Today’s Question: Is it acceptable to store photos managed by Lightroom Classic in Apple’s iCloud?
Tim’s Quick Answer: No, I do not recommend storing photos (or worse, the catalog) on any cloud storage platform if you’re using Lightroom Classic to manage your photos. Doing so can lead to a variety of potentially serious problems.
More Detail: While cloud-based storage platforms can provide excellent convenience, they can also lead to problems. This is especially true for the Lightroom Classic catalog, as well as photos managed with Lightroom Classic. I’ve also had problems with all sorts of different files being out of date or corrupted even outside the context of Lightroom Classic. The same concerns apply to other cloud storage solutions such as Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, and others.
The most significant risk with cloud-based storage platforms relates to the Lightroom Classic catalog. In my testing I’ve been able to corrupt a catalog in less than five minutes using various cloud storage services. There is simply too much risk in using cloud storage for the catalog, especially if you’ll ever access the catalog from more than one computer.
However, there can also be issues with photos stored with a cloud storage service. This is largely due to the common practice of maintaining primary storage on the cloud servers and only keeping copies of the photo on your own hard drive if there is adequate space. So, for example, if you’re storing your photos in the Pictures folder and enable iCloud synchronization for that folder, you’ll be able to see previews of all photos in any folder in the Pictures folder. However, the source image might not actually be there depending on how much free space you have. Instead, the file will be downloaded on demand if you try to open it.
However, accessing the image in Lightroom Classic doesn’t count as opening the source file, because Lightroom Classic doesn’t interact with iCloud storage in that way. This can lead to issues with metadata getting out of date or having a mismatch, among other potential problems.
These types of issues are not exclusive to Lightroom Classic. For example, I keep draft copies of the questions and answers for this Ask Tim Grey email newsletter in cloud storage using Microsoft OneDrive. This provides a convenient option of being able to access and update the same files from multiple computers and devices with ease. However, on multiple occasions I have updated a document in OneDrive on one device, only to later switch to another device and find that the updates didn’t get preserved.
The bottom line is that while cloud synchronization and storage solutions can be very convenient, they aren’t without their problems and shouldn’t be completely trusted with your photos and other important data. It is important to maintain a local copy of all important files (and a local backup) to avoid the problems that can occur with cloud-based storage.
