Today’s Question: If I import all of my photos to a folder using Lightroom Classic, can I still have my photos on my computer? I intend to subscribe monthly for Lightroom and Photoshop.
Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, when you import photos into your Lightroom Classic catalog, the source photos can be stored wherever you’d like. That typically means storing the photos on an internal or external hard drive on your computer.
More Detail: One of the reasons many photographers (including myself) make use of Lightroom Classic rather than the newer cloud-based version of Lightroom is that Lightroom Classic enables you to store your source photos locally, such as on an internal or external hard drive directly connected to your computer.
In other words, with Lightroom Classic you directly control the storage of your photos, and those photos will typically be stored on a hard drive directly connected to your computer. By contrast, with the cloud-based version of Lightroom your photos are primarily stored on Adobe’s servers, via the storage space included with the Creative Cloud plan you subscribe to. You don’t directly control that storage, though photos are synchronized to your various devices.
However, with the cloud-based version of Lightroom, not all source photos will necessarily be stored on your local storage device, depending on availability of storage space. That means if you don’t have enough storage capacity on your computer, for example, all photos will be stored in the cloud but only some photos will be stored on your computer.
The key is that with Lightroom Classic you have direct control over how and where your photos are stored. And you can learn more about how Lightroom Classic works with my course “Understanding Lightroom”, which you can get for 26% off by using this link to get started: