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I've been uploading everything to Lr Mobile already...

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braver

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Jul 12, 2015
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I've been uploading everything to Lr Mobile for years. Essentially my catalog is in the cloud, with the full DNGs locally where I need them. I don't need a second copy of them.

How would I migrate to the new CC?
 
OK so I let the new Lr sync, pointing it at an empty drive, and it shows 300K photos, but most albums are empty... I figured out what it is -- a glorified lightroom.adobe.com! Probably should forget about it and do thing in Classic as before...
 
I prefer to call it "Lightroom Mobile for Laptops and Desktops"
Currently there is not enough functionality in Lightroom CC to justify migration to it.
 
I prefer to call it "Lightroom Mobile for Laptops and Desktops"
Currently there is not enough functionality in Lightroom CC to justify migration to it.

And that is why I feel Adobe were offside in naming their new app Lightroom CC.

[I made this comment on the Lr Journal but it did not make it past the censors.]
 
OK so I let the new Lr sync, pointing it at an empty drive, and it shows 300K photos, but most albums are empty... I figured out what it is -- a glorified lightroom.adobe.com! Probably should forget about it and do thing in Classic as before...

If you look at from the perspective of trying to develop a cloud-based system that allows the user "access to your pictures from any of your connected devices, or any browser, wherever you are", doesn't it make sense, given the differences in hardware and operating systems, to develop as much as possible with a common look and feel? Pick up whichever device and know exactly how to move around, and know where the edit controls are, and what the sliders/tools are called?

I can't speak for you, but that makes perfect sense to me....and frankly, given that in this thread alone the new app's been called "Lightroom Mobile for Laptops and Desktops" or "a glorified lightroom.adobe.com", I'd actually say that this shows that it's one design goal they've succeeded in!

But specifically to your opening post, i.e. "how do I migrate to the new CC", I would first caution you to be really sure you're ready for that jump. 300k images at full resolution will take up a lot of space on the web, many TBs, and that's not going to be cheap!

In terms of what's happened when you set the "new LR" to sync, I'm making some assumptions here. By "pointing at an empty drive" I guess you mean you changed the default location for the downloaded originals to be the external hard drive? And did you also enable the option to "store a copy of ALL originals locally"? A further assumption is that the 300k images in the cloud were initially uploaded/synced from LR Classic/LRCC2015?

If my assumptions are correct, all that you have in the cloud are Smart Previews of those 300K images, not originals (though any images added from LRWeb or LRmobile would be originals), and only the originals would be stored locally on that external drive. SPs are stored in the LRCC's own catalog (which is self-managed in terms of space usage via the slider in the Preferences>Local Storage tab). In that configuration, you should actually find browsing and editing pretty snappy.

Before going any further, get back about my assumptions and if you want to extend into a proper look at the new app using some originals and I'll happily show you how you might be able to do that.
 
I made this comment on the Lr Journal but it did not make it past the censors.

Assuming it wasn't abusive, Matt, it'll just be timing. I guess they're busy.
 
After watching a little bit of the Adobe Max show on YouTube I have decided that Adobe is powered by a bunch of young techies who are enamored by gadgetry. The guy who demonstrated Lightroom CC (the new one) doesn't use keywords, never has, thinks they are a waste of time. He seems convinced that Lightroom CC is definitely the wave of the future. Whether we like it or not, that's where Lightroom is headed. I have played with it a little bit alongside Lightroom Classic. It's kind of cute in its own way. I can see putting it on my wife's laptop for when we travel. But then we can do the same thing by going to Lightroom.adobe.com.

So I'm a little confused. I took a few pictures yesterday and downloaded them to the new Lightroom Classic. I created a shared collection that showed up in the new Lightroom CC. I checked and they were also on Lightroom.adobe.com. Lightroom CC indicates that those images are not yet backed up in the cloud. Then where are they? I don't get it.
 
If you added them to LR Classic and synced from there, only Smart Previews are uploaded to the ecosystem and made available in LRCC/LRmobile/LRWeb (so the answer to the "where are they" question is: on your hard drive where you imported to). If you want originals in the cloud, import/upload using anything apart from Classic. Classic will get them (as originals) when the sync upload has completed.
By the way, no need to remove them and re-import from a different app.....add them again, but this time into LRCC. It should realise these are originals of the smart previews already held, add them without creating duplicates, upload them to the ecosystem to replace the Smart Previews, and have zero effect on LR Classic, except that the latter now also knows that an original is now in the cloud. That's the theory, anyway, and yes I have tested it and it worked for me.
 
So I'm a little confused. I took a few pictures yesterday and downloaded them to the new Lightroom Classic. I created a shared collection that showed up in the new Lightroom CC. I checked and they were also on Lightroom.adobe.com. Lightroom CC indicates that those images are not yet backed up in the cloud. Then where are they? I don't get it.

As you downloaded them into "Classic", the originals are on your hard drive. Smart previews have synced up to the cloud, then down to LRCC.

If you had downloaded them into LRCC, originals would have been stored ("backed up") in the cloud. Then when you next open "Classic", the originals would download to your computer. In this case, there will also be originals stored in the cloud.

Clear as mud?

