Just made the switch last week. Mean reason being I thinks that Adobe, with that change, is telling us that the days of Classic are officially numbered as it doesn’t make sense for them two have two teams of employees supporting two version of what is now basically the same software. They probably waited all these years just to have enough people using the Cloud version so the ditching of Classic would not hurt them that much if the remaining people using Classic are not happy.

But yes I had to change my workflow as I am still using and old Nikon D7000 that still works flawlessly but doesn’t have geotagging capacity. For that I have the App “Geotag Photo 2” on my cell.

So:

1) I Import on my DAS the pictures using the software “Nikon Transfer 2” and on import it changes the file names to the format I have being using for years and years: AAAA-MM-DD HH-MM-SS and then I geotag them in batch using Houdah Geo.

And then I follow the same worklow than the one you describe in your article.

Thanks

I previously was using a PC with a ton of local storage (both internal and external – all in a RAID5 configuration). My photos are over 20TB at this point (I don’t delete – I know I have a problem but on the other hand I have had a few occasions where I have been very happy about not deleting). I also have a Synology NAS that backs everything up from the PC. From the NAS it then goes to the Synology cloud for further backup. This all worked but was very cumbersome and getting expensive. Also, the Classic catalog on my PC was running slow. Along the way I had twice tried to get a 10Gb card for my various PCs (once I installed it myself and once on the PC I bought from Puget). It never worked and I had lots of issues with 10Gb ethernet (whereas the 10Gb ethernet on the Synology always worked fine).

When the Mac Studio came out I was very intrigued – super fast CPU/GPU and an onboard 10Gb network port. I finally took the plunge and bought the Studio. My plan was to access my files directly on the NAS from the Studio, thus eliminating a layer of complication – the local RAID device connected to my PC. This would save me money and aggravation over time (sync issues were always a concern).

The idea was great but execution was a problem. The good news is that the 10Gb port worked great on the Mac. The bad news is that when I got everything set up it turned out that migrating the Classic catalog to the new Studio while accessing the photos on the NAS was a serious problem. Nothing was working right – and I mean really not working right.

On Saturday I took a break from the morass of my basement office and shot two games – volleyball and football. On the way home I was scrolling through my podcasts and I listented to Matt K’s latest. To state the obvious, it was like they were talking directly to me. The key of course was the ‘Local’ tab.

After listening to them I decided to take the plunge. I got home and did all my edits for the day in Lr (not on the cloud but locally). When I was done I sync’d the 100 or so edited shots to the Lightroom Cloud and kept the rest on my local drive. When I was finished I moved from the local drive to the NAS.

More importantly, when I browse my NAS using the Local tab, via my 10Gb network connection, I am able to do what wasn’t possible in Classic. All of my photos are available to me, directly from the NAS, without needing another layer of local storage. And since I took Scott’s advice many years ago and converted all my RAWs to DNG (and still do), all the edits I have made over the years in Classic were embedded in the DNG files – they are all seen by Lr in the local browser tab.

Now going forward I am using the Adobe DNG Converter to copy files from the memory card to the computer. I then make my edits to the newly created DNGs (including adding my keywords to all the photos) – sync the edited ones to Adobe Cloud, and then copy the whole folder to the NAS for safe keeping for eternity. I am not at all worried that my catalog might grow to 40TB or more (other than the Synology cloud storage costs, but that is another story). When I use Topaz I just save the edited files as TIFs on my computer, run them directly through Topaz and then drop them back into the original folder.

Thanks to anyone who read all this – does anyone think I am making a mistake? Am I missing anything important?

Thanks again,
David

It’s a toy. Probably great for iPhone photographers. At 70-80mp file size for full frame cameras, Adobe’s cloud storage cost would be a fortune for just a single day’s shoot.

Hi Mike – That’s a good idea. Seems Adobe could just expand the Device section on Lr iPad to include and show local and external drives too. Same set up as Lr Local on desktop. Which I am quite happy with. Should be easy peasy says the guy that knows nothing about coding.

Seriously, This would be a nice addition. with moving to mostly using Lr on desk and iPad, the traveling stuff I worked on a couple weeks ago would have been even easier with this change. – Tim