UKnomad wrote:
Burkphoto - many thanks......that was what I was querying in essence...in order to have the edited images I would need to export them all to my Mac hard drive should I exit LR.....or to have a copy if my hard drive fails
Well, your ORIGINALS remain unchanged. If you drop your Lr subscription, you can still export from Lr with previous stored changes applied.
Software companies are not legally allowed to prevent you from using your data — and they would be stupid to do so, anyway! Your previous edits are accessible, but no changes can be made until you resume paying your $9.99 per month for the Photography Bundle of Lr, Lr CC, Ps, and Br.
Lots of people panic, thinking Adobe is ransoming them or something by charging subscription fees. That's crap. People with the previous Lr 6.x stand-alone version can keep using it until it is inconvenient to do so (meaning their computer OS won't support it any longer, or they need a new feature that wasn't in the original, such as support for a new camera raw profile).
Since I need both Ps and Lr CC, I subscribe. I've used Ps since version 1.0 back in the late 1980s. I used Lr since the first beta test.
I used to skip every other version of Ps, because the Adobe upgrade fees were too expensive. I couldn't afford $300 to $400 for a Ps upgrade, but I can afford $10/month. That's a decent bottle of wine, two or three Starbucks coffees, or four gallons of gas. You can't even buy a roll of film and processing that cheap, these days (That's about $30 if you want prints!).
I've said this before: Digital photography is an expensive hobby. By the time you get the equipment to do it right, a $10/month charge for software licensing is cheap, cheap, cheap! I have a small setup:
iMac $1200
Backup drives $1200
Network infrastructure $550
100Mbps Network access $50/month
Monitor Calibrator Kit $150 (The single most important tool I own!)
Desktop Printer $150
Photo Printer $400
Lumix GH4 $1300
Three lenses $1700
Other items (tripod, flash, filters, case, light stands, exposure targets, shoe mounts, LED lights, memory cards...) about $2000
So another $10 is not a big deal.