Easily Sync Edits Between Lightroom and Lightroom Classic

As you can imagine, I've had the privilege of connecting with MANY Lightroom users over the years, especially this last year with the release of my course, Lightroom Everywhere. My goal has been to help two kinds of photographers gain comfort with Lightroom Desktop and Mobile:

1. Lightroom Classic users who are curious about switching to Lightroom
2. Photographers who are entirely new to Lightroom altogether

When it came to interacting with photographers who fall into category #2, things were pretty straightforward. Because these photographers have no prior experience with any version of Lightroom, our conversations mostly revolved around the basics of how the app can help them manage, edit, and share their photos.

Things are quite different with photographers who fall into category #1. Lightroom Classic users, especially ones with many years of experience using the app, generally have a harder time with Lightroom. But it's not because Lightroom is more difficult than Lightroom Classic. It's completely the opposite, in my view.

Rather, Lightroom Classic users bring with them years of habit and second-nature instinct when it comes to working with their photos. One of the most common stumbling blocks I've found is maintaining a hybrid Lightroom / Lightroom Classic workflow, especially when preserving edits between both apps. In other words, many Lightroom Classic users would ask whether they could carry their edits over to Lightroom AND bring back edits made in Lightroom.

The short answer is: Yes, you can do that, and I'm going to show you how. However, I do not advocate this workflow, nor do I teach it in my course. While it is a functional workflow, there are potential versioning issues that could make things sloppy when keeping track of edits made to your photos. Still, there is value to understanding this hybrid workflow because it'll let Lightroom Classic users get more comfortable with the user interface and functionality of Lightroom, and that is something I fully support.

So, if you're interested in understanding how this hybrid editing workflow works, check out this video where I explain how to take the edits made in Lightroom Classic and bring them into Lightroom (and vice versa).