John
 
If you added them to LR Classic and synced from there, only Smart Previews are uploaded to the ecosystem and made available in LRCC/LRmobile/LRWeb (so the answer to the "where are they" question is: on your hard drive where you imported to). If you want originals in the cloud, import/upload using anything apart from Classic. Classic will get them (as originals) when the sync upload has completed.
By the way, no need to remove them and re-import from a different app.....add them again, but this time into LRCC. It should realise these are originals of the smart previews already held, add them without creating duplicates, upload them to the ecosystem to replace the Smart Previews, and have zero effect on LR Classic, except that the latter now also knows that an original is now in the cloud. That's the theory, anyway, and yes I have tested it and it worked for me.

Jim -- this is very important, so let me unpack this to confirm.

Say I have some Smart Previews in LR Classic CC uploaded to Lr Mobile.

Are you saying you can add the same original DNGs to the LrCC and then Lr Mobile magically matches them rot what it already has? How? By file name?
 
I've realized that LrCC can let me use it as basically a locally cached lightroom.adobe.com, allowing for synced rating and collection-organizing, and checked it out again. It does show all my Lr Mobile albums, but most of them have 0 photos, except for 2018 starting in April. Is that when LrCC started syncing with Lr Mobile? Or when I first tried it? An image in the non-0 albums, those after April this year, shows status as Synced with Lr Mobile and that cloud contains Smart Review only.

I checked download Smart previews" and "Store originals locally", and it started downloading the APC-...dng images I took on the iPhone using the Lr iOS app.

So far, I only add RAW files from SD cards by importing into Lr Classic on the iMac. I cannot ingest them into LrCC as I only have 1TB plan but my originals already are reaching 12TB of DNGs.

If you want originals in the cloud, import/upload using anything apart from Classic. Classic will get them (as originals) when the sync upload has completed.

-- so I guess I should not be doing this unless I upgrade to 20TB? And they only offer up to 10TB, which you are invited to call to arrange for, surely so they can check whether you are sitting down and not driving before they quote the price...
 
Jim -- this is very important, so let me unpack this to confirm.

Say I have some Smart Previews in LR Classic CC uploaded to Lr Mobile.

Are you saying you can add the same original DNGs to the LrCC and then Lr Mobile magically matches them rot what it already has? How? By file name?
Yes, that's what happens, though being pedantic it's not "LR Mobile" that does the matching, it's Lightroom CC.

I'm not totally clear on how the matching is done, though I believe it's a bit different to the LR Classic method.
 
Got it. Now I wonder why does LrCC show 0 images in all the albums I uploaded to Lr Mobile before April 2018, while everything is OK after that, including every new album I upload. I've not reinstalled LrCC until today, last time trying it when it came out and removing it at some point as unhelpful and confusing. Now I realized I can rate and organize in it with a local Smart Previews cache instead of lightroom.adobe.com, and they are almost the same except the crucial difference where the web sees all the Lr Mobile albums while LrCC shows all the albums but they have 0 files each until April.
 
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OK it gets weirder. All those empty albums were represented by the generic icon for thumbnail. Now they all got the first photo of the actual album, while still showing 0 files each, and clicking on an album shows "This Album is Empty" screen. The cloud status on the top right says syncing. Does it take a long time to get to non-0s?
 
Look at the total of synced images in all the various apps: Classic (the All Synced Photographs collection in the Catalog panel), LRCC on the desktop (the All Photos total), and LRCC Web (lightroom.adobe.com, again the All Photos total).

Do they differ?
 
Yes, I have about 329,398 in Lr Classic and Lr Web, and had 239K in LrCC but I see that number incrementing steadily. As I wrote it it grew from 281K to 282K. Some thumbs are replacing generic album covers in earlier year (2017), which now starts getting some albums with images. The confusing state is that empty albums have an OK checker, while the growing ones have the circle with gap status as syncing.
 
At this point, the total number of photos in LrCC has reached 329,404 (a few are always straggling from iPhone) but most albums before 2017 remain empty. The 2017 are now filled up. There's no status or progress of any kind as for the 0 ones to get flush.
 
Do the equivalent synced collections in LR Classic show non-zero numbers?
 
Yes Lr Classic has non-0 size for all synced collections. The 2016 is now full and 2015 seems too, with 2014 getting filled up, most 0 albums are now at 1 at least, with the thumb.

Update: now almost everything is non-0 all the way to 2004 where my setup starts, and looks like it will catch up. I'll verify tomorrow.
 
OK so everything seems to have synced, the album counts are all non-0 and actually seem to match the mothership.

I'm quite excited about the fact I can now use this for rating and keyboarding on the laptop without having to move the catalog back and forth, the main idea behind LrCC as the catalog is in the cloud. The limited DAM tools are annoyingly deficient but hopefully it will do, we'll see.
 
I'm quite excited about the fact I can now use this for rating and keyboarding on the laptop without having to move the catalog back and forth, the main idea behind LrCC as the catalog is in the cloud. The limited DAM tools are annoyingly deficient but hopefully it will do, we'll see.

I assume you meant keywording, but if so you're out of luck. Keywords do not sync between LRCC and LR Classic, nor does location data. Ratings, Titles, Captions, Copyright, GPS coordinates will all sync OK, but not the other two items.
 
Yes autocorrect switched keywording to keyboarding which is not too far off.:)

I've found that I can add selected photos to albums by right-clicking on albums, which does give me the minimal viable DAM. So that's good.
 
I've found that I can add selected photos to albums by right-clicking on albums, which does give me the minimal viable DAM. So that's good.

You can drag and drop them into albums as well, just like in Classic.
 
I think I tried to drag a single image view and it didn't drag, but it does from the grid view, both like in Classic, indeed.
 
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