Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
LightRoom Classic CC
- Thread starter zoran
- Start date
-
- Tags
- lightroom classic cc
- Sort by reaction score
There's Lightroom Classic, which is the one using your hard-drives for storage (and the possibility to use Cloud based storage too), it has all of the editing features, and there is Lightroom CC which is Cloud based and doesn't have a library or some of the editing features.
Hope that helps you to clarify things.
The word Classic is a bad choice for the product that is their flagship one!
CC is aimed at mobile phone photographers, really.
Hope that helps you to clarify things.
The word Classic is a bad choice for the product that is their flagship one!
CC is aimed at mobile phone photographers, really.
Not at all. They really are pushing the cloud based model quite aggressively. But, lots of photographers are resistant to this as a viable model of use, imagine a wedding photographer using a camera that takes 30MP+ file sizes and then trying to upload all that to the cloud? It's stupidity at best for that type of photographer.
Glad this was answered. I continue to search for a solution to managing my large photo library. CC does not sound like the solution, although at 9.99 a month for Lightroom CC AND 1TB of cloud storage, thats better than what iCloud is offering.
Adobe Sensei is why. They are not exactly hiding that anything you do with their software is going to be used to make their AI/Neural Network harder, better, faster, stronger... Sensei is a huge product for them, and not just in the creative apps. There will be APIs to access and use Sensei to power all kinds of applications.
Classic to me means that they're focusing their attention on the mobile world and for those who want the old version can use classic. It also means imo, that Adobe will be spending their time and energy improving the mobile/cloud based Lightroom. The classic will version will whither on the vine with less and less updates.
Not sure I'm following what you are saying here, but Photos (iCloud) provides 2TB of space and the ability to use lots of extensions for editing for $9.99. Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I can't see how Lightroom CC is better. BTW, for now I'm using both and we are sharing the 2TB plan across several family members which helps justify the cost as well.
I agree - classic will become like Aperture....it will work for a long time but one day it is just too old...
Because its a "rental" business model, and once they have your data, it is harder (or at least a hassle) for you to leave their ecosystem for a competitor.
Plus as sevoneone noted, the likes of corporate initiatives such as Adobe Sensei to use your data for their benefit....and I'm assuming that their lawyers have inserted the necessary paragraph into the software's EULA to grant them this permission - - and probably without you having any easy sort of opt-out option. The era of corporate leveraging of "Big Data" (and all of the creepiness that it will entail) is still only getting started.
That has a multitude of advantages: you can edit photos on any Mac or iPad, for example, and the image analysis happens on Adobe's servers in the cloud — which means your machine isn't taxed doing image recognition. Moreover, Adobe would have a larger pool of images with which to train its algorithms. That would make it easier for Adobe to improve its algorithms.
At the end of the day, the writing is on the wall: software is becoming a service. You can hang on to your copy of CS6 or Lightroom 6, but eventually you will have to switch — either to a new piece of software or to a subscription model, or both.
Just a quick comment: even rather innocent things such as spam detection in Gmail or autogeneration of thumbnails server-side for all uploaded pictures requires you to give access to your data. I still share your concern about uploading data, especially data of clients, to the cloud.
Without commenting on whether the new Lightroom is better (yet), but I think it is great that Adobe is not afraid of rewriting software in order to adapt it to a new paradigm. It shows that they are serious about Lightroom. And the way they do it shows that they understand they have to offer a slow migration strategy that continuously nudges existing customers to migrate to the New Lightroom.
Last edited:
I think people are starting pushing back on SaaS in the consumer sector, there will always be alternatives for people not willing to pay a monthly fee to use an application.
The paradigm shift is mostly about companies chasing profits, i'm not sold that we as consumers are better off.
I'm not sure doubling the price of the new photography package is considered nudging existing customers to the new LR?
Last edited:
These people are free to switch to other software. More and more software companies choose a subscription model, including pro software such as Mathematica, CST Studio or Microsoft Office.
I think your take is too cynical, software as a service has a lot of advantages, chief among them that all customers always use the latest version of your software and it allows them to eat recurring costs for things like cloud storage. Lots of smaller developers are also switching, e. g. the developer of my podcast client uses a subscription model as well. At least for smaller developers, the pay once model doesn‘t seem to work anymore. And a lot of the very expensive software has been on a subscription model since the very beginning, too (via service contracts, for example). Now a lot of software from the middle of the market also moves to a subscription model.
Just to be clear: I don‘t have a CC subscription, and my wife (who is a graphic designer) decided against one as we didn‘t think it was worth it. We replaced Adobe apps with other applications. But that doesn‘t change the trend, and I just think it is more nuanced than to just say it is to increase profits.
