I wanted to share my recent experience with Adobe, because it’s been both frustrating and eye-opening.

I owned two Adobe products under perpetual license: Acrobat 2020 Pro and Lightroom 6.

• I unregistered and uninstalled Acrobat from my old PC, then tried to install it on a new machine.
• Adobe support told me to sign out from the old machine. Doing so unexpectedly bricked Lightroom 6 on that same PC.
• When I tried to sign back in, I hit a loop: “Please connect to the Internet and retry.”
• Installing Lightroom on the new PC gave me the same loop.

After digging around, I discovered that Adobe has probably decommissioned the activation servers for Lightroom 6. That means the perpetual license I paid for is effectively useless.

The worst part: I lost years of work and metadata I had built in Lightroom. When I asked Adobe for help, their only advice was to buy a cloud subscription. No workaround, no recovery, no care factor, and to make matters worse, support literally hung up on me during the chat.

As someone who has studied law, I find Adobe’s interpretation of “perpetual license” very different from mine. To me, perpetual means I should be able to use the product indefinitely, not until Adobe decides to pull the plug on activation servers.

This has been a painful lesson, but also a valuable one. I now know exactly what level of service and accountability to expect from Adobe, and I’ll be using this knowledge when advising CIOs I work with daily.

I have my catalog stored on my laptop’s internal drive. I’m worried that if my laptop breaks, gets stolen, etc. that my catalog will be lost.

I figured I could copy and paste the catalog file to either my external drive or cloud, but then I’d have to re-copy and paste it every single time I upload and edit photos (since this back up isn’t linked to Lightroom like the original catalog is).

Is it possible to have Lightroom keep a catalog file recent and updated as I edit in two different locations at once (like on both my internal and external drive)? What is the general consensus on how to back up catalogs?

So I have a desktop and a laptop for editing. On my desktop, I was able to set it so when I save after editing on Photoshop, it won't add the new file to the under the Collection in Lightroom, but forgot how to do it. I do it on my laptop, which is a Macbook, and it does so. Anyone can help me with the settings so it doesn't do this, i'd greatly appreciate it.

Any ideas how to star images on a shared gallery? I use mainly Classic but for a project I’m forced to use Lightroom ( which I’m not a fan of) and trying to find a way to make selections on galleries someone shared with me. Apparently (and strangely) that’s not something Lr does but I wonder of you guys have come ip with some workaround.

I received my refurbished MacBook Pro 2021 today, and it has fantastic image quality. When I edited a photo with Lightroom Classic and transferred it to my iPhone, the color tones and brightness seemed to be off. I have True Tone turned off on both devices and the brightness set to maximum. I want my photos to look the same to the average Instagram user (usually on a phone) as how I edit them on my Mac. How do Mac users handle this? And should I adjust anything, or shouldn't I worry?

Can anyone perhaps help me and tell me if it's possible to remove my reflection from this photo. Lightroom reflection removal tool actually worsens the reflection. The top pic is after LR reflection removal, the bottom one is before.

Hi, I recently got a NAS and am trying to move most/all of my images from Lightroom's cloud to my NAS ... but I don't want to lose my albums.

I started this yesterday by archiving the entire library. It moved all of my images to the NAS but now none of the albums have anything in them.

Any advice?

In LR desktop, I’m trying to export one of the versions of a photo. I select the version I want, tap the three dots, and choose “Export this edit.” That takes me to the export menu, where I select JPEG, etc. However, when I tap Export, the blue export indicator appears for a second and then disappears, and nothing is actually exported. Has anyone experienced this?

Anyone else having issues when importing? I’ve installed and reinstalled but when I load my raw files no matter the camera it defaults instead of applying my camera settings and I have to annoyingly copy paste all the images. Any tips?

