Lightroom CC 2.0 and Lightroom Classic CC 8.0
Facial recognition is a processor-intensive task, as anyone who’s waited for Lightroom Classic to churn through a local library knows. In the new Lightroom CC People View, the library is indexed and analyzed in data centers instead of your computer. It appears as a category under My Photos, along with the All Photos, Recently Added, and By Date categories.
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Tying search to Sensei, however, means there’s no local search capability. If your laptop is offline, the Search field doesn’t even work (but the Filter options do). Or, if you do have Internet access, but you’ve paused the sync feature, the search feature won’t pick up any photos you’ve imported that aren’t yet copied to Creative Cloud.
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The performance of Lightroom Classic has improved over the year, but working in Lightroom CC is faster, plain and simple.
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One of my favorite features of Lightroom CC is how it handles images on disk. My MacBook Pro doesn’t have enough storage for my entire library, so Lightroom invisibly removes older originals to conserve disk space, and downloads them on demand from the cloud when needed. But I also save original copies of each image to an external drive in my office. When that disk is not connected, newly-imported photos are kept on the laptop’s storage; as soon as I connect that external drive, Lightroom automatically moves the files from the MacBook Pro to the external. In Lightroom Classic, you have to manually move and copy images.
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This is perhaps one of the biggest limiters for many people: To really take advantage of Lightroom CC, you need a robust, always-on Internet connection.
Plus, it seems pretty useless unless you subscribe to at least the 1 TB storage plan. When your entire library has to be in the cloud, 20 GB doesn’t go very far.
I’m still not crazy about having to pay the full subscription rate to get the the cloud version and Photoshop when I only use Lightroom Classic. The price has more than doubled since the days of standalone Lightroom, plus now it stops working if I stop paying. On the plus side, there are now improvements to Classic throughout the year, but it seems clear that Adobe’s focus is elsewhere.
Previously: New Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic CC.
Update (2018-10-19): Jeff Carlson:
With this week’s release of version 8.0, it’s clear there’s still plenty of life in Lightroom Classic CC. It’s the choice for photographers who aren’t interested in syncing their entire libraries with other devices via Creative Cloud, or who need features such as HDR or panorama merging, printing, creating books or slideshows, and more advanced organizing and metadata wrangling. Here’s an overview of the spotlight features in this release.