But don’t you also get 1 TB of storage for photos? That is quite generous if you compare that with other services such as Dropbox Pro, I think the price hike is justifiable. This transition will be a 3-6 year process, I think. Right now, you have less functionality and a v1.0 software that isn‘t ready for a lot of pro scenarios. Give it a few years and it will be. As soon as it is, I think Lightroom Classic will be phased out.I'm not sure doubling the price of the new photography package is considered nudging existing customers to the new LR?
A fair enough "versus the competition" perspective, but my gut tells me that photographers broadly fall into two (overly) broad categories on data consumption:
A: those for which 1TB of storage is gross overkill
B: those for which 1TB of storage is woefully inadequate
(and yes, I'd love to see actual statistics some day to see if my gut is correct...)
Considering that a simple 1TB bare (internal) 3.5" HDD is only ~$40 each at NewEgg, it makes the "own-vs-service" cost comparison to be potentially significant for the customers in group "B", even when one goes for triple backups ($120 for 3 x 1TB, or $165 for 3 x 2TB, etc).
-hh
@-hh
Regarding 1 TB being too big or too small, that's a good point. And if you are not interested in having 1 TB in Adobe's cloud, it doesn't factor in as a positive for Adobe's Lightroom subscription.
Storage tiers are a touchy subject and there is no single good solution. With professional software, I would like to see more diversity in the cloud storage services that you can use, e. g. Amazon S3 or Backblaze B2. I don't think people want to be tied into a single service, and more diversity gives you more data security. That's one of the issues I have even with, say, iTunes, it gets harder to be sure that you have a local copy of all your data.
However, I don't think it is fair to compare that to prices of hard drives to those of cloud services, the whole point is that your photos are available anywhere on all devices. I think that is worth extra.
Regarding 1 TB being too big or too small, that's a good point. And if you are not interested in having 1 TB in Adobe's cloud, it doesn't factor in as a positive for Adobe's Lightroom subscription.
Storage tiers are a touchy subject and there is no single good solution. With professional software, I would like to see more diversity in the cloud storage services that you can use, e. g. Amazon S3 or Backblaze B2. I don't think people want to be tied into a single service, and more diversity gives you more data security. That's one of the issues I have even with, say, iTunes, it gets harder to be sure that you have a local copy of all your data.
However, I don't think it is fair to compare that to prices of hard drives to those of cloud services, the whole point is that your photos are available anywhere on all devices. I think that is worth extra.
Yes, and BTW you can buy more storage from Adobe. I'm offered 1, 2, 5 or 10TB (at $10/TB/mo). iCloud Photo Library is 2TB for $10 in the US. Adobe also gives you unlimited storage on smart previews, and a Portfolio account. And I think still 2GB of anything storage.
Mylio with a $8.50/mo sub can sync to Amazon Drive; that might also be an option that could be cheaper. It's more of a backup of originals though, and they're encrypted, but since Mylio can do peer-to-peer synching maybe that's enough for some.
But if you already pay for online storage or backup, I dunno that getting some solution tied to an application like Lr CC or Photos makes tons of sense, even if you wanna work remotely on other devices, cuz a lack of selective sync kinda makes that a pain. I really don't get why Photos and Lr CC don't do selective synch, unless it's the fact that synching isn't trivial.
I understand why Photos doesn't, Photos does not pretend to be a professional piece of software and opting for simplicity rather than features makes sense in my mind. But the new Lightroom CC should definitely offer that option if it wants to be a DAM for advanced users.
Understood, and which is and similarly to what @robgendreau pointed out too:
The current Cloud business models are still stove-piped, so a user may end up needing to be renting cloud allocations from Apple, and Adobe, and whoever (et al) at $10/mo each, essentially because Adobe doesn't want to let us use our existing iCloud data storage, & vice-versa.
Add to that a slippery slope of more & more companies wanting to force customers into this sort of business model, these multiple sources of recurring costs makes this progressively more expensive & painful.
Fair point on cross-platform accessibility...but in counterpoint, when I'm already paying now for local hard drives for some of my data archiving/management, the cost of adding one more dataset onto them is pretty low: labor (setup, maintenance) doesn't really change, backups run unattended, and the incremental cost between, say, a 2TB to a 3TB HDD ($50 to $70 = +$20/unit) or 3TB to 4TB HDD ($100 = $30/unit) isn't all that much, even after one triples them to have redundant backups: adding an extra 1TB at 3*$30 is $90, which compared to some random $10/month Cloud fee pays for itself in less than a year.
Plus another hidden 'cost' of data on the Cloud is the cost of my access to the data (eg, ISP). While its pretty tempting to say "zero, because I need the Internet anyway", the real surprise here is bandwidth consumption and data transfer rates - - the cost here can be the amount of time required, which can motivate you into paying for a higher tier service.
