How do I move Lightroom to a new computer? | The Lightroom Queen
Lightroom only makes one catalog backup. If you see backups in two locations then these are older backups of backups from another catalog. There is no reason to ever open the Previews folder or to worry about what is in there. Lightroom knows what it is doing and will rebuild anything that isn’t there.

 

[Ollie]

I've read Victoria's Moving to a New Computer but am still confused by what I'm seeing in my file system. I installed the subscription version of LTR-Classic on March 31. In Edit>Catalog Settings I tell LTR to backup data to Master LTR Catalog April 2021-v10.lrcat. This shows up on my C drive with a LTR icon. But there is another folder (with no LTR icon) named Master LTR Catalog April 2021-v10 Helper.lrdata where the backup zip folders are going. :

I don't understand why the backups are not going to the folder I designated, nor where the word "Helper" came from.

In any case, these are all duplicated on another EHD, which I gather I should connect to the new computer before installing the LTR subscription app.

So after installing the LTR app on my new computer, is it the folder with the LTR icon (lrcat) I open, and not the most recent Backup folder in the "Helper" (lrdata) folder? I thought the Backup folder contained the most recent record of my activity.

Thanks for guidance.

Ollie

 

[clee01l]

Helper lrdata is a staging folder where LrC stages data to be written to the catalog database to speed up processing

When you exit Lightroom, it asks if you want to backup the catalog and shows the destination path of the backup files. Pause and check this path when you exit LrC and see if Lightroom is using the folder that you intended.


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[Ollie]

What I was trying to show in the screen shots is that I'm telling LTR to backup the catalog in the folder named Master Lightroom Catalog April 2021-v10.lrcat but the Backup zip folders are showing up in the folder ending in Helper.lrdata. I do not see them anywhere else. I'm not able to see any Backup folders in the [LTR-icon] Master Lightroom Catalog April 2021-v10.lrcat folder because as soon as I double-click on it, it opens Lightroom.

The screen shot in my earlier message shows a folder named Backups at the top of the queue but that is a folder from my earlier LTR 5.7 version, which should now be deleted.

Could you tell me if I am correct in believing that to move to my new computer I should first connect the external hard drive containing the folder ending in April 2021-v10.lrcat, plus the folder Master LTR Catalog Backups April 2021-v10, which contains the latest (today's) backup folder? See screen shots:

Ollie

 

[clee01l]

Could you tell me if I am correct in believing that to move to my new computer I should first connect the external hard drive containing the folder ending in April 2021-v10.lrcat, plus the folder ...

You should follow the instructions in the link that Johan provided earlier.

If there is clean up to be done, I think it is best to move everything using the instructions and sort out on the new computer. That way nothing gets left behind. I see a lot of files that are not in the right folders and some that could be removed from the folders that they are in.

Ultimately, you need a Lightroom Folder with a master catalog, Previews Sub folder and a Backup folder located on a volume that will still be good when your volume with the master catalog fails and you need to recover.


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[Ollie]

Thanks for everyone's guidance in transitioning to a new computer after upgrading to LTR Classic subscription model. The move has been successful except for a small problem with a metadata preset and new uploads, for which I have opened a new thread. Thanks again. Ollie

 

[michael.k.joiner]

Possibly, once you have migrated and made changes to the LR10 catalogue, you can't convert it back to LR6. So, should you decide later you no longer want LR10 and if you are able to keep LR6 running (which is increasingly difficult for Mac users and is slowly losing functionality for Windows users), you would have to redo your work (and of course, not take advantage of the new LR10 features).
Others on this forum can tell you what will stop working in LR10 if you stop your subscription. Develop is one. The Library keeps going, so you don't lose access to your work.

"The Library keeps going, so you don't lose access to your work." - that's an important point! I hope its true, because I've often wondered what I might do if I decided to go with another software package to edit my photos, but wanted to keep using the Library...

 

[Johan Elzenga]

"The Library keeps going, so you don't lose access to your work." - that's an important point! I hope its true, because I've often wondered what I might do if I decided to go with another software package to edit my photos, but wanted to keep using the Library...

It’s true.