Why Lightroom Classic works for me and Lightroom does not

[motorguy]

Lightroom Version Number

Classic Build 13.0.2

Operating System

1. Windows 11

The latest promotion of using Lightroom instead of LR Classic is no doubt going to be argued for the foreseeable future. The problem is that Lightroom Cloud is a basic editing software application. There are no plugins or other useful options many of us need and use on a regular basis. After watching Matt Kloskowski’s “ Goodbye Lightroom Classic” webinar, there are some clear issues in wholly making a workflow change.
There is no Quick Collection, or Collections option. You can create an album in your cloud storage, $10 per month for enough space to be useable, but then you are forced into the cloud and are no longer local.
There are no modules to create slideshows, books or even print. To do that, you have to create your album on the cloud in Lightroom, then import the album from the cloud into Lightroom Classic. If you regularly print or create presentations, this is not a viable workflow.
There is no option to create separate catalogs, for example you might want all of your real estate work in its own catalog and not in your main catalog. Lightroom Cloud in local mode uses your photo folders on any of your hard drives and does not manage your folders internally as LR Classic does. A major downside of this is that in Lightroom Classic, you can do a search across all of your folders in the catalog. Lightroom in local mode can only search the folder you are working in.
You do not import your photos into Lightroom as you do with Lightroom Classic and therefore cannot add things such as keywords, metadata such as copyright info etc. In Lightroom, as you have to download your images outside the program and then open the folder to access your photos, there is an added step or steps to select all, then add keywords etc. In Lightroom Classic, this is all done, from creating the folder on your hard drive, to adding adjustments, keywords, copyright and any other information at the time you download from the card.
On other detail, that to many is important, you cannot rename your files in Lightroom as you can when you import from your card to your local drive in Lightroom Classic. There is no rename function in Lightroom.
Lightroom Classic does it all, where Lightroom is a basic photo editor that is built for hit and run image editing, sharing photos across platforms, and storing images in the cloud. This does make for fast image processing and sharing, and if you are a cloud fan, backing up your photos. I hope it is not Adobe’s intention to kill LR Classic.

 

[clee01l]

The latest promotion of using Lightroom instead of LR Classic is no doubt going to be argued for the foreseeable future…I hope it is not Adobe’s intention to kill LR Classic.

Lightroom does everything that the Apple Photos app does and the Photos app is the competition that Adobe targeted when they developed Lightoom. While Lightroom over time will get more feature rich, It will not replace Lightroom Classic. Though at some point in time the two products may merge in to one.

I don’t see Adobe promoting one over the other. I do see Matt Kloskowski promoting himself which is his right.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[Califdan]

When Lightroom/Cloud first came out we were all quite worried that Adobe's intention was to build LR up and Phase LrC out. However, over time that fear has abated. Adobe is investing in LrC as well as LR. They have quietly abandoned an early statement that there would be no future enhancements to the Library module in LrC as several enhancement have been introduced in subsequent releases.

At this point I believe that Adobe is intending to keep both ecosystems going and intend to keep the Develop/Edit features consistent between the two and where feasible replicate basic image management capability between the two.

I don't partake in Matt Kloskowski's offerings, but if, as you say, he had a webinar entitled "Goodbye Lightroom Classic”, I would chalk that up to inflamatory marketing of his webinar. If the content was actually pushing the idea that LrC is going away I don't think he has any basis in making that claim at this time and I'd like to hear any evidence he has supporting that notion.

However, there are two Lighroom centric ecosystems available to the public. Each has its own pros and cons and individual consumers do need to make a choice of which one they want to be their primary "source of record" system for their images and then decide if they want to also synronize to the other (secondary) system for various purposes.

