Lightroom Classic to Lightroom — How’s it going?

A few months ago I made a decision to shift my photography processing from Lightroom Classic, which I’ve been using since I shifted from Apple’s Aperture, to Lightroom (aka Lightroom Cloud/mobile). I have now used Lightroom to deal with two significant photo shoots (one 500+ images, the other 200+) and my first curation/editing project, so it’s time to ask a critical question:

Was I an idiot in doing this?

The TL/DR answer is: it’s all good and I’m quite happy.

Let’s get deep into the rabbit hole and chat about this.

Why make a change?

A change like this is not to be done trivially. Ever since Adobe released the cloud-based Lightroom, I’ve wondered if it I should migrate my processing to it. Initially, I felt (and it seemed clear Adobe felt this was as well) that ultimately the two tools would merge, but Adobe has made it clear they now see them as having separate and non-converging roadmaps, with tools and features shifting to one or the other as makes sense.

So the worry of a forced migration went away over time. Every so often I would take a fresh look at Lightroom, but there always seemed to be some key feature I felt I couldn’t live without. (I should note that over time I’ve also examined other platforms as replacements for classic, including Luminar and Capture One, and none of them fit my needs as a replacement).

The reason I started considering this change again was a growing wish to be able to work with my photos on whatever device I happed to be using; a key issue with Lightroom Classic is that it’s tied to a single computer, which is my Mac Studio in my office downstairs. Almost everything else I do is tied into the cloud in some way so I can use both my downstairs desktop or my laptop, which typically lives upstairs in the great room — so Lightroom Classic was an outlier in how I do my work these days.

I also felt that my processing workflows had gotten pretty stagnant — not necessarily a bad thing, since I could generally get final images in about three minutes an image, but I found myself wondering if I should shake things up and tear it all down and see if I could build out a better workflow.

In evaluating Lightroom again, the features I felt were killer blocks to my adopting it had been resolved — we can table a discussion of Adobe’s subscription model for some other time, but the’ve kept up their end of the bargain with solid, ongoing improvements and features — so I decided it was time to make a serious attempt at shifting to Lightroom.

But How?

So, how to do this? One thing I knew was I did not want to manage two catalogs; I wasn’t going to bounce back and forth with some images here and some images there.

I ultimately decided to handle this shift this way: I exported all of my final, processed images out of Lightroom Classic, one year at a time; I made sure all metadata and locationi info were included, and I exported them as full-sized, uncompressed TIFFs, and then imported those into Lightroom. I also decided otherwise import the RAW versions of the last decade of images into Lightroom, so I have them if I decide to reprocess from scratch. For older images, I’ll need to fire up Lightroom Classic if I want to reprocess from scratch, so I still have my Lightroom Classic up and active, but the catalog and all of the image files were shifted over to my NAS and off my primary disk. And FWIW, since doing this I haven’t needed to fire up Classic except to run updates on it.

I did not try to replicate any folder or collection structures that I had in Classic. This was a conscious decision to see how well Lightroom search would handle my needs, and knowing that I could create what I needed when I needed it. So far, this has worked pretty well for me.

Quick sidebar on this: I think when you’re making a big change to your workflows like this, a big mistake I see people make is to shift to a new tool, and then try to force the new tool to work like the old tool did. You really need to tear down all of the old muscle memory and figure out how to get what you want done using the new capabilities.— tear the bandage off and start fresh.

In practice, this feels like the right choice, and it’s made the transition fairly easy overall. Even better, I’ve yet to run into something that I wasn’t happy with when I decided on the new workflow.

A couple of quick examples:

First, all of my images were geotagged, so in Classic I used the Map module a lot. Lightroom has no map module, but it’s easy to do the location lookup in either Apple or Google Maps, copy the GPS coordinates and paste them onto the images. The Classic Maps module did support geofences and Lightroom doesn’t, but to be honest, the only reason I used that was to fence off my home so that GPS data didn’t accidentally; there are other ways to do that protection, so I don’t really miss it.

