Lessons

Lesson Info

Lightroom: Copying Images to the Cloud

1 So now that I have my Selects folder, 2 I want to put these into Lightroom, 3 and I want Lightroom to put them on the cloud. 4 So now we are going to do something to allow our images 5 to be available here inside of the cloud. 6 Right now, they're just on local storage. 7 They are not part of the Lightroom ecosystem at all. 8 They are literally just, we're just looking at 'em 9 as a file browser. 10 It's important to note though, if I were to right click any 11 of these images, I can go down 12 and say, show this in the finder. 13 And when I open up in the finder, 14 it's gonna show me this Selects folder. 15 And notice that right next to the image is a 16 XMP file that says 85, it's it's 52 XP 17 as opposed to 52 CR3. 18 So the images here 19 and all of the information about what I did 20 to the image is right next to it. 21 That XMP file is how it stores 22 all the information about this photo. 23 Lightroom Classic will do that as well. 24 If in the preferences you say store XMP ...

automatically 25 right next to the original RAW file, 26 this does it without your choice. 27 It's gonna do it because it has nowhere else 28 to store these flags and stars 29 and anything that we do to the image, in fact, 30 all of the keywords, everything is in that XMP file. 31 But once I import them into the cloud side 32 of Lightroom, now Lightroom has it in its database, 33 and so it will have that information at the file 34 and it will have its copy of it inside of the database. 35 Okay, so here's what we're gonna do. 36 At this point, I can simply click on one image 37 and go up to the right hand side, 38 and you see this copy photo to the cloud. 39 If I click on that, it's going to make a copy of this image 40 and it's gonna port it over to the cloud area 41 inside of Lightroom. 42 And while it does that, it's making a copy 43 and putting it on the hard drive wherever we've stored it in 44 Lightroom's preferences. 45 So before we do that, we need to show you where 46 that preference is. 47 Now there is a full Lightroom workshop 48 that I just filmed here on Creative Lives. 49 So if you want real good details about Lightroom itself, 50 go and watch that workshop 51 because it goes through a lot more detail than we'll go 52 through in this workshop. 53 But before we import these into the cloud, we need 54 to make sure that we've chosen the correct place 55 for the images because in order to put them up on the cloud, 56 it has to go into Lightroom's database. 57 Lightroom's database holds all 58 of its original photos in a very specific place 59 which you get to choose. 60 So I'm gonna go up to Lightroom preferences, 61 and if you're on a PC, I think it's stored in the edit menu, 62 and we go to the cache settings. 63 So this is the settings for cache. 64 You can see that you can clear the cache, you can choose 65 how much cache you have available. 66 I choose maximum 67 because I want it to move as fast as possible. 68 And then you can see some options. 69 The first option is to store a copy 70 of all the smart previews locally 71 on the Macintosh hard drive, that takes up space. 72 And so if you have a smaller hard drive on your laptop 73 or some traveling computer, you might not wanna do that. 74 But if you have a desktop computer 75 and you're running Lightroom on it, knock yourself out. 76 Put that on there. 77 If you've got plenty of hard drive space, 78 you want these on there. 79 But I'm working on a laptop here, 80 and so I don't want to store a copy 81 of all the smart previews 82 because it's just gonna take up space. 83 I also don't wanna store a copy of all the originals 84 because again, I'm on a laptop 85 and I don't necessarily want to take up space, 86 and I just have a smaller hard drive 87 in this circumstance. 88 So I'm not taking up the space. 89 But if you're, again, if you're on a desktop 90 or if you're on a laptop 91 and you have all of your originals in an external drive 92 that's really large, then go ahead 93 and store all of your originals as well, 94 and I'll show you what that's gonna do. 95 But the most important thing is 96 that you choose a storage location for the originals. 97 So my storage place is in a blade drive called 98 Lightroom Original Photos, 99 and you just simply browse to that, find the place 100 that you want to store them. 101 So in my case, I go to this full, 102 this plat blade drive, 103 and then I go to Lightroom original photos, 104 and that's where I'm gonna store all of my original photos. 105 And you can see what it's doing. 106 It's storing 'em in a folder called Lightroom CC, 107 and then it's this weird folder. 108 And then as you go further, there's your originals, 109 and then it's showing you here's things from 2024, 2023, 110 all the way down to 2008. 111 So it's organizing 'em into these folders based on the date 112 that they were shot. 113 Now, notice that there's nothing in this folder. 114 Why? 115 Because that checkbox that I checked here, 116 or didn't check, sorry, that checkbox 117 that I didn't check here tells it don't store the originals 118 here on this hard drive only store them in the cloud. 