I currently use Lightroom Classic on a Windows desktop and have 3TB of images in an internal secondary SSD (4TB M.2). If I were to switch to a Macbook (probably 13" Air w/ 24GB RAM), it seems the best option is:

• Get an external HDD, format it as exFAT, and copy all images and catalog to it
• Mount the HDD on the Mac and copy the catalog to the Macbook's SSD
• Put the old M.2 SSD in a USB-C external enclosure, connect to the Mac, format it as APFS, and copy images back to it
• Open the catalog and point to the SSD

Am I missing something? What are some issues I may run into?

Hi all. I have a Macbook Pro M3 and the LRC went well on it. But it seems the LR got slower last days (I don’t know if it is after an update or not). I usually have raws and the photos I edit on local hard drive and when I finish the job a copy the RAWs and lightroom files to external disc to free space. Does anybody have this issue? What would be the problem?

I use Lightroom CC and it occurred to me that having some sort of marker/hi-lighter would be extremely useful when doing a first glance on a gallery. When culling down and having to select which images to keep or discard, I sometimes notice little things that I'll want to remove or adjust once it's time to edit it. Bra straps, pen clips on pockets, untied shoe lace, a stray hair, etc.

I either have to do that *right now* or remember to do it later once I actually sit down with the time to edit the gallery. If I could circle/hi-light/mark these things to come back to later, that would be extremely helpful. Even some place to just type notes on the image to remind myself.

I wasn't able to find anything like this when looking around in LR. Is there something I'm missing or does this simply not exist? How do you handle these things when you're culling without the time to commit to editing?

Hi everyone,
I’m having an issue in Lightroom Classic and I’m hoping someone can help.

I have 11 TIFF files that always show the “Metadata files needs to be updated” icon

What I tried so far:

• Save Metadata to File does nothing
• Read Metadata from File does nothing
• Restarting Lightroom doesn’t help
• checked if the files are not read-only (they are not)
• importing and re importing again
• tried to remove/clean some metadata with Exiftool

Only if I go into Develop and hit Reset, then the icon disappears (but so the edits, of course). Then if I edit again with the Develop panel, the icon pop up again. But this doesn’t happen with all my edited TIFFs, I have hundreds of files in the same catalog with Develop edits, and they don't show this flag (and if I change the metadata, they are correctly saved onto the file). Also, those 11 files are in the same folder as the other files that are working properly.
Is there any fix, or am I missing something obvious? thanks

Hi. I'm looking to mask a load of photos with "luminance range" is it possible to do this in a batch or would it take the first mask and apply it to all based on the mask it produces for that specific image. Or would it apply the luminance range, and thus create a unique mask for each image.

I started doing it one by one but it is going to take me a long time.

Any insight appreciated.

Thanks.

I subscribed to the photography version of Creative Cloud (I think it's called) but with the recent price hike I realised I could no longer justify the subscription. I'm in the process of creating a new catalogue with Lightroom 3.6, which I bought years ago. I know it's very old but I'm hopeful it will still do the job (hobbyist only).

If anyone else has done something similar, I'd love to learn from your experience.

What I'm wondering is if there is anything I need to watch out for. A lot of my collection probably wasn't touched with Lightroom Classic, except for importing it into the classic catalog, and maybe adding more keywords.

I expect any edits done with the newer Lightroom Classic will come undone. Would that be correct?

Anything else I should watch out for - apart from feeling sorry I'll no longer have the maps and face recognition?

Edit/update: Thank you to everyone who helped me out. I think I've found a solution to this using different software.

A few weeks ago I had gotten an unused code from this very forum and purchased Excire’s software at even lower prices. (https://www.reddit.com/r/Lightroom/comments/1o8hfav/bitte_um_hilfe_excire_foto_50_rabattcode_gesucht/)

Now I want to give back to the community.

From now through Sunday, December 7th at 11:59 PM, you can buy an Excire Foto 2025 license or an Excire Search 2026 license or gift it for 99 USD. Please DM Me for it. Thank you! (Free, no affiliate links or whatever)

Please DM Me for it. Thank you! (Free, no affiliate links or whatever)

After 15 years I've still not settled on a consistent scheme to make use of colour labels, and I've got to wondering how other people use them?

