Today’s Question: When updating applications in the Adobe Creative Cloud application I saw an alert that said, “Creative Cloud Files sync is going away”. I followed the link to get info but didn’t understand what the implications were for me. Does this mean I won’t be able to synchronize collections from Lightroom Classic?
Tim’s Quick Answer: The feature being discontinued only relates to the local “Creative Cloud Files” folder, which enabled files stored in that folder to be synchronized to the Adobe servers so they could be accessed from virtually anywhere. You’ll still be able to save files to the cloud via Creative Cloud applications, and you’ll still be able to synchronize collections to the cloud in Lightroom Classic.
More Detail: When you subscribe to a Creative Cloud plan from Adobe one of the benefits of your subscription is a set amount of cloud-based storage. This allows you to store photos or documents on Adobe’s servers, so they can be accessed from virtually anywhere.
For example, from Photoshop you can click the “Save to cloud documents” button to switch to saving to the cloud rather than locally on your computer. If you were then on another computer with Photoshop installed, or using the Creative Cloud application or a web browser to access your account (https://assets.adobe.com/cloud-documents), you could access the files you saved to your cloud-based storage. This option will continue to be available.
In addition, cloud-based synchronization for collections in Lightroom Classic will still be supported, and of course synchronization will remain available for the cloud-based version of Lightroom.
The only feature that is being discontinued is the option to save files to a local “Creative Cloud Files” folder on your computer and have the files in that folder synchronized to the Adobe Creative Cloud. This had previously provided a more general way to save files in a way that they could be accessed from nearly anywhere with an internet connection, but Adobe is discontinuing this feature.
My experience has been that very few photographers had been making use of the Creative Cloud Files synchronization option, and there remain several other very good options for storing photos or other documents in the cloud if you prefer to use that option for making your photos and other files available more broadly, in addition to being able to use this type of feature as an additional option for backing up critical files.
