If you are a photographer who is using (or thinking about using) the new Adobe Lightroom CC and you are worried about your photos or metadata being “locked up”, you can now breathe a sigh of relief. Adobe has released the new Lightroom Downloader application that enables you to download all of your source photos with metadata updates from the Creative Cloud.
Prior to the release of this application, all photos you added to your Lightroom CC library would be uploaded to the Creative Cloud servers, and possibly deleted from your local storage. Any metadata updates would be stored within your library and synchronized to the Creative Cloud servers, but not stored with local copies of your photos.
This created some (very reasonable) concerns among photographers who were worried that their photos would be “locked up” with Lightroom CC, forcing them to continue paying for a monthly subscription just to retain access to their own photos.
The Lightroom Downloader application enables you to download copies of your original photos, along with metadata updates you applied within Lightroom CC. In other words, this application provides a way to access all of your photos and data should you choose to discontinue the use of Lightroom CC (or if you simply want a full backup of all of your photos and data to store locally).
When you use the Lightroom Downloader application, your photos will be organized into a folder structure based on the date of capture. This is the same folder structure Lightroom CC uses in the background, regardless of the folder structure you may have previously been using for your existing photos.
More details about the Lightroom Downloader application can be found on the Adobe website here:
https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-cc/kb/download-lightroom-photos.html