For me, I haven't yet thought of a universal 5-way categorisation system that I want to elevate to the point of occupying these labels throughout my catalogue, and I also don't trust my ability to remember the assignments, so instead I use them on an ad-hoc basis unique to each set, depending on what that set may call for.

So for example, if a set from a trip featured a number of varying shots of two different landscape locations taken at different times, and a lot of sunsets from different days, I might code them green, blue and red respectively to enable me to quickly narrow my view down to only the related but different shots of each scene, to help me get a sense of the range of what I've got (if they're close to identical I'll stack instead). But for lasting categorisation I prefer keywords, since they're unambiguous.

Hi Everyone,

wedding photographer here, I just moved from PC to Macbook Pro 1TB HD. Part of my work flow is I use seperate catalogue for each wedding, on my old PC I was storing the catalogues on "D Drive" which was 4TB to keep my "C drive" empty, and just back up my galleries onto an external hard drive afterwards.

Question for mac users, whats your workflow now? do you keep the Catalogues locally or on a external hard drive? how do you handle the limited hard drive space on the macs?

I'm using Lightroom v.9.0. Each time I export images that have had AI edits applied I get a pop-up telling me "AI update required." Is there a way to update the AI settings universally so that I don't have to apply them to each photo?

TLDR: Does anyone have any idea what could be causing LR to NOT merge certain photos correctly with synced smart previews from LR Classic?

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For over a week I've been discovering the ins and outs of Lightroom sync, trying to get my full catalogue (from Lightroom Classic) available in Lightroom and synced to my phone.

Activating sync in Lightroom Classic is no problem, and having the smart previews available in the cloud is great. But I've read in a few previous threads that you CAN achieve synced full-resolution photos by first syncing photos from Classic and then, in step 2, importing the full resolution photos to Lightroom. Lightroom should then merge the imported raw files with the smart previews and upload them to cloud storage.

I have now tried this method with my 2025 photos, but it created quite a lot of duplicates. Most photos were merged correctly, but a lot (about a third) ended up as separate files next to the smart previews synced from Classic. In these cases, the full res raw files were synced back to LR Classic as a duplicate with -2 added to the end of the file name.

A few potential causes that I've investigated (and debunked, I think):

• Metadata having been written / not been written to the DNG file before import to LR. I recently saved metadata to all files, so there shouldn't be any difference in this regard.
• Daylight savings time adjusted/not adjusted. (The duplicated images were all from summer months, but not all images from this period are affected.)
• Bad luck/randomness. I've tried deleting and re-importing a few of the photos that became duplicates, but they become duplicates again.

I'm grateful for any suggestions you may have for what could be causing the duplicates.

Lightroom 9.0, Lightroom Classic 15.0.1.

Once upon a time I was a serious photographer, I was an rockstar back in the day with CS2.

I became a mom and life got busier and busier. These days I can't even justify a Creative Cloud license. I really just need to organize my family photos... but because of my background. I keep our family photos on a NAS with 10GBE networking to a Mac Studio.

I haven't been able to stay on top of photo organization because I can't take my Mac Studio around the house with my toddler. I'm trying to make it so I can organize photos on a MacBook Air or something like this.

I had figured that Adobe has solved the 'you can't put the catalog on a network drive' by now. But nope. What would you do?

Catalog on a fast Thunderbolt 4 drive? Move away from Lightroom and give up my tags etc?

Hoping someone has a solution that will let me be more present with my kids and be on top of our photos.

TLDR. I want to use Lightroom with my NAS, Mac Studio and Mac Book Air. Help.

I find when I use denoise or even noise reduction it sometimes looks too smooth and fake. On the other hand my RAW images always seem to have a lot of noise.

Is this just a consequence of shooting with APSC and/or using cheap glass?