I'm not real clear on the audience Adobe has in mind for the LR/Cloud "Local" feature introduced in October. I know that one frequently mentioned reason people give for why they prefer Classic or Cloud was that they want to manage their own images on their own computer rather than relinquish control of their master images to Adobe and the Cloud. Of course they already have that with LrC, but I guess this may be an attractive optuion for the folks who want to maintain control of their images on their own computer yet prefer the GUI and style of LR/Desktop over LrC. We'll see how that plays out.

 

[Woodbutcher]

I print. That's the bottom line for me. I haven't even upgrade my mac OS so I can continue to print without issues. I know I can figure out the rest of making Lightroom work for me, but I don't really want to transition off of LrC since I have a good workflow with it.

 

[Johan Elzenga]

They have quietly abandoned an early statement that there would be no future enhancements to the Library module in LrC as several enhancement have been introduced in subsequent releases.

I am not aware of any statement like this made by Adobe. Are you sure you are not confused with the statement that they did make, namely that Lightroom Classic would not get any new cloud sync features?

 

[Zenon]

I can hardly wait until Adobe turfs LrC or Lr, as long as whatever remains is as robust as LrC. Add the option to store locally or in the cloud is an excellent move forward.

 

[Califdan]

I am not aware of any statement like this made by Adobe. Are you sure you are not confused with the statement that they did make, namely that Lightroom Classic would not get any new cloud sync features?

Yes. I don't recall exactly where the statement was made but it was definitely made by Adobe and came out in first year after the re-branding fiasco. The essence of the statement was that LrC's Develop Module would continue to be updated but there would be no future enhancement to the Library module.

I remember being very annoyed when I read it and even installed Capture One for a look-see to see if might be a better option going forward than staying int he Adobe boat when the 'appearance' was that they were planning to phase out LrC in favor of LR (it wasn't).

 

[John R Ellis]

They have quietly abandoned an early statement that there would be no future enhancements to the Library module in LrC as several enhancement have been introduced in subsequent releases.

I recall there was a long thread in the old feedback forum relaying such statements made at that year's Adobe conference. That thread is long gone, but Victoria did say this in her contemporaneous post The Future of Lightroom (October 2017):

Future development of Lightroom Classic is being refocused on improving performance and enhancing the editing tools. It’s become a bit of a jack-of-all-trades over the last few years, so this new focus is great news for serious Lightroom users.

I'm sure she wasn't relaying her own speculation :->

I think it's fair to say that Adobe has stayed true to their word. Most of the significant improvements to Lightroom Classic have been focused on new Develop features and image quality (provided by the Camera Raw team). There have been fairly modest incremental improvements to Library, and almost no changes at all to the other modules, which continue to fester and slowly fall apart. The Map module is riddled with bugs, some serious, many of which have been retroactively labeled "as designed". The only significant changes to plugin support have been to support MIDI controllers in Develop.

 

[Ed Tepper]

When Lightroom/Cloud first came out we were all quite worried that Adobe's intention was to build LR up and Phase LrC out. However, over time that fear has abated. Adobe is investing in LrC as well as LR. They have quietly abandoned an early statement that there would be no future enhancements to the Library module in LrC as several enhancement have been introduced in subsequent releases.

At this point I believe that Adobe is intending to keep both ecosystems going and intend to keep the Develop/Edit features consistent between the two and where feasible replicate basic image management capability between the two.

I don't partake in Matt Kloskowski's offerings, but if, as you say, he had a webinar entitled "Goodbye Lightroom Classic”, I would chalk that up to inflamatory marketing of his webinar. If the content was actually pushing the idea that LrC is going away I don't think he has any basis in making that claim at this time and I'd like to hear any evidence he has supporting that notion.

However, there are two Lighroom centric ecosystems available to the public. Each has its own pros and cons and individual consumers do need to make a choice of which one they want to be their primary "source of record" system for their images and then decide if they want to also synronize to the other (secondary) system for various purposes.

