[Leica] It's all your fault

[Brian Reid]

My issue is subtle but critical (to me at least). I use the "Classic 
(Desktop)" version. I'm leery of clouds. I believe that there's really 
no such thing as "the cloud"; there are just computers somewhere else 
owned by somebody else that I access through networks I don't own or 
control.

When you bring a photo into Lightroom, the original file is saved and 
available, untouched.
When you edit the image, be it cropping or color balance or anything 
else, those edits are not made to the actual image. They are stored as a 
sequence of "change commands". This is convenient in that you can easily 
back up and un-do change after change, or make a "virtual copy" of the 
image in that state.

But an image "as edited" is not stored anywhere on the hard drive or 
anything else, except for screen-resolution previews that speed up the 
Library module. If I want to get a PSD or TIFF or JPG file of an edited 
image, it is necessary to use Lightroom's "Export" command, which 
applies all of the stored-up changes and produces a new file, which is 
put onto my hard drive.

If I have edited an image but have not yet exported it for safekeeping, 
there is no software in the world except Lightroom that can read the 
edits and apply them to the original image. They are locked away in 
Lightroom's database, which it calls a "catalog". If I lose access to 
the software that can decode a Lightroom catalog, then I lose access to 
my edits and therefore to the image as-edited.

What I have been doing until now is saving a Virtual Machine that, when 
started up, becomes a version of MacOS that can run Lightroom 6 and has 
a perpetually-licensed copy inside the VM. If the computer hosting it 
rots away or explodes, I can run that Virtual Machine on some other 
computer and still have access. The VM encoding that I use is not 
proprietary; there are at least 2 noncommercial VM systems that can open 
it. So I am protected against failure of computer hardware and VM 
software. And until now, I was protected against failure of the 
Lightroom app itself, because I've always had a pickled copy of LR 
inside the saved VM. The new Adobe subscription scheme can make that 
stop working, and there is nothing that I can do except pay.

So, yes, I don't use the cloud. I keep my images on my desktop computer 
and on several external hard drives (including two ReadyNAS boxes in 
separate buildings). Once a month I FedEx a hard drive to a relative on 
the other side of the country. It's all safe. But now unless I pay my 
protection money, I cannot preserve access to the edits I have made 
unless I have exported the edited images and saved those  exports. I do 
exactly that for my most important images, but I never know what 
20-year-old image is going to become important next week.

Brian Reid