Today’s Question: I received an email from Adobe notifying me that as 3/1/24 the Creative Cloud Storage would be discontinued. Now that Adobe has launched Lightroom with a hybrid of online and local image storage options, is Adobe doing away with the option for Lightroom Classic subscribers to use collections for syncing select images to Adobe cloud storage?
Tim’s Quick Answer: No, Adobe is not discontinuing the ability to synchronize collections from Lightroom Classic to the cloud. There are also various other options for storing images or documents in cloud storage with Adobe. All that is being discontinued is the synchronization of the Creative Cloud Files folder.
More Detail: Adobe recently announced that they were discontinuing the option to use Creative Cloud Storage to synchronize files from a folder on your computer to Adobe’s cloud-based storage, which provided an option to synchronize images and documents across multiple computers via online synchronization.
This change will not prevent you from synchronizing collections of photos in Lightroom Classic. It also won’t affect the storage of cloud-based photos for those using the Lightroom desktop application (or mobile or web versions of Lightroom). It is also still possible to use online Creative Cloud Documents storage, which is supported by Photoshop, for example, and enables you to save photos to online storage so they can be accessed from virtually anywhere.
The Creative Cloud Files feature that is being discontinued is a separate feature that did not operate directly within any Adobe software. Rather, it functioned through your operating system. A “Creative Cloud Files” folder would exist within the folder for your username within the operating system. Any files saved in that folder would be synchronized to Adobe’s cloud-based storage, so you could access those files from any computer on which you have signed in via the Creative Cloud application, for example.
I had understood this feature was being discontinued on February 1st, but I have now seen that some users were notified via email that the deadline is March 1st. Whether or not you received such an email, it is a good idea to confirm whether you have any files stored in the Creative Cloud Files folder that you would like to preserve. That folder can be found under C:\[username]\Creative Cloud Files on Windows, or at Mac HD/Users/[username]/Creative Cloud Files on Macintosh.
You can also learn more information on the following page on the Adobe website, but I’ll warn you in advance that the page can be a bit confusing because there are references to various storage options, including the similarly named but completely different “Creative Cloud Files” versus “Creative Cloud Documents”:
https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/kb/eol-creative-cloud-synced-files.html
