- [Narrator] Let's connect our Lightroom classic catalog
to the ecosystem, also called the Lightroom cloud.
To do this, we first have to turn it on
and we find that option up here under the cloud
icon in the upper right.
We see the start syncing button,
but before we click on it,
we should check out the sync preferences
and this gear icon will take us there.
So I'll click on that.
And this opened the light room classic
preferences and took us to the Lightroom sync tab.
What we want to look at is this
section down here that says location,
this tells light room where to
download images that are already in the
cloud or part of the Lightroom ecosystem.
For example, images will be in the cloud
If you use the Lightroom app on your phone.
I'm going to go ahead and click this to turn it on.
And we'll notice over here
to the right that by default,
these pictures are going to get
downloaded to your pictures folder.
I recommend that you choose a different
location for the sync downloads
before you start syncing.
I prefer that the images get
downloaded to my external hard drive.
So we can set that up here by clicking choose.
And then I'll navigate to my external photos hard drive
and I'll create a folder from Lightroom
and say create and choose that.
Now we can see that the location is
on my external photos drive in the new
folder that I created.
I'm also going to turn on the
use sub folders that will nicely
organize the downloads into dated folders.
And I like having that.
I know this functionality is
pretty confusing at first.
So let me try and make sense of it for you.
Remember that lightroom classic
requires images be located on a
local hard drive and Lightroom,
which includes all of your mobile
devices puts images in the cloud.
So when you start Lightroom classic syncing
with Lightroom classic acts like a vacuum
and it pulls down anything It finds in the cloud.
And here what we've done is told Lightroom
where we want those images to go.
Okay, now we're ready to turn on the sync.
So I'll close out of the preferences.
I'll go back up to the cloud and
I'll click the start syncing button.
Now I'm getting this message
because I have previously
used a different catalog to
sync to the Lightroom ecosystem.
You probably haven't because it's
your first time setting this up.
And if you have never
set up a sync before,
you're not going to get this message.
But if you have,
if you've ever had a different
catalog that you synced,
this is telling you which catalog do
you want to sync? And I'm going to say,
yes, I want to sync this catalog.
There's a couple of other important
things to understand with this.
First, only one classic catalog can be synced at a time
which we just saw.
If you previously had synced a different catalog,
like I had, you're going to get that warning message.
And second, starting the sync does not upload photos
from Lightroom classic to the cloud.
It will download images from the cloud,
if it finds something there.
We haven't yet put anything
into the cloud ecosystem.
So there's nothing there to download.
So at this point, nothing has actually synced.
We've only set up the connection
between lightroom classic and the lightroom ecosystem.
Next we'll sync some photos from
classic up to the Lightroom cloud.