119 So when I put my images into the cloud version 120 or part of Lightroom, it's going to first put 'em onto 121 that hard drive, into that folder that I just showed you, 122 and then it's gonna upload 'em to the cloud. 123 And then as soon as it does that 124 successfully, it's gonna delete it. 125 Remember, they're still on this 126 because I'm copying 'em from here 127 to the database in Lightroom. 128 But that database stores them for a little while. 129 It's almost like a Dropbox situation 130 where you put it on your Dropbox, your Dropbox holds onto it 131 until it gets to the cloud, 132 and then it removes it from the Dropbox. 133 That way it's not storing stuff all over your computer. 134 So that's what's it's doing here. 135 If you have a large enough hard drive 136 and you click on this store a copy of all originals, 137 it's going to actually store everything on that hard drive. 138 And in the cloud, which is great 139 because that's a backup in both places. 140 I just happen to choose not to do that simply 141 because I'm working on a laptop. 142 And Lightroom is a secondary situation for me. 143 It's not the original. 144 If Lightroom is your hub, if it's the thing 145 that's your original source, 146 that's where you're putting everything, 147 then I would make sure 148 that you have a large enough drive. 149 And I would turn that on. 150 And I would also turn this on as well. 151 So if you're gonna turn this one on, turn this one on, 152 make sure both of them are on so that you have access 153 to all the smart previews and all the original files, 154 unless you just have a small laptop 155 and you don't have a large external source. 156 And especially if Lightroom is not 157 your main work flow situation. 158 If Lightroom Classic is your main workflow situation, 159 that's where you store all the originals 160 and you don't necessarily need to keep 'em here. 161 When you put them in, it'll put 'em in 162 and then it'll send them to the cloud and get rid of 'em. 163 So it's a temporary storage space, 164 but you have to set up this drive. 165 So set up this drive, choose whether 166 or not you wanna store those originals down on your computer 167 or on an external drive by choosing these two options here. 168 And then I would choose your cache as maximum as possible. 169 If you have the space, if you have a very small drive, 170 then choose something down here. 171 But the smaller it gets, the slower it gets. 172 So I choose maximum. 173 Okay, so we have a location 174 and we know where these are gonna go once we put them into 175 the cloud side of Lightroom's database. 176 So I can just move one of 'em 177 by clicking on this little button up here, 178 or I can highlight all of them 179 and now see how it says copy 83 photos to the cloud. 180 Or I can right click or click on this triple dot button. 181 And now I'm working with the entire folder of images 182 and I can say, copy this entire folder to the cloud, 183 which is what I'm going to do. 184 So I'm gonna click on copy 185 to the cloud, and it's gonna say, 186 do you want to copy 83 photos to the cloud? 187 Absolutely. 188 Notice that it says copy, 189 it is not moving. 190 It is copying them. 191 It's also telling me that if they happen to be on the cloud, 192 it's going to make a version of them. 193 And it's asking me if I want 194 to overwrite any metadata if there's something already in 195 the cloud that has these images. 196 So if I've already done this, it's going 197 to ask me if I want to overwrite. 198 I don't need to worry about this. 199 This is all brand new stuff, so I'm gonna hit okay. 200 And it's importing. 201 You can see it doesn't take very long for it to import. 202 They've all been added to the cloud. 203 And so now if I go over to the cloud, I will find 204 inside of my cloud area, it says all photos. 205 And there's one that says recently added. 206 So this area 207 of Lightroom is all about the database. 208 So this is where you find the images that you just added. 209 Go to recently added, drop this down, just now, 210 I added 83 images. 211 They're all right here. 212 So now I can highlight all these images 213 and I can create an album out of them. 214 Remember in Lightroom Classic, we have these collections. 215 Those collections are how we connect to the cloud. 216 At this point, Lightroom is shipping them up 217 to the cloud already. 218 Look at this. 219 So if I go over to the right hand side, see how that cloud 220 is spinning right now, it's uploading all 221 of these images to the cloud. 222 83 images are being added to the cloud right now. 223 See that? 224 And so it's already adding those images to the cloud. 225 What I wanna do is I wanna put them into an album 226 so that I can find them when I'm on the cloud, 227 when I'm in Lightroom Classic, when I'm on Lightroom Mobile, 228 I can find 'em really easily. 229 I don't have to go based on the time they were shot. 230 I can actually go based on the album that they're in. 231 So I'm gonna go to my educational collections here, 232 and I'm gonna go to our Lightroom workflow, 233 and I'm going to create an album. 