Most notably, in a comfy chair with good light or on a weekly airplane flight. I will be using a Collection of mine that is a work in progress to craft black and white images of the Himalayas. Setting up Lightroom for mobile use Connect Lightroom to your Adobe ID The first step is to make sure you have the right version of Lightroom on your PC or Mac. You need to have version 5. You also need an Adobe ID free for this to all work as it is the hub in the cloud that makes this all spin. If you need help setting up a Collection, the will help. After clicking, you will notice a double arrow appears to the left of the Collection. This indicates the Collection will be syncing when sync is turned on. Now, up in the top left, Lightroom will let you know it is starting the sync of those images. As a first pass, we are done! Simply repeat this process for Collections you have already created. Additionally, when creating a new Collection, there is a box that can be checked to automatically sync the new Collection. It looks like this: Setting up your iPad or iPhone for use This is the easy part. Go to the App Store and search for Lightroom Mobile. You will be presented with an Adobe ID screen after paging through the first time introduction. After signing in you will be taken to a page showing all the Collections you have set up to sync on the desktop version of Lightroom. Tap the main image and you will be taken to the Collection itself. The first time you run through Lightroom Mobile it will give you helpful contextual hints. Tap on any picture to edit it. Quick filtering with Lightroom mobile While there are a lot of features in Lightroom Mobile that make it useful for photographers, this post is going to concentrate on the basics to get you started. For me, filtering is the best use of this app, currently. I enjoy being able to filter my images from the comfort of my living room or while traveling. I also do some basic edits to images but I usually leave the major edits to my desktop. To filter images, I use both the flags and stars features. You can switch between changing those features by tapping the icons in the bottom left corner. When the flag icon is highlighted, as it is here, simply move your finger up or down on the screen to pick, unpick or reject images. These settings will then sync over to your desktop within seconds as long as Lightroom is open on the desktop. I use these two features to sort images. Flags are images I especially like and I know I want to work on back at my desktop. I then use two stars to indicate the image should be used for my stock photography work the scale then goes up to three stars once edits are done, four stars when title and keywords are done and five stars when completely finished. There are a lot of editing options available in Lightroom Mobile that can be accessed from tapping the icons at the bottom of the screen on an individual image. All of these features are best left for a future post. To do this, click on the three little dots on the bottom of the Collection image: This brings up a menu with many options. Choose to Enable Offline Editing and Lightroom Mobile will now bring across Smart Previews of the images to your mobile device. What have you found useful in Adobe Lightroom Mobile? Beware though that on older computers enabling mobile sync will make the develop module unbearably slow for images that are in synced galleries. For metadata editing and similar as well as importing on location from a memory card, the third-party Lighroom companion iPad app Photosmith is worth considering. It can also sync via WiFi and does not require an internet connection nor a Creative Cloud subscription. Is internet required for syncing if mac and ipad are on the same wifi network? I see internet needed to sign on, but the reason I ask is that I am on a boat and bandwidth is precious and expensive. How do you handle that issue? This syncing process can also be quite slow, even on fast internet, at least here in Europe. And on the mobile device, you have no real indication if all images are transferred or not. New images just show up, and sometimes you have to sign out and in order to get new galleries to show up which loses all images stored for offline use. That means you first have to import all images, and only then can you set them to sync. You cannot connect all your cards and have them import and sync with LR mobile over night, you have to manually start the sync after the import is complete. For fast turnaround times, the current workflow is just impractical. When I have a set of 1500 images, it is not uncommon for me to have to wait two days until everything is ready to go and shows up properly on my iPad. For workarounds, you essentially have the following options: 1 Bring a laptop instead and use Desktop LR like we used to. From the camera roll, you can import the files into LR Mobile. But this only works for JPEGs, LR cannot import raw files on a device. Laptop needs to be running for it to work and it is clumsy, but I have done this on occasion. You should be able to see the ratings applied in CaptureOne in LR since they are XMP metadata. Laptop needs to be running for this of course. I hope we will see major improvements when LR6 comes out in February, but I doubt it. Not having local sync via WiFi gives them an excuse to make LR mobile a cloud-exclusive service, luring people into subscriptions. What I find to help and take considerably less than two days for even 5000 images is to turn off the Auto Lock feature of your iPad if it is safe for you to do so, assuming you are at home and leave LR Mobile running. With leaving it on, plugged in and syncing, I can get through 1000 images in about an hour, maybe a little more. It would be real swell if they would make it sync directly through USB too. That would cure a lot of ills for time and bandwidth. Maybe that will come one day. Paying the creative cloud subscription ONLY for Lightroom mobile seems a little too much for personal use a few times a month, even though I really liked my short trial period.
