Alternating from Lr 1-6 to Lr Classic and back.

[LCL999]

Operating System

1. Windows 10

I recently took out a subscription for LrC. which promptly trashed my Lr3 calalogues by converting them to a new format, and deleted my old Lr3 program, substituting the new LrC program in its stead with the same name.
I am not particularly happy with LrC. It is much slower than my old Lr3 and the new features don't turn me on. But that may change. Anyway, I uninstalled it and reinstalled Lr3 from an off-line back-up disk. That works, and it seems that LrC hasn't changed the images.
What I would like to do is to be able to switch back and forth between the two systems. All suggestions welcome.
How far does LrC go looking for .lrcat files to convert? If they are not in the Pictures folder, will it still do a search and destroy?
I'm thinking of running Lr3 out of a different Programs folder and moving the .lrcat files to a non-Pictured folder. Will that work?
If those files and folders are on a different drive, will that work?
If I can get that working, then I will probably use Lr3 to manage all my pics up to end-2021, and start a new catalogue for LrC for 2022 onwards. Hopefully the much smaller catalogue will speed LrC up.

Comments please

LCL

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Lightroom only upgrades a catalog when you try to open it, and asks your permission to do so. It doesn't delete anything, it just creates a copy of the catalog to upgrade and borrows the previews from the older catalog.

A huge amount has changed since LR3, and the processing has greatly improved, but with that complexity does come a bit of a speed hit. The minimum system requirements have therefore increased since LR3. Catalog size doesn't make much of a difference these days.

Oh, one more thought... there may have been a bunch of background processes running since you'd just upgraded, like reverse geocoding and face detection, which would have slowed you down until they finished too.

To get an idea of what's new, these posts might help:
What’s New in Lightroom 4?
What’s new in Lightroom 5.0?
What’s New in Lightroom CC / 6.0?
What’s new in Lightroom Classic since Lightroom 6?

 

[Linwood Ferguson]

If you do go back and forth bear in mind there is only one copy generally of an image. If you import a new image into new-lightroom, that image is not in the old-lightroom catalog. And vice versa. You can also make a royal mess if you move images around within lightroom, as if you move it in old-lightroom that move is not visible in new-lightroom so it goes missing.

It is a nice idea to use both briefly to become familiar with differences. It is really not a good idea to run both for any length of time, you will at some point create a mess.

Oh... and do not open the old catalog in new-lightroom more than once, or it will convert again, leaving multiple new catalogs.

Finally Victoria's "borrow" comment can come back to bite you if you go back and forth, as the new install gets all the old previews already built. So if you go back to old lightroom it will rebuild previews and you will have two sets. Once you are finished with old lightroom entirely, be sure to delete those as they can be large.

 

[clee01l]

I do not think it wise to try to manage image files with two different versions of Lightroom/Lightroom Classic. As Linwood has said, what ever you do will eventually come back and bite you. LR3-6 is obsolete and eventually, they will become incompatible with a modern operating system. With Lightroom Classic you can use the parts that appeal to you and ignore those that don’t. Note that Lightroom Classic supports 5 process versions. LR2 is probably process version 1 or 2. The organization structure of the LR DAM has not changed. So IMO LrC is the same as LR3. If you are have it performance issues, then it is likely due to insufficient resources with the OS and hardware.

You need at least 16GB of RAM and 100GB of frees-access on C:\. If you do not have those, performance will be a problem Also your Anti Malware app need to exclude all Lightroom Files and Image files once they have been imported.

Alternately, your subscription includes the cloud version of Lightroom. It does not have all of the bells and Whistles found in LrC. Images are stored in the Adobe cloud and you can puts a few images in your 20GB plan to see if you are happier with it than LrC. If you want to switch to Lightroom and not use Lightroom Classic, you will nee to switch plans to include 1TB of cloud storage since 20 GB is bare minimums for one camera card.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk