Lightroom Tips

Lightroom 5 And The Creative Cloud Q&A

Over the last few months I’ve seen more and more people subscribe to the Creative Cloud. Partly because everyone who went to Photoshop World got a free subscription for 1-year and partly because Adobe just announced a photographers bundle where you get Lightroom and Photoshop for $9.99/month.

Anyway, since that’s happened, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about what to do if you already have Lightroom installed when you join the Creative Cloud. So here’s a quick Q&A:

Q. How do I get Lightroom if I join the Creative Cloud?
A. It’s easy. It shows up under your “Apps” tab when you install the Creative Cloud Updater/App Manager.

Q. If I already have Lightroom 5 installed when I join the Creative Cloud, do I need to re-install it?
A. This is probably the most popular question. The answer is no. If you already have Lightroom 5 installed, you don’t need to re-install it once you join the Creative Cloud. You can just use the version you already have installed and everything will work just fine.

Q. Is there an advantage if I do decide to un-install LR5 and install the version from the Creative Cloud app manager?
A. Not really. Everything works exactly the same between the two versions.

Q. What happens if I do decide to uninstall my original pre-Creative-Cloud-subscription version of Lightroom, and install it from the Creative Cloud app manager. Will I lose my catalogs and work?
A. Nope. The Lightroom uninstaller just uninstalls the actual Lightroom application files. It won’t remove your catalogs. When you re-install and launch Lightroom, it usually picks up that you have an existing catalog and asks if you want to open it. If not, you can simply just go to your catalog and double click the .LRCAT file to open Lightroom with that catalog.

Q. What about if I ever decide to unsubscribe from the Creative Cloud? Will I be able to continue using Lightroom? Will I lose all of my Lightroom work?
A. That one kind of depends on which group you fall in to. I know a lot of people just got Lightroom 5 with their creative cloud subscription. But, a lot of people also already owned Lightroom before they subscribed. So…
1) If you didn’t own LR5 before you subscribed to the Creative Cloud, then if you stop your subscription you naturally wouldn’t be able to use Lightroom anymore. However, your Lightroom files (the catalog mainly) will still work just fine. So you could either a) decide to buy just Lightroom and your catalogs will work just fine or, b) you could resubscribe and you’d have access to your catalog files like normal.
2) If you already owned Lightroom 5 before you became a Creative Cloud subscriber, then your catalog will work just fine and you can go about using Lightroom 5 just like you normally would.

I hope this helps clear up a few things about the Creative Cloud versions of Lightroom. Have a great Wednesday!

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