"Adobe recommends that CC be the primary tool"

I don't see that. Adobe might be struggling with getting customers and potential customers to understand the range and variety of how their tools work. I would agree that Adobe is working toward incorporating cloud storage into the options for workflow. This is especially true for photographers that don't expect prints to be part of their photography.

I still think I see Adobe continuing to work on a "classic" workflow for the photographers that have real cameras, store image filess on small computers and make prints. This week they added a new slider called "Texture" to go with Clarity and DeHaze.

I also think Adobe is preparing for a huge change coming to us. Our wireless connections are going to begin jumping in speed in a couple years. "5G" connections will make cloud storage use more obvious and useful to all of us.

I think Adobe might be puzzled about why traditional camera photographers can be so reluctant to spend $10 for a TB of storage! They (we!) come from shooting film. We had to buy the film and pay to get it developed. The current cost for a 36 exposure roll of Ektachrome is $13 and a processing mailer is $11.

IDguy,

You owe it to your heirs to continue the payments. How else will they see the beautiful work you do! (Ignore this if you make prints of everything you do).

Based on what you've written, including "between the lines, about your work flow, equipment and methods, why are you messing with the Lightroom CC (cloud) applications? What are you trying to accomplish? Are you not just making your system more complex? Why are you not sticking with a classic workflow in Lightroom Classic?

You are right IDguy. Pretty much everything is done with links. It does get confusing between classic and the cloud and the end of the folder structure. I should have said links instead of original.

What happens when you import photos into Lightroom classic it brings them in as links, it links to the original photo in a folder that matches the folder structure on the hard drive. Then you can edit the photos in classic from there. These are called folders.

Collections, the area just below the folders, is just one of many ways to organize your photos. What I did was created collections such as flowers animals water scenes etc. I did this because I was too lazy to input keywords which I now do and I found the key words actually better for me. In the collections area it is also links. If you click the little square to the left of the collection titles it will sink to Lightroom cloud version.

Once it sinks to the cloud version it becomes albums in the cloud. From the cloud version you can edit your photos from anywhere among other things so just create their website etc I don't use the cloud version I do most of them I do my editing at home on my PC. I believe this is also where the links stop and actual photos are uploaded to the cloud, and I think the cloud version creates its links for the cloud.

And they just confused everybody again by changing the names I just updated and it's now Lightroom for the cloud version in Lightroom classic I think, I don't know I renamed them myself so I know what they are.

I can see where the clown version would be useful for someone that travels a lot but I just wait till I get home.

It sounds like you've pretty much figured it out, a lot of people say it's not very intuitive but I find it fairly easy especially with all the YouTube videos and and the Adobe site which I sometimes look at but learn more from Reading here on the hog.

Don't know if this all makes sense or not but that's the way I understand it.

I want to address the problem with the computer hard drive getting too full as I have recently experienced it. With the help or Apple techs by phone, I learned how to analyze my hard drive and found that various photo files had it full. I work in Lightroom and download pictures from my camera cards right into LR. My LR photo files are and have always been on exterior derives. My instruction files (most recent update) are stored in three locations: in the pictures file on my mac HD, on my backup to the original exterior LR drive and in Dropbox. Every time I turn LR off it stores the instruction update to each of these locations, although I do have to go and delete older backups every week or so. But these files don't require much space anyway.

The big issue is with my mac picture files. I have done a terrible job of eliminating redundancies. For some reason several groups have shown up in my pictures file and not in the photos file in pictures, but elsewhere. I do transfer several pictures into Photos which I might want to share with others when out and about and that works well. To address this problem I now do several things: first, make sure to eliminate redundant pictures in "pictures"; second, limit the pictures I enter into Photos to a few representative shoots to keep the Photos file in pictures smaller: finally, I have signed up for Apple's iCloud storage plan (as opposed to LR's) which will store as much of my "Photos" files on the cloud as necessary when the HD nears capacity and recall them whenever I want to use them, which is normally only when I want them on Apple TV.

Finally, I have learned to clear out my trash file on the HD very regularly. I was amazed at how many pictures-normally in DNG content form-are in there. Even in thrash they will count just as much against your available capacity.

A full HD will mess up your ability to do anything, not just LR editing. This is why I use Apple's cloud rather than LR's--I can keep many none photo apps in there.