Confused: converting from Lightroom CC to Lightroom classic

[matthewwprior]

Lightroom Version Number

8.4 and cc

Operating System

1. macOS 10.14 Mojave

I see a lot of questions about converting from Lightroom classic to cc but my problem goes the other way. I'm trying to figure out how to go from cc to classic.

I started out with cc a few months ago and am loving Lightroom, but I really want the extra capabilities of classic. I've converted my subscription from Lightroom with 1TB to photography package with 20gb (I didn't go with photography with 1gb because of the cost) now I'm trying to figure out how to convert my photo set over. I have 44k photos, Lightroom CC was working from a version stored in the adobe cloud, but I also have Lightroom CC storing originals on a ssd (which is backed up with amazon prime cloud).

Given that I won't have 1TB of cloud storage after the end of the month I should build my LR catalog from the ssd, is this correct?

If work from the ssd will I keep all of my edits I have make in Lightroom CC? Do I need to bring the cc catalog file in? Is there even a cc catalog file I can grab?

Working from the photos on the ssd, should I still keep the catalog file on the PC drive?

If I am working with the ssd what can I use Lightroom CC for?

Sorry about all the questions, I'm really confused.

 

[clee01l]

All of the information collected on images in the Cloudy version of Lightroom is stored in the cloud. The Lightroom Classic uses a local catalog file to store all of the information collected on images. Once you have Lightroom Classic installed, all you should need to do is create a new empty catalog and start sync'ing with the Cloud. This should Download all of the images and the information collected on images. You would need to do this before your subscription plan reverts to 20GB of cloud storage.

There may be others with more experience in this regard since I have only worked from the Classic version using the Cloud Version for mobile devices.

 

[Jim Wilde]

There are two main ways of converting to Classic from Lightroom:

1. As Cletus mentioned, install Classic and create a new empty catalog. Set this catalog to sync with the cloud and all the existing cloud images will download into the Classic catalog (and thus onto your hard drive). Care: before enabling sync in the Classic catalog, visit the Classic Preferences>Lightroom Sync tab to adjust the download location for the cloud images if needed....the default is a single folder in the user's Pictures folder, but you can set a different location for that location if you prefer (e.g. on an external drive or different internal drive). There is also a setting which you can use to have Classic store the downloaded images into one of the standard capture date-based folder schemes, which is a lot better than all in a single folder.

All the existing Albums in Lightroom will be recreated as Collections in Classic, though Album Folders in Lightroom will not sync to corresponding Collection Sets in Classic, they would have to be created manually if desired. The main downside of using this "migration" method is that some data which you may have entered into Lightroom will be lost, specifically Keywords and Location data (but GPS info will sync, just not any location data you may have entered), and any face tagging that has been done in Lightroom will also not transfer so you'd have to go through Classic's face recognition process to redo the work if you use face tagging.

2. The other method is to use the Adobe Downloader, a tool which is specifically available when a user wants to exit their subscription and needs to retrieve their data from the cloud. Using this method the images are downloaded into a date-based folder structure in the local location that you specify. From there you would import those images into the new empty Classic catalog.

The intention is that all "XMP" data from the Lightroom cloud catalog is included in the downloaded files, so that means that keywords and location data would be included. The bad news is that existing album/collection data is not typically included in XMP, thus your existing Album organisation would be completely lost (though you could easily get around that by keywording all images in Lightroom with the relevant Album name before running the Downloader).

One thing you need to be aware of.....any existing downloaded copies of the cloud originals are not useful in the context of a migration from cloud to Classic. Those locally stored originals are copies that do not contain any metadata/edit data, they are primarily used for performance and offline working reasons, so forget any thoughts you had of trying to use them in the migration.

 

[Califdan]

Jim,

Great answer. Short of doing the experimentation myself, I wonder what you think of using both methods?

1st - do your option 1 which will preserve collections and result in all the Cloud images being in Folders on the destination machine but minus keywords, and location data.

