From the course: Lightroom Classic Essential Training

Which Lightroom should you use? - Lightroom Tutorial

From the course: Lightroom Classic Essential Training

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Which Lightroom should you use?

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- [Instructor] There are two different lightroom applications for your Mac or Windows computer; lightroom classic and lightroom. This course covers the essentials for lightroom classic. So before you get started, I want to help you determine if lightroom classic is the right choice for you. Here's a quick overview of each lightroom. First, lightroom classic. The focus of this course, is a desktop computer app that runs on your Windows or Mac computer. Lightroom classic only runs on a computer, not a tablet or phone. Photos imported into lightroom classic remain on a local hard drive. Lightroom classic actually requires that photos reside on a hard drive. They can be on a memory card, USB, or in a cloud. For this reason, it's a good idea to have some basic file management skills, if you want to work with lightroom classic. For example, you should understand what hard drives are, how to connect an external drive, what the folder structure is, how to navigate folders, how to create folders, and how to copy files from a memory card to a folder on a hard drive. If you typically put everything important on your desktop, so you don't lose it, then lightroom classic may not be the right application for you. For comparison, let's take a look at the other application simply called lightroom. This is a cloud based application for your Windows or Mac computer. Cloud based means that the photos reside in the cloud. The lightroom application itself runs on your computer. Lightroom is available for your computer and your mobile devices. There's also a lightroom web version. With lightroom, all of your photos from your mobile devices and your computer are automatically uploaded to a cloud server, and there are some benefits to using lightroom over lightroom classic especially if you struggle with keeping track of your files. With your photos uploaded to a cloud server, every photo is stored in the same location, and they are available to you from wherever you happen to be, and with your photos in the cloud, you never have to worry about losing them. Lightroom also uses smart artificial intelligence to do image searches. So you don't have to worry about keywording photos. Lightroom classic has gone through several name changes since its introduction in 2007. This unfortunate naming history confuses pretty much everyone. So I thought it might be helpful to outline the history here. The first six versions of lightroom were available with a perpetual license. In 2015, lightroom CC became part of the Creative Cloud subscription plan, and for a while, you could purchase lightroom six with a perpetual license or subscribe to lightroom CC through the Creative Cloud. These two lightrooms were essentially the same application as lightroom classic today. But lightroom six did not have any of the cloud sinking features found in lightroom CC. In 2017, Adobe introduced a completely rebuilt brand new cloud centric application and named it lightroom CC. Never mind the fact that lightroom cc was already taken, and this required a new name for the original lightroom application, and that's how it became lightroom classic CC. Then in 2019, Adobe dropped the CC extension from all of the Creative Cloud applications, which leaves us where we are today with lightroom classic and lightroom. So the new lightroom application with the same name as the original lightroom application is not the original, lightroom classic is the original. Got it? Lightroom is newer than lightroom classic, so it does not have all of the same professional capabilities, and this may be the number one reason to use lightroom classic instead of lightroom. This course covers the essentials for lightroom classic. The original lightroom.

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