Adobe Creative Cloud - Installing Lightroom

After paying my money, it is off to my Windows machine to continue the process (I use linux for all things except lightroom). I have backed up all of my photos, twice, including my lightroom catalogs onto external USB drives. You never know what can happen when making a big switch like this.

I have been using perpetually licensed versions of Lightroom and Photoshop. I use Lightroom all the time, but only rarely use Photoshop. My photoshop is CS5, 64 bit for Windows. My lightroom is 5.7.1, 64 bit for Windows, circa 2010, which includes Camera Raw 8.7.1

I launch Chrome on Windows, login to the Adobe Site, give it my cell phone number, and a button is offered "Launch Creative Cloud". Inside here are buttons that allow me to download Photoshop and Lightroom. I start with the lightroom button, it downloads an installer (.exe file) that says it will install the latest lightroom. I elect to have it install AGS, which verifies periodically that my versions of lightroom and such are genuine. After asking several questions, it installs the Creative Cloud desktop app. I also install Photoshop.

The big surprise - two things called Lightroom

Lightroom CC was introduced as a cloud based mobile friendly version around 2018. At that time what was simply "Lightroom" as part of the CC package became "Lightroom Classic". The CC version will only work from photos on the cloud, so it is not what I want unless I want to move all of my 25,000 photos to the cloud and begin trusting Adobe to take care of them, as well as possibly paying Adobe to store them for me.

So I download Lightroom Classic and launch it. Unlike Lightroom CC, which was clueless when I launched it, Classic finds my photos and my catalog automagically and it reports finding it as/in:

Tom.lrcat
Tom-v11.lrcat
C:/Users/Tom/Pictures/Lightroom/Tom-v11.lrcat

The popup that announces finding my catalog offers me an "Upgrade" button. I cross my fingers and press it. It warns me that this new catalog will not be compatible with older versions. It tells me that a new database will be kept alongside of my catalog in the same folder (whatever that is) with the name ".lrcat-data"

At one time I had lightroom placing catalog backups into time stamped folders in /home/Camera/lightroom_catalogs but I don't see any timestamps in there more recent than 2016.

After this, the new lightroom seems to be up and running and has located all of my photos.

As a side note, this would have been necessary even if I wanted to start using Lightroom CC. Lightroom CC is unable or unwilling to import information from Lightroom 5 catalogs (though they say it will accept Lightroom 6), but now that I am converted to the CC catalog format, I could in theory move things to CC. But I won't. And I have lost the ability to run 5.7.1 as near as I can tell.

• Lightroom Classic vs Lightroom CC
• Importing Lightroom 5 catalogs to Lightroom CC