234 So I right clicked it, and I'm gonna create an album, 235 and I'm gonna make sure it's inside of this folder. 236 And I'm gonna include all of the selected 83 photos. 237 And I'm gonna name this Indiana Portrait. 238 Oops, I didn't spell that right. 239 Portrait. 240 And I'm gonna hit create there. 241 It just added Indiana Portrait. 242 There's 83 images. 243 You can see that it's spinning. 244 That means it's determining that it's gonna put these, 245 so it's adding them to the album right now. 246 And anytime you see that spinning thing, it's connecting 247 with the cloud and it's doing something with the cloud. 248 So right now it is interfacing with the cloud 249 and saying, I'm adding these images 250 that are on their way to you now. 251 I'm adding them into a album. 252 And that album also needs to be on the cloud as well. 253 So it is interacting with the cloud. 254 Now, this is important. 255 I can right click this particular album, 256 and I can go into the settings here 257 and I can say, make this available offline, 258 because right now, remember, I don't have 259 that little box checked. 260 And so I'm not keeping the originals down here 261 on the computer. 262 As soon as they get into the hard drive, they're going 263 to the cloud, and then they are being removed 264 from the hard drive, not from this hard drive. 265 This hard drive's no longer in play, 266 it's just this is a copy of 'em all. 267 This is my originals, the ones that I copied into the cloud 268 and into the database, which are going to 269 that specific folder that's in the preferences. 270 Those images are going to be removed soon. 271 So I want to go to this folder, right click it. 272 This is important if I'm gonna take my laptop 273 and go say on an airplane trip, 274 and I want to be able to work on my images, I want them 275 to stay on my laptop, at least for the time being, 276 I want them to be here. 277 And so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna say, 278 make these available offline. 279 And by doing that, it's gonna tell me 280 how much space is required for doing this. 281 And I'm gonna hit download. 282 See that little green 83 in that chevron? 283 That tells me that these 83 images 284 are available offline. 285 Now that I've chosen 286 to store these on the computer 287 so that they're available offline, if I now go 288 to the Lightroom original photos, you can see 289 that they exist here and they're gonna stay there 290 because I right clicked this album 291 and said, make them available offline. 292 And if I want to then release those images 293 so that they can go back to the cloud 294 and they free up space on my hard drive, 295 simply right click it again and say, 296 make available offline and check that. 297 And then they will be released. 298 And at some point, 299 they will just be deleted off the hard drive, 300 not instantaneously, but over the course of the next hour 301 or minutes or whatever. 302 Okay, so now we have our images in 303 a collection or an album, which is 304 what we call it here on Lightroom, 305 or a collection on Lightroom Classic. 306 So let's go back to our schematic 307 and just kind of go over what we've done so far. 308 We took our images from the card 309 and we put them in the hard drive. 310 Then we started looking at them through the local option 311 inside of Lightroom. 312 We actually made our selections, we chose them, 313 we reorganized those photos the same way we do 314 in Lightroom Classic, and we put them into two folders, 315 the Rejects and the Selects folder. 316 Then we took the Selects folder 317 and we imported that onto the cloud side of Lightroom. 318 And when we did that, we also put them into an album. 319 By virtue of putting them into the cloud section inside 320 of Lightroom, those immediately started moving up 321 into the same album that we put 'em on in here, 322 moved them up here into the full high resolution 323 images on the cloud. 324 But instead of sending the entire set of images 325 that we shot, it only sent 83 326 because the rest of them 327 are still sitting back on this local hard drive 328 and Lightroom has kind of forgotten about them. 329 Now, when we go back to Lightroom, 330 you can always go see those original photos 331 by just clicking on the local side, 332 go back into your favorites, go to that specific folder. 333 But these are not the same images. 334 We're not looking at 'em from, 335 we're not looking at the same set 336 of photos from two different angles. 337 This one, we're looking into this original set 338 of hard drives, and if we want to forget about 'em, 339 all we have to do is unplug this drive 340 and we'll have no access to them. 341 Again, it's just a file browser. 342 And if I want to, I can click on this 343 and I can remove it from the favorites. 344 And then the only reference 345 that exists is if I browse to it again. 