I’ve tried every way I can to work around this, but that just kills Lightroom CC for me. Lightroom CC doesn't offer Smart Collections (whaaaat?!), but its AI-powered Sensei search tool is rather good. I searched for 'sea' and found a whole load of images in my collection I might not have thought about. (Image credit: Rod Lawton/Digital Camera World) (opens in new tab) 5. Smart Collections in Lightroom Classic are really useful. They are like Collections that populate automatically based on search criteria you specify. You can create Smart Collections to display images with a specific keyword, or combination of keywords, photos taken with a particular camera or lens or ISO setting, images taken between specific dates. It does have Adobe's server-based AI-driven Sensei search engine, which is very useful in its own right – and Lightroom Classic doesn't have this. Sensei is remarkably good at finding matches for objects you search for based not just on keywords and filenames but what's actually in the picture. There are lots of programs that are better at certain things than Lightroom, like DxO PhotoLab for noise reduction, for example.

Lightroom Classic works with them pretty well, Lightroom CC does not.

(Image credit: DxO Labs) (opens in new tab) 6. It’s not just Adobe that makes great photo-editing software.

I also use Capture One, Exposure X, DxO PhotoLab and Nik Collection, ON1 Photo RAW, Luminar and more.

Lightroom Classic plays nicely with all of these. Most come with plug-ins that you can launch from within Lightroom Classic, and for those that don’t (like Capture One) you can run them separately, export your processed images to the same folder structure used by your Lightroom catalog and then sync your folders or import the new images manually when you’re done. Lightroom CC does not support plug-ins and only talks to one external editor – Photoshop. So you CAN open an image in Photoshop from Lightroom CC and THEN launch the plug-in you need, but that seems a really clumsy way to go about things that takes twice as long and needs an additional application that gobbles up precious memory you might not have available.

Lightroom 6 software