From the course: Lightroom Classic Essential Training

Which Lightroom should you use? - Lightroom Tutorial

From the course: Lightroom Classic Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Which Lightroom should you use?

“

- [Instructor] There are two different Lightroom applications for your Mac or Windows computer. There's Lightroom Classic and Lightroom. This course covers the essentials for Lightroom Classic. So before you get started, I wanted to help you determine if Lightroom classic is the right choice for you. Here's a quick overview of each Lightroom. First, Lightroom Classic, the focus of this course. It's a desktop computer application that runs on your Windows or Mac computer. Lightroom Classic only runs on a computer, not a tablet or a phone. Photos imported into Lightroom Classic remain on a local hard drive. Lightroom Classic actually requires that photos reside on a hard drive. They can't be on a memory card, USB drive, or in a cloud. For this reason, it's a good idea to have some basic file management skills if you want to work with Lightroom Classic. For example, you should understand what hard drives are, how to connect an external drive, what the folder structure is, how to navigate folders, how to create folders, and how to copy files from a memory card to a folder on a hard drive. If you typically put everything important on your desktop so that you don't lose it, well, Lightroom Classic might not be the right application for you. For comparison, let's take a look at the other application simply called Lightroom. This is a cloud-based application for your Windows or Mac computer. Cloud-based means that your photos reside in the cloud. The Lightroom application itself runs on your computer. Lightroom is available for your computer and all your mobile devices. There's also a Lightroom web version. Lightroom works on all your devices, and it's essentially the same application, whether you are on your computer or your mobile device. Lightroom is a cloud service application. It can upload your images to a cloud server, and for that reason, users sometimes refer to it as Lightroom Cloud, but the official name is simply Lightroom. Originally, Lightroom required your images to be in the cloud. Images were automatically uploaded to the Lightroom cloud when you added them to the Lightroom application. Beginning in 2023, Lightroom now includes the option to choose for cloud or device when you're editing. You can now edit images that are on your local device or computer without having to upload them to the cloud. But to share images across all of your devices, they have to be uploaded to the cloud. There are some benefits to using Lightroom over Lightroom Classic, especially if you struggle with keeping track of your files. Any photos uploaded to a cloud server are stored in the same location, and they're available to you from wherever you happen to be. With your photos in the cloud, you never have to worry about losing them, and Lightroom uses artificial intelligence to do image searches, so you don't have to worry about keywording photos. Lightroom Classic has gone through several name changes since its introduction in 2007. This unfortunate naming history confuses everyone, so I thought it might be helpful to outline the history here. The first six versions of Lightroom were available with a perpetual license. In 2015, Lightroom CC became part of the Creative Cloud subscription plan. For a while, you could purchase Lightroom 6 with a perpetual license or subscribe to Lightroom CC through the Creative Cloud. These two Lightroom were essentially the same application as Lightroom Classic today, but Lightroom 6 did not have any of the cloud syncing features that were found in Lightroom CC. In 2017, Adobe introduced a completely rebuilt, brand new cloud centric application, and they named it Lightroom CC, nevermind the fact that Lightroom CC was already taken. This required a new name for the original Lightroom application, and that is how it became Lightroom Classic CC. In 2019, Adobe dropped the CC extension from all of the Creative Cloud applications, which leaves us where we are today with the Lightroom Classic and Lightroom. In 2023, Adobe added the local device option to Lightroom, which was previously exclusively a cloud storage application. So the new Lightroom application with the same name as the original Lightroom application is not the original. Lightroom Classic is the original. Got it? So today, Lightroom provides the option to work with images in the cloud or on your device. Lightroom Classic is exclusively a desktop application. Lightroom is newer than Lightroom Classic, so it does not have all of the same professional capabilities, and this may be the number one reason to use Lightroom Classic instead of Lightroom. This course covers the essentials for Lightroom Classic, the original Lightroom.

Contents