Adobe Creative Cloud?

I finally upgraded my quite older iMac with a refurbished Mac Pro and its time to reload software, a quite pleasant pastime. I was thinking about "upgrading" to Adobe's Creative Cloud package with Photoshop and Lightroom. The monthly fee is less than $10 USD per month, which isn't too bad considering version upgrades in the past were fairly expensive, and standalone versions are no longer available. I'm currently using Photoshop 5.1 and Lightroom 6 standalone versions.

 

I guess I have two questions before deciding to go with Adobe CC or not. First, can I use the service without having to store my images on Adobe's servers (I'd like to keep them where they are, on my desktop)? Second question is, I have developed about a dozen or so Photoshop Actions over the years, as well as having several plug-ins...can I still use these actions and plugins with a prescription-based program? If not, that tells me to stay with what I've been using.

Adobe PS and LR come in both Classic and Cloud versions. The former resides in your computer, along with your image library. The latter gives you the option of storing and editing images stored in the Cloud or locally. You can download both versions and use them simultaneously or for different purposes.

 

Images in the Cloud are available on mobile devices, for display or editing. In LR Classic, you can assign images to "Collections," which can also be synchronized with mobile devices in the Cloud. Collections aren't copies, rather pointers to the images assigned to them.

 

The Cloud isn't very practical for backup on the road. It can take the better part of a day to upload the contents of a single 64 or 128 GB card. It is a great way to create electronic albums, with superb display quality, taking very little space on the device.

"Time Machine" backup has saved me a few times.

Yes, you can keep all of your images on your own computer. Also, you should be able to save you existing Photoshop actions and use them with CC. I did this a while ago and can't remember how I did it, but it wasn't hard. Adobe support should have directions for how to do this.