store their photographs for them on Adobe’s servers. Those who choose Adobe Lightroom (cloud-based), on the other hand, are comfortable letting Adobe Inc. Those who choose Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic are intentionally choosing to design and implement their own file storage and backup systems. Their own hardware in this context means computers, external hard drives, or Network Attached Storage devices that each individual Lightroom Classic user must purchase and maintain. Those who choose to use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic are choosing to store their digital photographs on their own hardware.

Both types of Lightroom excel at organizing a large volume of digital photographs and both programs utilize Adobe’s cutting-edge raw image processing technologies.īeneath the surface though there is an enormous difference in the way that these two programs operate and that difference comes down to file storage. These two products share a common name and a similar purpose. Now, after a couple of rebranding efforts, there are two very different products on the market for serious photographers: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic and Adobe Lightroom (Cloud-Based).

A decade later, in the fall of 2017, Adobe chose to break this product up into two very different animals to reflect the growing divide in image storage technology.

first introduced a professional-grade program specifically for photographers called Adobe Lightroom way back in the winter of 2007.

Adobe lightroom classic