I'm not real clear on the audience Adobe has in mind for the LR/Cloud "Local" feature introduced in October. I know that one frequently mentioned reason people give for why they prefer Classic or Cloud was that they want to manage their own images on their own computer rather than relinquish control of their master images to Adobe and the Cloud. Of course they already have that with LrC, but I guess this may be an attractive optuion for the folks who want to maintain control of their images on their own computer yet prefer the GUI and style of LR/Desktop over LrC. We'll see how that plays out.

I have a different view on the future of LRC. To me, from a corporate resource allocation and cost standpoint it make sense for Adobe to have one engineering team working on one Lightroom and I think over time they will be there. I'm not concerned about it because I think they will merge the best of both systems into one and make the transition seamless. To go one step further, it makes sense to have one engineering team working on one image processing system that includes the best of LR, LRC and ACR in one system that seamlessly links to PS and all the other graphic programs, similar to the way Affinity has integrated their photo, publisher and designer programs. Again, I'm not fretting about it because I think they'll make it work if that's the way they're going. I thinking that maybe the new "local" option in LR is a small step in that direction.

 

[Ed Tepper]

Here's why I'm staying with LRC for now:
I create virtual copies to test to see how different looks feel to me, e.g. color vs B&W, etc.
I use collections and smart collections extensively to organize my images
I have many export presets so I can easily format exported images to meet the demands of my clubs and forums.
I always rename my images so I can easily identify them as to e.g. location and date

As of now, not having the ability to do any of the above in LR Local tab is a deal breaker for me. Of course YMMV.

 

[BobT]

I've had a little play with Lr. Didn't expect much considering our so so internet. It was surprisingly good. In LrC, I can run Denoise in 17 seconds. In Lr, it took only 10 seconds. How can that be?
So, performance wise, I don't really care. However, I do care about placing all my photographic IP in the hands of a cloud service. Despite all assurance to the contrary, ultimately, as they say, possession in 9/10 of the law and the cloud service has possession. Our images would make valuable feed stock for machine learning and the cloud services know it.

 

[tspear]

I have a different view on the future of LRC. To me, from a corporate resource allocation and cost standpoint it make sense for Adobe to have one engineering team working on one Lightroom and I think over time they will be there. I'm not concerned about it because I think they will merge the best of both systems into one and make the transition seamless. To go one step further, it makes sense to have one engineering team working on one image processing system that includes the best of LR, LRC and ACR in one system that seamlessly links to PS and all the other graphic programs, similar to the way Affinity has integrated their photo, publisher and designer programs. Again, I'm not fretting about it because I think they'll make it work if that's the way they're going. I thinking that maybe the new "local" option in LR is a small step in that direction.

Adobe has already said Bridge, ACR, Lr and LrC have a unified engine/code base for the develop module.
What they do with it, and how they work varies by product.

Tim

 

[PhilBurton]

To me, from a corporate resource allocation and cost standpoint

Assuming no internal politics or rivalries between teams.

it make sense for Adobe to have one engineering team working on one Lightroom and I think over time they will be there. I'm not concerned about it because I think they will merge the best of both systems into one and make the transition seamless.

I would be surprised if new features common to both Lr and LrC did not already share a common code base.

Even if there were one overall team for all Lr products, there will still need to be sub-teams or individuals responsible for specific products.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

I recall there was a long thread in the old feedback forum relaying such statements made at that year's Adobe conference. That thread is long gone, but Victoria did say this in her contemporaneous post The Future of Lightroom (October 2017):

I'm sure she wasn't relaying her own speculation :->

Yep, it wasn't intended as a "we're not going to update Library" kind of statement, more of a development roadmap for the next few years. Their priority for Classic was improving performance and editing features, and they've stuck to it pretty well.

 

[clee01l]

I would be surprised if new features common to both Lr and LrC did not already share a common code base.

ACR is a prime example of this. The same code is used for ASC (standalone app) used in Photoshop, Lightroom and LrC. It is just packaged differently with a different user interface. I would not be surprised if there were parts of Bridge included in the new Local feature of Lightroom.