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Adobe Photography Plan & Workflow Questions


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Apologies in advance for these 'newbie' questions.

I've been using Photoshop Express for several years and am pretty comfortable using it, although I've never come up with an efficient/satisfactory workflow.  I'm retiring from work later this year and anticipate significantly more travel - pandemic allowing - and decided to buy the Adobe Photography subscription service.  Note that I'm not a big supporter of cloud services, preferring to keep my applications and data/photos on my PC. My uncertainty primarily revolves around using LightRoom CC vs. LightRoom Classic when it comes to travel.

1.  Am I better off 'importing' new photos to the cloud when traveling, or just back them up each day to a portable drive, as I've done in the past?

2.  I have a large repository of digital photographs taken over the past decade or so;  does it make sense to import all those photos into Lightroom CC ( I currently have the 1TB plan) and just move to the cloud for everything?  Or given my preference to 'keep things local' only use the cloud service while traveling and keep managing the files locally when home?

I'm starting to locate and watch various tutorials, but thusfar haven't found anything that addresses the pros and cons for fundamental approaches to managing files and workflow.

 

All opinions and suggestions appreciated!

-rich-

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Rich, consider using Bridge/Camera Raw/Photoshop when you are deciding which Adobe application to use.  You can work without importing/exporting anything.  Just view your folders in Bridge, double click on the image to open it in Camera Raw (which is the Develop module in Lightroom) with edits stored in the .dng file or in a .xmp sidecar, then go to Photoshop.  When you are done editing in Photoshop, save the file in a format you like in any place on your hard drive or on a cloud as you like.  You can open both raw and jpeg in Camera Raw.  You can do all the Digital Asset Management you like of Lightroom in Bridge.

All Adobe Photo Plan applications can be stored on your PC.  It is up to you if you want to store raw or images on Adobe's Cloud or anyone else's Cloud if you use Lightroom Classic or Photoshop.

1 TB isn't a lot of storage in my mind.

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Adobe's naming conventions are daft, so when I write LR Classic I mean Lightroom CC Classic, with the local catalogue. When I write LR CC I mean Lightroom CC, the desktop app that stores images in the cloud. 

My main photo catalogue is stored locally and edited in LR Classic on a desktop PC. 

When I travel, I use LR CC on my laptop to import images and do as much editing as I need to at the time. I then drag them into albums. After these have been automatically uploaded to the cloud, LR Classic can 'see' the albums as 'collections' ; on my desktop PC I can drag them into my catalogue as edited DNGs, and work on them further. The last task, which I often forget, is to delete the redundant collections/albums, and files in LR CC. 

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I didn't reply to your Q2.

I tried using LR CC exclusively with all my images in the cloud (2Tb storage). But the limitations of LR CC are just too great compared to LR Classic: after all these years you still cannot print from LR CC; you can only use Photoshop as an external editor (not Topaz, or Nik Silverefex etc), and even when using PS CC, the image is not returned back to LR CC; exporting from LR CC is more limited. I get the impression that LR CC is not being developed except where it is convenient to add tools and functions.

So, a few years ago I cancelled my 2Tb cloud subscription, and returned to LR Classic with just 20Gb cloud storage, and used the money I saved to pay for Backblaze backup storage.

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If you are used to using Photoshop, even the 'Express' version, I would follow exactly what @zeitz has said. Using Bridge and a portable drive makes life very, very simple and you only need to make it more complicated if you want to further back that up onto the Cloud. 

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Thank you all for the great suggestions.  I just changed my plan from the 1TB to the 20GB version and deleted all the files from the 'cloud' and plan to spend much of my remaining day watching Bridge tutorials.  :)

FYI, I also found this thread explaining how files are saved (or not) to the cloud to be very informative:

-rich-

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