That cloud icon is your key to migrating your Lightroom catalog into Lightroom Classic. Or, option two: You can migrate your edits out of Lightroom and into Lightroom Classic, thus freeing up your cloud storage for future work. So what to do? Option one: You could upgrade your storage and delay the problem. If they’re in Lightroom, they’re in the cloud. Unfortunately, while there is an option in Lightroom to store files locally (as well as in the cloud), there is no option to ONLY store files locally, and clear them from cloud storage. What happens, though, when you run out of cloud storage? I filled my 100GB in under a year of shooting RAW (and that was conservative, because I was on maternity leave at the time).

Depending on your Creative Cloud plan, you might have 20GB, 100GB or 1TB of cloud storage. Lightroom uses this storage to store full versions of the image files you import into your catalog. When you subscribe to an Adobe Creative Cloud plan, you get a quota of cloud storage. However, as I’ve written about before, there are some features missing from Lightroom that mean I’ll never be ditching Lightroom Classic altogether, and this article is about one of them: the limited Adobe cloud storage that the Lightroom catalog depends on. As a longtime Lightroom Classic enthusiast, I started using Lightroom for the portability: I love being able to edit photos on my phone or tablet, without needing to be at my desktop computer. Last year I started using Lightroom on my mobile phone.

Lightroom storage plans