For example, if I come home from a holiday with the memory cards filled on just my newest dSLR, that's 196GB worth of new data. Uploading it on a 25Mbps connection will take at least 18.3 hours to upload (assumes 100% of maximum theoretical throughput). If that's too slow for my liking, I'm now looking at paying more for a 50Mbps service to cut that 18 hours down to ~9 hours...in contrast, a a generic local hard drive takes only ~30 minutes. And sure, we can say that one does the local HDD copy and then it Cloud syncs overnight ... but you're effectively out for a day from accessing them on your tablet/etc until that overnight synch has transpired.
Similarly, doing a 'restore' on just my photo database ... mine's now pushing 2TB ... would suck up half of my ISP's monthly quota, and at 25Mbps takes at least 8.2 days (assumes 100% of maximum theoretical throughput). Fun.
FWIW, I'm not being opposed philosophically to "progress" - - I'm just balancing its benefits versus its costs, and recognizing that individually, I'm not a particularly good use case/ workflow for it (currently).
-hh
I disagree; I think any application should allow selective synch. At least withe Dropbox photos, Amazon, Google, Mylio, Box, OneNote, etc etc you get it. Amateur, pro, casual user, whatever. Sure, only Mylio has a photo-specific front end, but it still seems odd that Adobe and Apple don't do that. Except Adobe does do it with Classic. I dunno what Apple's problem is. Geez, with 256GB iPhones someone could maybe end up with more photo storage on the iPhone than the boot drive of their Mac. Even with their automatic space-saving, it seems silly not to allow the user to choose what's stored up there more effectively.
I understand what you are saying, but I think it is important to recognize that each of these companies has no business incentive to do something about that. And I'm not just talking about money, one big issue going forward is using server data analysis to enable functionality for the user. Google, Apple and Adobe at least are all doing this, allowing you to search for “car” and it will find all your photos with cars in it without the need to tag them. If they don't have access to that data, they can't improve algorithms, and if they can't improve algorithms, they are not competitive in the market.
In an alternate universe where Google had switched away from a purely ad-centric revenue model, you could say that they provide all of this to other companies as a service, but that is not the route they took.
That is a fallacious argument: the whole software industry is moving to a subscription model for the most part, some has had subscription models for decades already. And that isn't because there is some slippery slope, but because software prices have declined sharply ever since iOS apps became a thing. When Aperture was introduced, it cost $500. I've seen whining by some people because they paid $80 for Luminar and have to pay $40 again in order to get a DAM. You can buy software that is an equivalent of Photoshop or Illustrator for many, many users for ~$50 or so. Thanks to the app store software prices have gone down but sales volumes have gone up.
Moreover, people are much more comfortable shelling out $5/month than $60 once even if the amount at the end is the same. It is just human psychology, it seems less even though it isn't.
At the end of the day, we need to be willing to fund software development, and if a pay-once model is no longer sustainable but for a select few software companies, then software companies need to switch to a different business model. And if we want our favorite software to continue to be developed, these companies need to make money.
However, I think you do mention the right problems not just for users, but for society in the end: data gets duplicated and fractured. And you should never rely on a single service to store your data. Ideally Apple and Microsoft should make cloud storage APIs that other services can hook up to, similar (but better) to what Apple did on iOS. And then professional software should rely on that at least to do backups and such.
How do you then access photos on your external hard drive with your iPad (e. g. to show your portfolio to a client)? And what about quickly setting up Adobe Lightroom CC on a new machine away from home?
I understand what you are saying, I bought a Synology NAS for good reason: I want a local copy of my data that I can access, and I can access my data away from home. But if that is supposed to happen reliably and quickly, you need someone else to manage the storage. I would not give up my Synology for cloud storage, but at least for me one is not a replacement of the other, and the simple calculation only makes sense if you use the cloud just like you would an external hard drive.
That's a problem time solves, and users will have to pressure their ISPs to increase data rates. I live in a country where I have 1 GBit internet at home and at work, and getting those internet speeds at home in Japan is trivial: you just need to move to a newly constructed apartment building and use the ethernet jack. I know that this may not necessarily help you, but cloud storage becomes more and more viable over time. And there are no data caps here. (That was different from when I was living in Canada, though, where we initially had a 120 GB/month data cap.)
More and more data is moving into the cloud, and while data speeds, data caps and such are problems for some users now, that will disappear over time.
There is way too much to go wrong here if a user chooses the wrong settings, because he or she doesn't really understand what is going on. For simple software such as Google Photos or Apple's Photos, the current approach of the software managing storage is the best solution (as in best compromise between up- and downsides).
For more advanced software, I agree that we need more flexibility. But I think you are going about this the wrong way, though: this is a problem that should be solved on a platform level independently of data types. Apple, Microsoft and Google (the big three relevant OS manufacturers) should make cloud storage APIs that are vendor agnostic. This way, you could ask Time Machine to use Amazon S3 storage or Backblaze B2 buckets, and all Amazon and Backblaze need to do is write software that mediates between their cloud storage servers and the mac OS Cloud Storage Kit APIs. Professional software should offer this as well: pick your favorite service to store your photos.
