Lightroom CC locks you in to its little ecosystem in a way that doesnвЂ™t make senseвЂ¦ except perhaps in a very cynical way. So you CAN open an image in Photoshop from Lightroom CC and THEN launch the plug-in you need, but that seems a really clumsy way to go about things that takes twice as long and needs an additional application that gobbles up precious memory you might not have available. Lightroom CC does not support plug-ins and only talks to one external editor вЂ“ Photoshop. Most come with plug-ins that you can launch from within Lightroom Classic, and for those that donвЂ™t (like Capture One) you can run them separately, export your processed images to the same folder structure used by your Lightroom catalog and then sync your folders or import the new images manually when youвЂ™re done. Lightroom Classic plays nicely with all of these. I also use Capture One, Exposure X, DxO PhotoLab and Nik Collection, ON1 Photo RAW, Luminar and more. ItвЂ™s not just Adobe that makes great photo-editing software. Lightroom Classic works with them pretty well, Lightroom CC does not. There are lots of programs that are better at certain things than Lightroom, like DxO PhotoLab for noise reduction, for example. IвЂ™ve tried every way I can to work around this, but that just kills Lightroom CC for me. You can create multiple versions for an image, but it still only has one thumbnail, and you only see one version of that image when browsing. Lightroom CC now supports вЂversionsвЂ™ but these are really just saved history snapshots and not the same thing at all.

They seem to me one of the principal advantages of non-destructive editing tools like Lightroom вЂ“ the ability to create multiple вЂversionsвЂ™ of the same image with different processing treatments alongside each other. Others may disagree, but I canвЂ™t do without Virtual Copies. Both Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic offer an impressive set of non-destructive editing tools, and Lightroom CC does almost as much as the desktop version.Д«ut it doesnвЂ™t offer Virtual Copies. So letвЂ™s switch tack to everyday editing. (Image credit: Rod Lawton/Digital Camera World) 4. One image, four different versions (or as many as you like) side by side. **Actually, I've just noticed that Lightroom CC will 'Store a copy of all originals at the specified location' if you check that box in the Preferences, so I have to take some of that back вЂ“ but I assume all my 'edits' (adjustments) are still in the cloud.** But it doesnвЂ™t вЂ“ so I think IвЂ™d rather keep my images on my desktop computer where I can organise and back them up myself, and very often load them a lot more quickly. If Lightroom CC offered desktop storage but вЂmirroredвЂ™ my library to its cloud servers, that would be fine. Of course, I can always keep my originals on my own computer, but then IвЂ™m maintaining two image libraries in two places and itвЂ™s all getting messy. But the bigger my image library gets, the more I stand to lose if something DOES happen вЂ“ and the more its going to cost me in Adobe cloud storage later when 1TB is no longer enough.

I trust Adobe with my images, I trust it to keep backups, I trust it to have zero or near-zero downtime. You can increase your local cache so that more are stored on your own computer, but thatвЂ™s a workaround, not an alternative storage location. Lightroom CC takes over your storage so that all your images are in the cloud and not on your computer. Where my pictures are stored is an issue for me. Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer my images here and not on a server somewhere in another part of the world.

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