How does lightroom local storage work?

[JamesMay82]

if I select store full images locally to an external drive and then I don’t use my external drive for a month and just import edit from the images in the cloud will it automatically know to download the images when I plug the external drive back in?

How many of you download full copies or do you just trust the cloud?

 

[mollyc]

Local storage is local. LR will make smart previews for you to edit small res files if your external isn't connected. But the whole point of local storage is that it is not in the cloud. I keep all my LR images on my local computer hard drive or a network connected drive (NAS). The only images that are in the cloud for me are ones that I take and edit in LR on my phone then get synced over.

Perhaps I'm not understanding your question.

 

[JamesMay82]

Local storage is local. LR will make smart previews for you to edit small res files if your external isn't connected. But the whole point of local storage is that it is not in the cloud. I keep all my LR images on my local computer hard drive or a network connected drive (NAS). The only images that are in the cloud for me are ones that I take and edit in LR on my phone then get synced over.

Perhaps I'm not understanding your question.

Apologies

So I have my library downloaded on an external disk and I understand how that works.

But if I didn’t plug in the external drive it would then access my photos over the cloud and I could import new photos which would then sync to the cloud etc.

But say if I then connected the external drive after a month of not using it. Would it know to download the photos to my external drive that haven’t already been downloaded? Or would it just skip them as such and only download files when you import them the first time and with thr drive connected.