

"We got to a fork in the road," Hogarty said. As a result, Adobe chose to make two versions of Lightroom for PCs instead of overhauling only one.
#LIGHTROOM AND LIGHTROOM CLASSIC SOFTWARE#
"It's a very difficult adjustment to respect the cloud as the truth."Īdobe is particularly sensitive to the risks of introducing instability to software many people rely on for a living. "We are talking about a 12-year-old product architecture designed from the beginning to respect the file and folder system as the truth," Hogarty said, meaning that photos on your laptop drive are the primary files. In other words, where is the primary version of a photo stored - on your laptop or in the cloud - and what is merely a temporary copy linked to it?
#LIGHTROOM AND LIGHTROOM CLASSIC HOW TO#
The central difficulty has been coping with a profound change in how to Lightroom anchors its data, said Tom Hogarty, senior director of product management for photography at Adobe. But moving too slowly opens the door for challengers - and indeed a long list of competitors are trying to lure away Lightroom customers.

Moving aggressively to modernize can alienate customers - as Windows 8 did when Microsoft tried to adapt to the touch-screen era. One year Windows PCs might be hot, then it's the web, then it's mobile devices. The situation illustrates the difficulties of the ever-shifting foundations of the computing industry. He's used Lightroom since the first public beta, but now he's troubled by the idea of paying for a cloud service that lacks Lightroom Classic abilities. I'm now testing alternatives," said Mike Wren, a professional photographer in Albany, New York. "For a very long time, Lightroom's place in my studio was an automatic decision. And you must choose carefully because moving your photos from one to the other isn't easy. If you want more power than Apple Photos or Google Photos can offer, you must choose between the newer, internet-savvy Lightroom and the older, beefier version now called Lightroom Classic. It needed to decide whether to retool the existing Lightroom software or make a fresh start.Īdobe chose a combination of both routes, forcing Lightroom customers to make the decision instead. But modernizing for smartphones, tablets and cloud computing put Adobe in a pickle.

Lightroom got its start in 2006 on MacOS and later Windows, storing the photo library right there on your personal computer. But one thing didn't change: the awkward split between two versions of the photo editing and cataloging software. Adobe released a slew of Lightroom updates last week.
