I’ve got Lightroom CC and I like it, 1TB of cloud storage for all my pics is enough. However my wife also would like a similar setup but doesn’t really want to spend another tenner a month. And TBH it may not even be that good VFM for me either.

We have 1TB of storage with OneDrive since we pay for MS Office, and Google Drive is another option. But what other library management suites will work on those platforms? I know Google Photos does management but what’s it like for editing and stuff? Are there any that work with OneDrive?

What I like about LR is that you can use it on a small hard drive (we have MS Surface devices) and restrict the local storage it uses, and it works seamlessly. I know that Google Filestream and OneDrive have a similar system but I dunno if they work well with software that might be expecting everthing to be local. For example if software decides to scan all files that could play havoc with Filestream’s local caching idea.

Looks like OneDrive has a photo management facility, and I guess there’s the W10 photos app. Then you could just edit each file locally using whatever editor…

Have you considered switching to Lightroom Classic rather than the vanilla CC version? You have that in your adobe subscription too. You can install it on two machines for your £10pm but only use the software one at a time – i.e. if it is launched on one the other won’t launch and vice versa. My workflow is to run it all off a plug in hard drive including the catalogue file. Hard drive gets backed up to my Synology NAS. The advantage of putting the catalogue file on the HDD as well as the RAWS is that I can swap computers and still continue to work on the files – so laptop when away and desktop when back at home. I’ll eventually transfer older photos to a drive in the bay of the NAS but not got close to capacity yet. If I didn’t want to use two computers to edit the same LR catalogue I’d just store them on the computers HDD where they get would get backed up automatically and put older photos on a cheap slow drive and again back it up. Classic has a lot more functionality than the cloud version – it’s the preferred version of all pro photographers.

Would your wife be using the same computer? If so the only issue would be the cloud size. You could run seperate catalogues or collections. It does all play together nicely I’ll admit. Images on your phone syncing with images.

Alternative – heard good things (though not used it myself) about Alienskin Exposure X4 which has gone from a niche ‘styling’ product into effectively a lightroom alternative. One time purchase rather than a subscription but local storage of file so more like LR classic than CC.

We don’t want to faff around with local hard drives though. I like the cloud magic approach, so it’s all in one single place.

It certainly is a draw to the CC approach. And with RAW files getting bigger and bigger (the latest full frame cameras are knocking out 83mb RAW files now and my wifes Huawei phone makes 30 odd mb files when put in pro/raw mode) and laptops with SSD drives having smaller and smaller capacity and with good broadband speeds now almost ubiquitous it does make sense. I’d still test out classic first to see if you notice the difference to CC.

edit – just clocked – you have the lightroom plan with 1TB storage but not LR classic or photoshop. So you can trail classic but not use it instead unless you drop the vast majority of your cloud storage.

You not just install your cc on her comp?

Ive got my cc sub on my Mac and my pc.