346 But because we have the XMP sidecar files next to it, 347 anything that we did to it 348 before we brought it into the cloud side of Lightroom 349 is in the XMP, including if we were to adjust it. 350 And so if I were to click on one of these images 351 and go into the adjustment area, 352 which is these areas over here, 353 we haven't talked much about them yet. 354 And I go into a lot 355 of detail on these in the Lightroom class 356 that we just filmed here on Creative Live. 357 But if I go into the adjustment area here 358 and I switch into the detail view, 359 so I'm looking at the entire photo. 360 If I start adjusting this image, 361 and I kind of want it to be a fairly like 362 low key image, there we go. 363 And let's go into the color. 364 Okay. 365 So if that's what I want to do to the image, 366 then that has already been stored in the XMP file. 367 And so if I were to right click this 368 and show it in the finder, actually it was this one here. 369 If I were to open this file inside of Photoshop 370 or inside of Lightroom Classic, or wherever, 371 this XMP file would tell Adobe what I had done 372 with this file. 373 So it's constantly storing the information in the XMP. 374 Again, the same way that Lightroom Classic would be storing 375 the information in the XMP, 376 if you had the little box checked in the preferences 377 that says automatically write the information to the XMP, 378 the original photos are still here, they're still available. 379 You can always go back to them if you want to. 380 But the ones that you chose, the ones that were important, 381 are here on the cloud. 382 And those are in this album, 383 and they're going to be available everywhere. 384 So we're gonna go over here to the cloud, 385 and you'll notice that it says it's all synced 386 and backed up now. 387 So we are ready to look at them anywhere we like. 388 So as an example of that, you can see that the images 389 that we put into the cloud area in Lightroom, 390 they got uploaded 391 to the cloud already while we were talking, 392 and they're already over here on the iPad. 393 You can see it. 394 I can start looking through these images. 395 You can see right here that there's a flag. 396 You can, if I go to the info on them, you can see 397 that there is a caption. 398 You can see that my copyright is in there. 399 If I go to the info panel, you can see 400 that it has the captions and the copyright. 401 So all the information, including keywords and flags 402 and stars have all come with those photos. 403 And they're available here on my iPad as well. 404 If I start messing with those and I start adjusting it 405 or choosing images, things like that, or rejecting images, 406 it will change the settings here inside 407 of Lightroom as well. 408 So they're gonna crosstalk. 409 So in addition to them being stored in the cloud, 410 they're also being delivered 411 to our mobile devices in full resolution if we choose. 412 And I'll show you that setting in our next segment. 413 And also, they're being delivered down to Lightroom Classic 414 inside of the collections. 415 And I showed you where those images are being stored 416 in the collections inside of Lightroom 417 and also in the file folder 418 where we have chosen to put them. 419 So that's all based on the preferences that you set inside 420 of Lightroom Classic. 421 So again, you've got preferences in Lightroom as to 422 where the Cloud Lightroom originals folder goes. 423 And you also have that in Lightroom Classic. 424 So you gotta make sure you set both of those up 425 so you know exactly 426 where photos are coming when they are put 427 into each version 428 of Lightroom from another version of Lightroom. 429 So just make sure that you set those 430 up right at the beginning. 431 So when we talk about Lightroom Mobile, we'll show you 432 where the settings are to set what you want to do 433 and what size files you want 434 to come down into Lightroom Mobile. 435 So each different version of Lightroom has settings 436 that choose what and when and how 437 they want to receive images from the cloud. 438 Lightroom Classic is the only one 439 that always receives the full original file. 440 So if you put a file into Lightroom 441 or Lightroom Web, 442 the full original file goes up here into the cloud, 443 and that full original file has 444 to come down into Lightroom Classic. 445 If Lightroom Classic is on. 446 And if the web is connected in Lightroom Classic, 447 it will come down 448 and it will go into whatever hard drive you've set up 449 so that you can store an original file. 450 It's kind of like a fail safe. 451 It's a safe for all your files. 452 So Lightroom classic is fantastic for that. 453 So as a result of that, a person could get away 454 with always putting their images into Lightroom 455 on their laptop or Lightroom Mobile on their iPad, 456 and always start there 457 because the images will always end up in Lightroom Classic 458 as full high resolution images. 459 And that means that you would have 460 a full high resolution image here on this computer, 461 a full high resolution up in the cloud, 462 a full high resolution here if you chose 463 to actually bring down the full high resolution image here 464 on your mobile devices. 465 And then a full high resolution here. 466 So you have one, two, three, four copies 467 of your file simply 468 by putting them into Lightroom on your laptop.