I have been using Lightroom Classic (LrC) for a while and I am interested in the innovations and improvements enabled by the cloud architecture of Lightroom CC (LR CC) and by a new platform – the flaws and the technical debt of Lightroom Classic are too much (in)famous.
Maybe it is just me, but I have been a little bit struggling to understand what LR CC was doing with my physical files. This post is trying to explain it to avoid to other people the pain it has been for me.
Overview
Long story short, when you import images, LR CC is creating a physical copy of your original file (RAW, JPG, whatever you shoot) on Adobe Cloud. So, you can archive your file, delete it locally, your choice, but a copy is stored not on your machine, but on Adobe’s cloud dedicated to Lightroom CC (don’t be confused, there are several, and Adobe’s documents is another one).
However, you can configure LR CC to have a copy of some or all files and previews on your local machine.
You can delete an image but you are going to remove the physical copy of this image on Adobe’s cloud and on your local machine (unless of course if you have kept the original file before uploading it to LR CC as LR CC is creating a copy. It is this copy which is deleted by your action in LR CC).
How it works
You can find where to store a local copy of your files in Edit -> Preferences: