DWU2 wrote:
Bill, you've obviously gained a mastery of the LR universe that enables you to do some interesting things. I've been using LR (Classic) for about seven years, and am pretty competent with it, and to a lesser extent, with PS. When LR CC came out, I made a conscious decision to stick with LR Classic. My decision was based in large part on a couple things you touched on in response to my question.
The first is cost - if you're going to go all-in and use the cloud as your primary storage (which also gives some important reliability advantages), then the monthly cost is much more than I would ever care to pay. I'm admittedly not nearly as informed about LR CC (non-classic) as I am about the Classic product. I think there are some work-arounds (I think I've read about storing smart previews in the cloud, but I'm not sure about that). But, if I have to consider what to do with every photo, whether to store some in the cloud and some not, then perhaps the product is managing me, instead of the other way around.
The second factor in my decision was the fact that, if one is going to store all of his RAW files in the Adobe cloud, then a phenomenal amount of transmission time is going to be required. If you go out on a shoot and return with 1,000 RAW files, I haven't calculated how many hours that would take, but it's a lot.
Accordingly, I opted not to purse the non-Classic version of LR for my needs. As I noted above, that makes me less than fully-informed about that product, so maybe I made a bad decision.
When there is a debate, the question of the day is framed with "Resolved:". That's how I started this debate - the title on this post is the question. Do not assume I think that the answer is resolved.
Adobe's storage costs are far higher than competitors such as Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. And the lifecycle cost of backing up to two or three local drives is an order of magnitude cheaper than that. So, that brings me back to the issue your response raised - If a photographer has a very large photo collection (over 80,000 in my case), is Lightroom CC a viable alternative, or is Lightroom Classic a better alternative?
I welcome your opinion.
Bill, you've obviously gained a mastery of the LR ... (
show quote)
I use HDD storage for archiving and just use the LR CC cloud storage as working space.