2nd - do your 2nd option using the Adobe Downloader but to a different parent folder. this will bring down the images again but now the XMP's will have keyword and location data.

3rd - in File Manager or Finder, copy just the XMP's from the Downloader populated folders to the corresponding folders with the images from the Sync process, replacing any XMP's already there

4th - back in Classic all the images would have the "metadata mismatch" icon lit. Select all images and use the "read metadata from files" option to re load the metadata from the XMP files.

My assumption is that this will bring in the Keywords and location data from the XMP's and would not mess up the collections created from albums, Have you tried this out to see if it works?

To deal with faces, In LR/Cloudy, before you do any of the above, I suppose one could create a hard keyword for each "face" and after selecting all the images for each face assign that KW. Then when done with the above, each "face" keyword would point to the images having that person but I suspect they would not point to the specific part of the image containing the face. These keywords could then be marked as "person" type keyword and at leisure the actual face in each image could be identified if desired.

Again - this is an idea and I have not tested it.

 

[matthewwprior]

There are two main ways of converting to Classic from Lightroom:

1. As Cletus mentioned, install Classic and create a new empty catalog. Set this catalog to sync with the cloud and all the existing cloud images will download into the Classic catalog (and thus onto your hard drive). Care: before enabling sync in the Classic catalog, visit the Classic Preferences>Lightroom Sync tab to adjust the download location for the cloud images if needed....the default is a single folder in the user's Pictures folder, but you can set a different location for that location if you prefer (e.g. on an external drive or different internal drive). There is also a setting which you can use to have Classic store the downloaded images into one of the standard capture date-based folder schemes, which is a lot better than all in a single folder.

All the existing Albums in Lightroom will be recreated as Collections in Classic, though Album Folders in Lightroom will not sync to corresponding Collection Sets in Classic, they would have to be created manually if desired. The main downside of using this "migration" method is that some data which you may have entered into Lightroom will be lost, specifically Keywords and Location data (but GPS info will sync, just not any location data you may have entered), and any face tagging that has been done in Lightroom will also not transfer so you'd have to go through Classic's face recognition process to redo the work if you use face tagging.

2. The other method is to use the Adobe Downloader, a tool which is specifically available when a user wants to exit their subscription and needs to retrieve their data from the cloud. Using this method the images are downloaded into a date-based folder structure in the local location that you specify. From there you would import those images into the new empty Classic catalog.

The intention is that all "XMP" data from the Lightroom cloud catalog is included in the downloaded files, so that means that keywords and location data would be included. The bad news is that existing album/collection data is not typically included in XMP, thus your existing Album organisation would be completely lost (though you could easily get around that by keywording all images in Lightroom with the relevant Album name before running the Downloader).

One thing you need to be aware of.....any existing downloaded copies of the cloud originals are not useful in the context of a migration from cloud to Classic. Those locally stored originals are copies that do not contain any metadata/edit data, they are primarily used for performance and offline working reasons, so forget any thoughts you had of trying to use them in the migration.

This worked perfectly. Thank you

 

[Jim Wilde]

My assumption is that this will bring in the Keywords and location data from the XMP's and would not mess up the collections created from albums, Have you tried this out to see if it works?

Yes, it does work. However, when I tested it I did something different to your point 3. Bearing in mind that only proprietary raw files would have an xmp sidecar, to use your method would mean copying the complete file for any Dng, Jpg, Tif file types, overwriting the Classic files. However, given that it's possible to set the initial Classic dated-folder structure for the sync download to the same as the Downloader uses (yyyy/yyyy-mm-dd), doing that and then running the Classic sync followed by the Downloader, you would end up with two identical folder structures....so rather than doing that copy, I simply ran the "Update Folder Location" in Classic on the top level folder, pointing to the Downloader parent folder instead. Then in Classic, select all and do the Read Metadata from Files to restore the keywords and location data.

 

[Califdan]

Good catch on the file types that don't use separate XMP's and for doing the testing and coming up with a better solution.