Hands-On: Lightroom Mobile iPad / iPhone

Stumbled on an interesting article and first hand experience using LR Mobile on the iPad and iPhone on PhotoFocus. Anyone here using or considering LR Mobile?

Eduard said:

Stumbled on an interesting article and first hand experience using LR Mobile on the iPad and iPhone on PhotoFocus. Anyone here using or considering LR Mobile?

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I've loaded it on my iPad, but have been waiting to start working with LR on the Mac first in order to get familiar with it. Thanks for the link!

After seeing this thread I decided to download it and have a look. Pretty easy to setup. Just make sure your desktop and mobile device are signed into the cloud. From the Desktop LR just enable sync (looks like you get about 54GB of space to be able to store) and presto. You have access to your pics. I've been looking through the menus and it looks like you get a fair amount of tools to work with. You're constantly hit by "pop up tips" at first. Just to give you tips on 2 finger taps, 3 finger taps, swipes, etc. Its interface is sleek and pretty easy to follow.

I personally wouldn't find much use for it but I'll tinker with it for awhile and see if that changes.

Well one thing that would have been pretty handy for me. If I was on vacay or something and just dumped my SD cards onto my iPad for 3 reasons, some quick edits in LR Mobile AND to sync them up to my desktop at home AND so I could free up the space on my SD card. But it's looking like iPad won't handle the RAW files only jpgs. I'm reading some forums now debating this whole thing. This would be a cool feature if it could be done this way.

Just got an iPad yesterday, as a matter of fact. I wasn't necessarily planning on using it (that's not among the reasons why I got one), but now that it's here it would be hard not to justify looking into it. I don't like spreading around where I work on things, nor to I necessarily like the idea of a catalog in the cloud, but there's a lot of shared tech stuff that I'm "getting over".

After a quick read I'm liking some of what this will allow me to do, particularly just sorting through a flurry of newly imported images and flag/rank them somewhere other than on my laptop. I find the need to be on WiFi a bit of a drawback, but I totally understand it from a space perspective, and thankfully there is a workaround for those of us who don't always have access to WiFi (the airline I usually fly, United, has not yet offered it).

I'll definitely play with it. I was looking to use the iPad for carrying my portfolio around with me to shows, something I couldn't always do before, and while I could always use my iPhone as a local hotspot when no public WiFi is available, I'm not crazy about the potential data charges. I can see keeping a full blown Portfolio Collection on the iPad, but using the WiFi-only function for other things. I only do preliminary and finish editing in LR, with the rest of it done in PS, Nik and onOne tools, so it won't cut down on editing time - but it could easily make my life easier in the image review and clean-up end of things.

Here is another interesting article from Fotozones regarding the LR Mobile.

I installed it and started playing with it yesterday. One major drawback for me is that I'd like to be able to prevent accidental updates in LR Mobile from automatically being applied to the image on my laptop. I'm going to try something today to see if I can add virtual copies of "finished" images to a collection instead of the original. This way if I accidentally change it then it will be applied to the copy and the original edits will remain intact and can be propagated to the copy again. I'd try it right now, but LR isn't operating properly and I suspect I need to reboot.

Reboot complete and test done - yes, you can place Virtual Copies of photos in a collection. Yeah!!

Until I get confident with this stuff I suspect that anything for "showing" will go in as a virtual copy, or I may just wind up exporting a fold of Portfolio JPEGs, which is likely the smarter solution since the image itself is finished and any applied edits can just be reset to get it back to normal.

I finally had a chance to play around with it. Pretty slick. I wish it supported Smart Collections. As it stands now, the biggest use I see is for sharing family/vacation pictures with my wife on her iPad.

Jake: Instead of Virtual Copies we need a LR Mobile Viewer. That would solve the issue.

I'd rather be able to selectively choose whether or not I want to sync a change on the mobile app. Give me a switch in the app that says, "Auto Sync On/Off". Give me a box I can check on any given image that allows me to include or exclude an image in the next sync, with a Select All or Deselect All button like I get on an import. It can't be that hard to do, and I don't doubt that they'll get there. For now, I've taken to logging out on my laptop until I want to purposefully sync with my tablet.

I think I found the answer. You can share your Collections via the website (lightroom.adobe.com). This way the Collection is view only.

This link is full of great Mobile tips and is how I figured it out. Awesome!! This is exactly what I wanted.

I can share my photos from my own website if I have Wifi access. Truthfully, while I know they have my shots "in the cloud" now, I don't want to drive anyone to their site to see them.

More than just sharing, what I don't like is that accidental and unintended changes are automatically applied unless I purposefully reset the image. That's fine if I know I did it, but not if I do it unaware. It's a bit of a dangerous tool as is.

BackdoorHippie said:

More than just sharing, what I don't like is that accidental and unintended changes are automatically applied unless I purposefully reset the image. That's fine if I know I did it, but not if I do it unaware. It's a bit of a dangerous tool as is.

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If you share from the lightroom.adobe.com, whoever you share with can not edit - it is view only. I like that the site is secure (https). I also use a service to share images but this may just replace that - and save a few dollars along the way.