Adobe Lightroom

£9.98/$9.99/month The web-first Lightroom needs cloud storage

Adobe has made things complicated by splitting Lightroom into two versions! You get both with the Adobe Photography Plan, but they look and work in very different ways, so we’ll look at them individually.

‘Lightroom’ is the name Adobe now uses for its newer, web-first version. Lightroom is a stripped-down version of Lightroom Classic that’s a lot more pleasant to use, but comes with requirements and restrictions.

First, all images must be stored in the cloud, so for an image collection of any size at all, that means paying £9.98/$9.99 extra per month for 1TB of storage. Second, it doesn’t support external editors or plug-ins (except for Photoshop), it doesn’t offer smart albums and you cannot create virtual copies either.

Lightroom is very effective, however, if you want to capture, browse and edit images seamlessly across multiple devices, and the editing tools are now on a par with those in Lightroom Classic. Lightroom also benefits from a more streamlined interface and the power of Adobe’s AI Sensei search tools.