Second, all of my images get basic keywords and metadata as part of initial processing. Most of the time, this would be basic location info (i.e. “place, city, county, state”) and for birds or animals, the species data (i.e. “Bald Eagle, Haliaeetus leucocephalus”) Classic had a nice feature where I could add a synonym to a keyword and if I pasted the keyword in, both would be attached to the image. What I found with Lightroom is if I pasted in a single line with those two items comma separated (as seen above), they would enter in as two keywords. So I’ve started a text file where each line is a species and it’s latin name, and adding these keywords becomes a quick cut and paste.

Lightroom also adds basic location data to the image metadata when inserting the GPS, and for almost all images, that solves the location aspect of my metadata entry, saving me that step.

Importing and Processing

My general import process is simple: I have a folder called “Outings”, and for each import, I create a folder in it that has the date and location name. I then import images into that. I have the import routine add a copyright to the image.

I then add the GPS and location metadata to the images. Once that’s done, I start evaluating and culling. I’ll start by looking at each image and culling those with killer flaws, like poor sharpness. The goal is, and it typically takes 3-5 culling rounds — to come up with the smallest number of images that represent a representation of unique images in the import. That means, for instance, since I use burst mode a lot, that I’ll delete images that are effectively duplicates of each other — everything else goes into the trash and is deleted. (We can defer the “binge or purge” discussion to some other time as well. I used to keep images until I gave them a second review, but in all honesty, across 8,000+ images over many years, I only “rescued” 11 images from the nope pile, so I’ve decided to no longer worry around that. Lightroom hangs onto deleted images for 30 days, so if I change my mind on an image, I can go get it back during that time)

I won’t go into details of the processing, and that’s still in flux anyway, but there’s one aspect I need to cover. When the processing is complete, I then go back on these final images and do a more detailed entry of metadata — this is where species info gets added, for instance. I then export all of those images (these are full sized, 100% quality JPEGS) for final processing.

That final processing is done with Topaz Photo AI, which I use for sharpening, noise reduction and sometimes, enlargement. I run all of the images through this tool, and then import these images back into Lightroom. These go into a folder with that same date/location name, but in a folder called “Image Finals”. These images are rated between 3-5 stars depending on my view of quality. The images in the “Outings” folder are given 1 star ratings. This means when I’m searching for usable images, I can add a “> 3*” to the search and exclude any of the images that aren’t “final”.

Figuring out Lightroom

If this makes you curious about using Lightroom, the resource I used to get up to speed was the Youtube channel run by Brian Matiash. He also has a video class called Lightroom Everywhere, which I found quite helpful in getting up to speed with the tool, and I recommend it as a starting point.

Final Thoughts

My processing time is about 20% slower than it was in Classic, but for the most part, that’s because I’m still experimenting and learning how to best use Lightroom in my processing. It’s also not, in a real world sense, a problem, but I expect it’ll speed up some as I get more experience with the tool.

There were a lot of little things I used to do in Classic that I wondered if I’d need or want to do in Lightroom. In practice, the answer is “almost never”. The first 100 images I processed made me wonder if I was an idiot for trying this; as things started clicking into place it became obvious that it was the right decision for me, and I have zero interest in going back.

Lightroom Classic is a good, solid tool and I’ve enjoyed using it for many years. Lightroom is also a good, solid tool, and it gives me some new options (like multi-device access to my images) and I’ve yet to find something that makes me feel I’ve given up any capability in the migration.

So I can now say that I feel that this shift was big, and yes, breaking and relearning all that muscle memory was at times stressful, but it was more than worth doing — and I’m looking forward to all the things I’m not going to have to think about any more, such as the fun of going on the road with the laptop and then having to figure out how to cleanly migrate all of the images to the Mac Studio version of Classic. With Lightroom, that just happens.

All in all, I see myself as a happy user of Lightroom for the next decade or so. I’ll still keep Classic around for a year or two, in case I want to work on one of those older images, but since I haven’t worked on almost all of them for at least five years (I checked), I could probably not worry about that, but there’s no real reason to pull the plug, either.

Overall, the migration from Classic to Lightroom was easier and faster than I expected it to be, there were almost no problems that cropped up and needed to be figured out, and so I can call it an unqualified success…