Lousing Local feature on iPhone Lightroom Mobile app

Currently, you cannot use the local feature with an external hard drive on the Lightroom Mobile app for iPhone. The app only shows the "Device" option, which refers to photos and videos in the Photos app.

However, on Android devices, it is possible to edit photos directly from an external hard drive using Lightroom Mobile. On iPhone/iPad, you can only edit photos in the Photos app when you are in the Device tab. Hope they will add option to edit photos on external drive to Lightroom on iOS!

Paweł Słowik
www.slowik.eu

As far as I know the Local editing feature is only in the Mac/Windows desktop version of Lightroom, and not yet available in any mobile or web version of Lightroom.

The Device tab on mobile is not the same as the Local tab on desktop, and the Device tab is technically not mobile device storage in general. On iOS, Device specifically means images that are in Apple Photos, so it will not show any images stored out in normal iOS file storage (in other words, it doesn’t show images that you’re storing in the folders in the Files app).

On iOS Lightroom you can use the Import button to browse photos stored in the Files app, so this is a way to see and select images on an external volume connected to an iOS device. But again, it doesn’t work like the Local tab on the desktop, because any images you select this way are copied into iPhone/iPad internal storage for upload, so you can’t just work directly from the external volume.

So, for now at least, there is no way to use Lightroom on iOS to simply browse and edit photos without importing them into Lightroom.  This does particularly limit the usefulness of Lightroom when you want to use external volumes to make up for not having enough internal storage space on the device.