First, I want to thank you all for this thread, because as a CC newbie, I wasn’t sure what the difference between the two LR products was, and was going to ask the question here. For a side project I started at work, I started with classic, because I think I saw somewhere that it was for the desktop. After reading this, it’s seems I made the right choice for my current needs.

As for the product naming convention, I’d say it sucks, because I really had no idea what the difference was, so I just installed both.

So can any of you suggest any good “quick start” type resources for getting up to speed with the basics of both LR and PS? I’ve done some very basic RAW editing in Nikon’s software like adjusting exposure, WB, and color tone, but that’s about it.

The tools are targeted for specific edit platforms, not the camera equipment. If you have to bring every image home to your desktop, you may be leveraging the full capabilities of the 'classic' software. But, you're missing the immediacy of the tablet-based CC (mobile) software. If you want to debate the issue, you might start by understanding the issue ....

Why does LR exist? Because most digital images benefit from editing more refined and powerful than the minor changes to contrast, sharpening, saturation and WB that can be controlled within the camera. But also, most images require nothing as complex of PhotoShop. So, Adobe has extended the concept of LR to a tablet, covering the typical (majority) of needs of an image editor. An image may need the complexity of PhotoShop, just as an image may need the full functionality of LR classic. Lightroom mobile lets you get started and can share the WIP image(s) with LR Classic, if needed and even when PS when you get to your desktop. But in the meantime, you can share the results with clients on the quality display of your tablet with the 'polished' look of edited images, even from RAW, rather than SOOC very preliminary results of JPEG.

The serious photographer who works with presets and profiles for a consistency of results, they can bring their vision to their tablet and perform the in-field application of this knowledge capital and efficient workflow.

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.