Both Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic offer an impressive set of non-destructive editing tools, and Lightroom CC does almost as much as the desktop version.īut it doesn’t offer Virtual Copies. So let’s switch tack to everyday editing. (Image credit: Rod Lawton/Digital Camera World) 4. One image, four different versions (or as many as you like) side by side. **Actually, I've just noticed that Lightroom CC will 'Store a copy of all originals at the specified location' if you check that box in the Preferences, so I have to take some of that back – but I assume all my 'edits' (adjustments) are still in the cloud.** But it doesn’t – so I think I’d rather keep my images on my desktop computer where I can organise and back them up myself, and very often load them a lot more quickly.

If Lightroom CC offered desktop storage but ‘mirrored’ my library to its cloud servers, that would be fine. Of course, I can always keep my originals on my own computer, but then I’m maintaining two image libraries in two places and it’s all getting messy. But the bigger my image library gets, the more I stand to lose if something DOES happen – and the more its going to cost me in Adobe cloud storage later when 1TB is no longer enough. I trust Adobe with my images, I trust it to keep backups, I trust it to have zero or near-zero downtime.

You can increase your local cache so that more are stored on your own computer, but that’s a workaround, not an alternative storage location. Lightroom CC takes over your storage so that all your images are in the cloud and not on your computer. Where my pictures are stored is an issue for me. Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer my images here and not on a server somewhere in another part of the world.

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