Migrate photos and videos from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom

If you’ve used Lightroom Classic earlier, you’re familiar with the concept of catalogs. A catalog in Lightroom Classic is a database (.lrcat file) containing records for each of your photos and any videos you may have imported. A record in the catalog includes a reference to where the photo lives on your system; your instructions for processing the photo—for instance, the adjustments you applied; and photo metadata, such as keywords and ratings.

On the other hand, in Lightroom, your photos are stored in their full resolution centrally in the cloud, and synced with your computers and devices when you’re working on them. You can migrate your catalogs from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom. When you do so, Lightroom brings in each of your photos included in the catalog and uploads it to the cloud in its full resolution for access across multiple devices and computers. Later, to save on disk space, you can even consider deleting those photos from the local storage on your device.

Note:

Collections of your photos in Lightroom Classic automatically become albums in Lightroom. The following data in your Lightroom Classic catalog won’t be available in Lightroom after migration:

• Snapshots
• Custom metadata
• Creations: books, slideshows, and print/web creations
• Shares on Lightroom for the web
• Map-saved locations
• Folders and folder hierarchy
• Smart collections
• Develop history
• Color labels (migrated as keywords in Lightroom)
  

Prepare your catalog in Lightroom Classic

• Optimize the catalog (File > Optimize Catalog).
  
• Reconnect any missing files. See Locate missing photos.
• Optimize the metadata for the migration. Some tips:
  • Try creating a smart collection to find any metadata conflicts. See Create a smart collection.
    
  • Resolve metadata conflicts.
• Custom folder names are not migrated to Lightroom. As a workaround, before migrating, create collections in Lightroom Classic mimicking the custom folder names/structures.
• If you want to continue using Lightroom Classic after migration, consider upgrading to its latest version before migrating the catalog. This step makes it simpler to sync photos and metadata between Lightroom and Lightroom Classic. The original versions of any photos you import into Lightroom are synced back to Lightroom Classic.

Prepare Lightroom for migration

Follow these steps in Lightroom:

• Ensure that the Cache > Storage location for originals preference points to the desired location. See Cache preferences.
  
• Ensure that there's enough disk space in that location to accommodate the original, full-sized images in the Lightroom Classic catalog. The migration process creates a copy of your images. If you're running low on space on an internal drive on your computer, you might want to connect an external hard-drive and specify a location on it as the custom location.

Migrate a catalog

Congratulations! You can edit, organize, and share your photos using Lightroom now.

Migrate presets

When you launch Lightroom for the first time, existing Lightroom Classic profiles and presets on your computer are automatically migrated to Lightroom. If you have made some changes to the existing presets or added new presets in Lightroom Classic, you can migrate preset to Lightroom.

There are two ways in which you can migrate presets from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom:

• Navigating to the default location of presets and importing them in Lightroom
• Exporting presets from Lightroom Classic to a custom location and importing them in Lightroom

Import presets from the default location into Lightroom

Export presets from Lightroom Classic and import into Lightroom

FAQ