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MerkurNJ
Known Participant
November 15, 2023
Question

Lightroom workflow with iPhone

  • November 15, 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 1459 views

Hi - I have been using Lightroom Classic for many years to organize my photos taken on an SLR. I have over 200,000 photos all organized into Year folders with 'Month' and 'Event' subfolders.  This has worked very well for me but I am now finding I take more photos on the iPhone and want to include those.

 

What I have set up is a 'watched' folder in Lightroom that auto imports images from my iCloud Photos folder.  All my iPhone photos now appear in Lightroom.  All in one folder of over 30,000 images!  What I would like to do is drag those photos over from the Auto-import iCloud folder to a Lightroom folder organized in my Year/Month/Event format.  When I do this however they disappear from the iCloud folder.  What I would really like to do is Ctrl-Click-Drag to copy those images but Lightroom doesn't allow that.


I am sure I am not the only one that has run into this.  What have other users found is a good strategy for organizing iCloud Photos in Lightroom?

 

Thanks.

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    1 reply

    Conrad_C
    Community Expert
    Conrad_CCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    November 15, 2023

    I do this using a different path, not going through iCloud Drive. I’m not saying this is the best way, but it’s what I like to do.

     

    For photos taken with the iOS built-in camera or saved by other apps into the iOS Apple Photos app:

    1. Plug the phone into the computer, and the Import dialog box in Lightroom Classic sees it as if it was a camera card, listing the images in the Photos app.

    2. Make sure my standard import preset is selected so that the Destination panel organizes imported photos into my preferred folder structure, and confirm the import. The iPhone photos are imported into the same folders where all of my traditional camera photos are.

     

    For photos taken with the Lightroom app camera:

    1. In my primary catalog, enable sync with Lightroom Photos (cloud storage), and make sure sync is enabled in the Lightroom app on iPhone.

    2. In Lightroom Classic preferences, in the Sync tab, set the download folder destination and folder structure to match what I use for photos coming in through the Import dialog box.

    3. Whenever I open that catalog, the sync feature downloads any new photos in Lightroom Photos (in the cloud) that were auto-uploaded from the Lightroom app on the iPhone. The Sync tab Location settings organize the downloaded originals into my standard folder structure.

     

     

    Instead of doing both of those methods, you can combine these two in the App Settings for the Lightroom app on iPhone. In the Import section, under Auto Add From Device Photos, enable your choice of Photos, Screenshots, and Videos. Whenever you create any of those with the iPhone built-in camera app, they will be auto-imported into the Lightroom app on iPhone, so you wouldn’t have to import them separately (skipping my first series of steps above). Everything would just come in through the Lightroom Photos cloud download to Lightroom Classic. In other words, instead of going through the iCloud sync system, it would all go through the Lightroom cloud sync system.

      M
      MerkurNJAuthor
      Known Participant
      November 18, 2023

      Thanks for these ideas here Conrad.  I like using the iCloud as it keeps all the photos synced between the two iPads and an iPhone.  I will look into using some of your workflow here to come up with a robust process.

       

      Paul

      Conrad_C
      Community Expert
      Conrad_CCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      November 18, 2023

      What my ideas don’t cover is going in the other direction, out: When someone also wants to have a common pool to sync out to both the Adobe cloud and Apple Photos/iCloud Photos. That’s a tough one to resolve because both systems want their pool to be the central one and they don’t integrate. So I kind of keep everything in the Adobe system and don’t use the Apple cloud very much for photos.

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