Today’s Question: Virtual copies in Lightroom Classic are so useful, and I believe that they don’t take a lot of memory. Should Lightroom ever disappear, would my virtual copies be gone too?
Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, if Lightroom Classic disappeared you would no longer have access to your virtual copies. However, you could preserve those virtual copies by creating copies of images.
More Detail: A virtual copy in Lightroom Classic represents a second set of metadata for the same source image. For example, you might have processed the original raw capture in color, then create a virtual copy that you convert to black and white.
If you lost access to Lightroom Classic, you would lose your virtual copies in the process. However, assuming you have at least a little bit of warning, there are some relatively options for making sure you don’t lose the adjustments and other metadata for your virtual copies.
First, let’s assume for the sake of argument that Adobe were to discontinue Lightroom Classic, even though there are absolutely no credible rumors that this might happen. You could simply export virtual copies using the “Original” option for the Image Format popup in the File Settings dialog. This would create a copy of the (presumably) raw capture plus the sidecar files that contain the metadata and Develop adjustments.
The scenario above assumes that if Lightroom Classic were no longer available, that Camera Raw or the non-Classic version of Lightroom were still available. If so, you could access your exported copies based on the virtual copies from Lightroom Classic using either of those applications, and metadata and Develop adjustments from Lightroom Classic would be available.
If you’re concerned about losing access to any Adobe applications, that would mean that your Develop adjustments wouldn’t be accessible, since those are proprietary to Adobe software. But to address that concern you could export copies of your images in a non-raw format. That could include, for example, exporting as TIFF or DNG files from Lightroom Classic. In this latter and more extreme scenario, you would want to export all (or at least many of) your raw captures to preserve the adjustments you had applied. In this case, however, the adjustments would be “baked into” the new derivative files you had created, whereas in the previous example you could still modify your original adjustments using Camera Raw or the non-Classic version of Lightroom.
But again, I don’t expect that we need to worry about Adobe photography applications being discontinued anytime soon, and even if one or more were to be discontinued, I’m sure we’d have enough warning to do manage the necessary process of preserving the adjustments applied to photos in Lightroom Classic or other applications.