But that is still ways off, and I currently don't see any strong business incentive for this to happen (especially for Google's Android).
Last edited:
True enough, as well as the insight that their choices will affect if customers buy their product(s).
Mmmm...the IT industry started with annual licenses and the PC age brought about the 'purchase once' model and now we're going back towards subscriptions ... but what has changed has been the "where's the data portion stored?". Granted, some of it is for 'Big Data' leveraging (such as you described), but with conveniences comes a cost, which is as was noted by XKCD awhile back
Yes, and this perception manipulation applies also when it isn't the same, but also more.
True, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we're willing to fund things that aren't of sufficient benefit to ourselves.
In simplest terms, I don't have these capabilities.
However, there's also more than one way to skin a cat. For example, for showing anyone a portfolio, it will have already been cherrypicked & prepared ahead of time ... reduced versions may have already been synched to an iPad, or they may have already been uploaded onto a personal website (which can include private directories).
Similarly, when I go away on a photo trip, I don't carry a laptop with me for the purpose of downloading photos anymore. I think the last time was back in 2010 or 2011? A laptop is additional carry-on baggage bulk/weight, and since my photo trips aren't slow & leisurely, there's many other competing priorities (even including sleep). My solution has been to carry 200-400GB worth of memory cards to thus have no need to dump data to a laptop: all of my review/editing simply waits until i get home (and get caught up on sleep). This has become an option because memory cards are massively cheaper today vs 5 or 10 years ago (for example, bought 200GB of 800x CF's for only $100 last year).
(on slow & expensive ISPs)
True, they hopefully won't get worse (allusions to USA's Oligopoly problems).
But by the same token, our expectations increase over time: we're no longer content with the I/O performance of a Hard Drive, but want an SSD. Similarly, the 4MP camera gets replaced with a 8MP, and then an 18MP ... so the volume of data we're pushing around increases as well.
Overall, I philosophically understand & accept that there's always going to be some mismatch between customers & suppliers ... but part of the challenges here include the willingness of suppliers (in particular) to provide generous overlaps in support frameworks as these models evolve - - one of the biggest customer downs risks on the "you don't own anything" models is that huge portions of the supplier's infrastructure can disappear in the literal blink of an eye.
-hh
Of course, and looking at their financials, they are doing better than ever. Moreover, a bunch of competitors at various ends of the market have popped up, so I would claim it is even a lot better for customers now. Win-win.
A few years ago, I was really distraught, because Aperture was languishing and the only alternative was Lightroom whose UI I hated. That still hasn‘t changed, and I don‘t own any Adobe software. But looking at the company, I still think it is making the right moves: it slowly converted its business model to a subscription model which helped their bottom line. And they are investing, as far as I can tell, in the right technologies (the cloud, automated image processing, etc.). Moreover, they are willing to replace software with ground-up rewrites and provide a slow migration path. Despite the change in business model, end users are paying less in subscription fees than if they had bought the shrinkwrapped Adobe CS Studio box every time it was updated. But customers have the added advantage that everyone is using the latest version. All of that sounds good to me. And thanks to the change in OS ecosystems, serious competitors are popping up.
I was thinking of larger businesses where you had always had to deal with service contracts and such — you needed to pay regularly to keep on using software. The only difference now is that in the past few years, software subscription went from being a larger business thing to being something regular customers now have to deal with.
I don‘t think this is manipulation, not even marketing, but a big benefit for everyone. Most software subscriptions only make you pay for months that you actually use their product. I could cancel my Strava Premium subscription now and will lose the associated perks soon after. So it may actually be better for customers to pay on a monthly basis.
I assume you are talking about specific features, right? In this case you want to say that even though the Lightroom CC subscription includes cloud storage, even though you have no intention to use it, you still have to pay for it, correct?
If that‘s what your argument is, then I‘d say that you do that with any product: there are always many features that you don‘t use, but you will have to pay for them. But I don‘t feel cheated just because my Microsoft Office license helped fund development of PowerPoint (which I never use). The cloud has for most software companies become table stakes.
Of course, if the software moves in a direction away from your needs and use cases, go for something else. I have high hopes for Luminaries, because I would finally like to put Aperture rest.
Exactly. Which is fine if you don‘t need them, but I can imagine there are many people who will find them useful or just so much more convenient.
It seems to me that the number of megapixels has stabilized to roughly 24 for APS-C-sized sensors and even full-frame sensors don‘t go beyond about 50. By the same token, I don‘t think file sizes for stills are getting larger.
Video is a different story, that will push bandwidth for the foreseeable future.
I agree, and my solution is to not rely on one particular service only. Backblaze could go away tomorrow, and I would still have at least two, but for important documents at least three other forms of backup.