Lightroom Classic or Lightroom? Maybe I no longer need to choose
Back in January 2024, I wrote a blog post asking whether it was finally time to dump Lightroom Classic and move to Adobe's newer, cloud-based Lightroom.
At the time, I had used Lightroom Classic for nearly a decade and had a catalogue with more than 50,000 photographs. Lightroom was becoming increasingly attractive, particularly with the arrival of its Local option and the ability to work much more easily between desktop, iPad and mobile.
I was sufficiently impressed to suggest that Lightroom Classic's days as Adobe's main photography application might be numbered.
Two and a half years later, I think I might have been a little premature.
I didn't make the switch. Instead, I carried on using Lightroom Classic while keeping an eye on Lightroom as it developed.
Now, as I start thinking about my photography workflow for 2027, I'm looking at the question again. But something fairly fundamental has changed.
I'm no longer convinced I need to choose between them.
Lightroom has certainly grown up
One of my biggest objections to Lightroom in the past was the assumption that my photographs needed to live in Adobe's cloud.
For somebody with tens of thousands of RAW files, that never seemed particularly attractive financially or practically.
Lightroom's Local selection for images changed that considerably. I can now browse and edit photographs sitting on local drives without first importing and uploading everything to Adobe's servers.
Lightroom itself has also become considerably more capable. Many of the editing differences that once separated it from Classic have disappeared.
But there are still differences.
Classic remains a much more comprehensive Digital Asset Management system. Its catalogues, collections, keywords, metadata tools, virtual copies, plugins and output options still give it advantages when managing a large photographic archive.
That's important to me.
I've accumulated considerably more than 50,000 photographs now, and I don't particularly want to dismantle an organisational system that works simply to use the newer application.
Then the studio changed the question
There is another difference between 2024 and today.
I now have a home studio.
One of the things I want to develop in 2027 is proper tethered shooting: connecting my Sony camera directly to the computer so photographs appear on a larger screen as I take them.
That changes the calculation considerably.
Lightroom Classic supports tethered capture with my Sony cameras. I can shoot directly into the catalogue, control parts of the camera from the computer, use Live View and apply settings as photographs arrive.
Adobe's cloud-based Lightroom still doesn't offer the equivalent native tethered workflow.
So for my studio, Lightroom Classic isn't old software I'm hanging onto through habit. It actually provides something I need.
But Lightroom solves a different problem
Where Lightroom becomes increasingly attractive is away from my main computer.
I use an iPhone for more photography than I did a few years ago and I have an iPad that is ideal for reviewing, sorting and editing photographs.
That's where the cloud ecosystem starts to make sense.
Instead of moving my entire archive into Adobe's cloud, I can keep Lightroom Classic as the master catalogue and selectively synchronise photographs or collections I actually want available elsewhere.
When I synchronise photographs this way, Classic uploads Smart Previews rather than my full RAW files, and those Smart Previews don't count against my Adobe cloud-storage allowance.
That opens up some interesting possibilities.
After a studio session, for example, I could have the photographs appearing in a synced collection and review them on the iPad. I can flag photographs, give them star ratings, and make edits without sitting at the main computer.
Those changes then find their way back into Classic.
Likewise, photographs taken on my phone can enter the Lightroom ecosystem naturally and become available on my other devices. Suddenly the cloud isn't replacing my archive. It's giving parts of that archive mobility.
So my plan for 2027 is hybrid
My current thinking looks something like this:
Lightroom Classic remains home.
My main RAW files, archive, catalogue and studio workflow stay there, backed by local storage that I control.
Lightroom becomes the mobile workspace.
I'll use it on the iPad and iPhone for photographs I want to access away from the computer, including reviewing shoots, carrying out initial selections, making edits and working with photographs taken on the phone.
The cloud becomes the bridge, not the destination.
Rather than uploading decades of photography simply because I can, I'll synchronise the things that actually benefit from being available everywhere.
And that, I think, is the part I missed when I looked at this in 2024.
I was asking which Lightroom should win.
Perhaps that's no longer the right question.
For my photography in 2027, Lightroom Classic and Lightroom increasingly look less like competing products and more like two parts of the same workflow.
Classic gives me the archive, organisation and studio tools I need.
Lightroom gives me the flexibility I wanted back in 2024.
This time, rather than dumping Lightroom Classic, I think I'm finally ready to use Lightroom properly alongside it.
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