In this recent LIVE Broadcast which went out on YouTube and Facebook, I chatted with Brian Matiash about Lightroom (known affectionately as the Cloud Version) and how it has changed fairly recently introuding local storage in addition to cloud storage.

Brian is an early adopter of using Lightroom exclusively for his workflow so I thought it would be good to hear what the potential workflow would mean and what switching to Lightroom would mean for someone like me that is a Lightroom Classic user.

There were already a few things I knew weren’t in Lightroom, which probalby out of all of them were the reason I hadn’t started using it ‘in anger’ , but up until fairly recently it was the fact that it was purely a cloud based storage workflow …

Brian did a great job talking through the ‘cloud-only’ workflow ; a workflow that would definitely suit some people, so that was great to see; it isn’t a workflow for me however, but then workflow is very much a personal thing.

With cloud-only comes the issue of the amount of storage and the cost of that storage, which in my opinion at the moment, Adobe’s pricing is a bit on the excessive side … especially when you kind of compare it to something like the cost of BackBlaze BackUp with unlimited storage costing me $84 or pretty much £66, for the year!

I’m also one for keeping all the layers in files and keeping hold of images I don’t use and at the moment I currently have around 6TB of data.

There’s also internet speed to consider.

If I was to go out and shoot a portrait with my 61MP Sony A7RIV, I could potentially end up with quite a few images which from that camera would mean a considerable amount of data.

Uploading this to the cloud would be ok if I was at home as we do have very fast 1Gb Broadband, BUT anything less than this would take a considerable amount of time. I couldn’t and wouldn’t go cloud only, but would instead use the local storage as I do now and only sync my ‘keepers’ in a portfolio on the cloud.

However … this I already do with Lightroom Classic.

All of my image files are on Hard Drives and I have several portfolios as Collections which are synched with the cloud meaning I can view them on my iPhone, my iPad … or even another computer.

The conversation with Brian and seeing the Lightroom workflow I genuinely found interesting and educational BUT for me, certainly for now, unless Lightroom functionality with what I mention above and other stuff that was mentioned by others watching LIVE yesterday and have commented since, were implemented.

That said … just giving Lightroom Classic a bit of a face lift and making it a bit quicker would make me happy.

But, if I’m being totally honest … I don’t get why 2 separate versions were made in the first place.