Lightroom | Common questions

Lightroom is a new photography service by Adobe that includes desktop, mobile, and web apps. Lightroom automatically backs up all your photographs to the cloud and lets you access and work with your photos from any desktop or mobile device.

Lightroom provides you the editing power of Lightroom Classic and Adobe Camera Raw in one easy-to-use package. In Lightroom, you experience seamless workflows across devices. The editing and organization tools it offers are similar to the ones you already use on your mobile, desktop, and on the web.

Lightroom is designed to work seamlessly with Lightroom mobile (iOS), Lightroom mobile (Android), Lightroom on the web, and Lightroom for Apple TV.

While Lightroom and Lightroom Classic differ in several ways, there are three main things that separate them:

• Lightroom on Mac and Windows share a similar and consistent experience with other Lightroom apps on mobile and web. 
• Lightroom uploads all your full resolution original photos to the cloud. This means that all your photos are safely backed up. It also means that Lightroom can do various things that Lightroom Classic can't. For example, you can use Lightroom to access all your photos on multiple computers such as a laptop and a desktop, or a home computer, and a work computer.
• Lightroom also provides features that are based in the cloud, such as the ability to search for photos based on what's in the photo — without having to add any keywords manually. For example, you can search for 'dog' to find photos of dogs in Lightroom without having to manually assign the keyword 'dog' to any photos.

For related information, see Go from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom.

Adobe will continue to develop Lightroom Classic alongside Lightroom.

Syncing between Lightroom Classic and Lightroom for desktop isn’t recommended.

Yes; Lightroom has an 'Edit in Photoshop' feature. Lightroom doesn't currently support third-party plug-ins.

Yes, all the work you have in Lightroom (except for keywords) automatically syncs back to Lightroom Classic. To enable this feature, launch Lightroom Classic and ensure that sync is enabled.

Yes, Lightroom is available in Creative Cloud Team and Enterprise plans.

For details, see the system requirements page and the Lightroom GPU FAQ.

Yes; Lightroom supports all the raw file types that Lightroom Classic and Adobe Camera Raw support. To see the full list, visit Cameras supported by Camera Raw.

Your original, full resolution raw files are backed up in the cloud.

See this tech note for information on HEIC image files support.

No. Your Adobe ID is the key to all your photos stored in the photo cloud.

Lightroom manages your photos for you, so that your photos don’t fill up your hard drive space. This allows you to keep and work with many photos, even if there’s not enough room for all the photos on your hard drive.

You can always view all your photos in Lightroom, even if the original file is not stored on your hard drive. When you are working with a photo and the original is not already present on your computer, Lightroom automatically downloads it from the cloud.

Lightroom also provides the option to always keep all your original files on the computer’s hard drive as well, in addition to backing them up to the cloud. If you’d like to keep certain images available locally, do the following:

Within the Local Storage preferences, you have the option of changing how much of your available disk space is usable by Lightroom. By setting the Target Available Disk Space Usage slider to the desired amount, you can choose how much or how little of your hard disk space Lightroom is allowed to use.

The amount of cloud storage depends on your Creative Cloud membership. You can check the available space by going to the Account tab of the Preferences dialog in Lightroom.

For more information about upgrading your storage, see Upgrade your Creative Cloud storage.

No; Lightroom safely backs up all your photos to the cloud.

You can use the Adobe Lightroom Downloader app to download your photos from Creative Cloud after your membership expires.  

First, make sure that you are signed in with your Adobe ID on adobe.com before trying to download.