Do you add your iPhone photos to your Lightroom Catalogue?

Do you feel the catalogue gets too large and clunky?

From adding smartphone pictures? Not any more than with the photos and videos from all of other cameras I’ve owned (35mm, micro 4/3, action camera, advanced compact, and older digital cameras going back almost 30 years, plus scans of negative film taken by four other cameras many years ago…).

The smartphone photos are only a small percentage of the almost 200,000 frames and videos in my Lightroom Classic catalog from all of the cameras I’ve ever owned, so to me, the phone is just another camera in the database.

I’m in ​@dj_paige’s  camp.

I set LR Mobile to automatically import from my Iphone’s camera roll and sync with LR Cloud, syncing down into LR Classic. Once set up, this is much easier and more reliable than trying to import from the phone with a USB cable. I’ve got about 55K photos cataloged, which as dj_paige alludes is on the smaller end of catalog sizes.

I delete from the LR stack almost all “ephemeral” phone pics, such as the floor and aisle numbers in the airport parking garage or the recipe my wife needed while grocery shopping.

Totally on board with all files in one place.

The biggest hassle for me is getting the RAW files out of iCloud. Maybe someone has a better system? I am only able to download RAW files from iCloud using my PC one at a time if I’m lucky.

Depending on the file type (mov, jpg, dng, heic) LRC handles them differently. I’ve had only mov files import and display when the JPG’s were also there. My workaround was to create a JPG folder and move them all into that, then resync the parent folder in LRC.

My opinion is that you want all of your photos (that’s 100%, every single one) to be organized the same way within one organizing tool. I don’t like and would never allow some photos to be cataloged in one spot and other photos to be cataloged in another spot. Because then I’m going to mis-remember which photo is in which cataloging method and then I’m going to panic because I will think the photo is lost somehow; or even if I don’t panic, it takes me extra long to find the photo I want, I’ll probably spend 10 minutes trying to find the photo in the wrong cataloging method. Don’t go there.

My main worry is bloating the catalogue though, so I’m curious about what others have tried. 

Bloating? Some people here have 500,000 photos in a Lightroom Classic catalog without problems (except the backups take longer).

PS: your writing mentions Lightroom and Lightroom Classic as if they are the same thing. They are different software that do different things; no tags in Lightroom.

I selectively import iPhone images via the Lightroom Mobile app on the phone.