Sensible LrM workflow for travel?

Question

Trying to get my head round a sensible workflow for LrM and LrC for a month long train trip to Spain next month and have a couple of questions which are hopefully not too dumb and/or been answered many times before.

I travel with an iPad Air 4 with 256 GB storage plus a 1TB Sandisk SSD. My intention is to return home with all the unedited RAW files from the camera backed up onto both my iPad and the SSD along with just my selected keepers in LrM in the Cloud. In the past I have tended to wait until I got home before uploading everything onto my OneDrive storage and then importing into LrClassic for editing and sharing. I don’t have a laptop powerful enough to run LrC to take with me (nor the baggage allowance!) so am confined to the iPad.

Since I’ll have a week at the end of my trip where I’ll have time to review and make a start on editing my images (plus decent wifi), I’d like to do as much of the culling in LrM then and possibly some editing of the chosen images with a view to completing this task in LrClassic when I get home. I want to avoid duplication and also having to re-edit stuff I’ve already done in LrM.

My questions are:

If I import images from my iPad Files app into LrM (leaving the SSD to one side as an extra backup), are these stored in the Adobe Cloud as full RAW files or are they Smart Previews? I have the 20GB Photography Plan but am likely to be importing more than 20GB during the month. If they are Smart previews, I presume they don’t count towards that allowance but if full files then they will?
If I then go through and cull and am left with only the keepers in LRM and delete the rejects from LrM (to keep within my 20GB), I presume all the original RAW files (including rejects) stay untouched in the iPad Files app? How can I link my edits of the keeps to the files in the Files app? How does Local Storage work in LrM?
When I get home, when I open LrClassic, I guess it will synch with those images I’ve selected and edited in LrM. Will it replicate my LrM Albums as LrC Collections which are synched with each other? Will it also download the original files for those selected images into whatever location I specify in the Lightroom Synch Preferences dialog?

I also noticed that if I go in the other direction and set a LrClassic collection to synch with LrM, it will upload all the images to the Cloud and replicate the Collection name as an Album. If I then turn off the synching in LrC, the Album disappears from LrM but the images still appear in the All Photos section of LrM. Why don’t they disappear as well? If I keep turning synch on and off with whichever Collection I’’m working on, won’t I end up with everything accumiulating and appearing in the Cloud? Or are these just Smart Previews which i can safely delete as I go?

Hope this makes sense and grateful for any enlightenment.

Conrad_C · Accepted Answer

…have a couple of questions which are hopefully not too dumb and/or been answered many times before…
By @robkendrew

There are no dumb questions, especially about Lightroom because the travel workflow is not completely intuitive when you throw Lightroom Classic into the mix. It’s intuitive if you’re used to other cloud-only solutions like Google Photos or iCloud Photos, but Lightroom Classic is very much tied to originals stored locally and that’s where the confusion starts..

I travel with an iPad Air 4 with 256 GB storage plus a 1TB Sandisk SSD. My intention is to return home with all the unedited RAW files from the camera backed up onto both my iPad and the SSD along with just my selected keepers in LrM in the Cloud.
By @robkendrew

On my last trip, I was able to automate much of that using the app Sync Folders Pro for iOS. It‘s not free, but it’s cheap enough that I thought it was well worth it. (The non-Pro version is free, but is missing features I wanted.) If you have used any of the major Mac backup utilities like Carbon Copy Cloner or ChronoSync, Sync Folders is similarly powerful though a little more difficult to figure out.

What it lets me do is create presets that save the source and destination folders, so I can save a preset for copying from a specific camera card to a specific folder in the Files app on the iPad. I have another preset that copies all photos in the iPad card import folder to the external SSD connected to the iPad. I have these presets set to sync, so it does not copy everything every time; it only copies that day’s new images. So at the end of each travel day, I connect the camera card and SSD to the iPad through a USB-C hub, run the sync presets, and end up with two complete copies of all photos taken on the trip, one on the iPad and another on the SSD. With two backups I feel comfortable reformatting a card.

JohanElzenga already answered the questions correctly, but here is a little more commentary.

On question #1, all images you import into Lightroom are always copied and queued for upload to Lightroom cloud storage. Uploads from any non-Classic client are always treated as originals, so they always count against the storage limit. Lightroom Classic is the only client that uploads Smart Previews, but because you aren’t taking a computer that runs Lightroom Classic, you will not be uploading any Smart Previews during the trip.

2. If I then go through and cull and am left with only the keepers in LRM and delete the rejects from LrM (to keep within my 20GB), I presume all the original RAW files (including rejects) stay untouched in the iPad Files app? How can I link my edits of the keeps to the files in the Files app? How does Local Storage work in LrM?
By @robkendrew

In any non-Classic (cloud) version of Lightroom, local storage contains cached Smart Previews or full copies of originals downloaded from the cloud. What triggers a download is editing an image in the Detail view. This cache is automatically loaded and flushed as you edit different cloud originals. The only way to keep more originals in local storage is to increase the Cache Size Limit in Lightroom settings. However — and this is very important to understand — any photos in this local cache are in Lightroom private app storage. They are not exposed in the Files app, and therefore not available to any other app. If an image exists in Lightroom, the only way to see it in another app is to send it directly using a Share option in Lightroom, or export it to the Photos or Files app and have the other app pick it up from there.

You are correct that originals in the Files app are not altered by Lightroom. If you imported some keepers into iPad Lightroom during the trip, the imports of those files are copies. They and their edits are sent up to the Lightroom cloud, disconnected from and not linked in any way to their originals in the Files app. So any images you import into Lightroom will be separate from and not linked to the copies of those images on the iPad or external SSD.

Have fun in Spain…it’s a great country to photograph.

JohanElzenga · Answer

1: They will be originals, not smart previews.

2: Lightroom does not delete images from the Files app.

3: Lightroom Classic will download all new images in Lightroom Mobile and create a collection for each Lightroom album it doesn't already have.

4: You must remove an image from 'All Synced Photographs' in Lightroom Classic in order to delete it from the cloud. Turning off syncing for a collection/album will only remove the album itself from the cloud, not the images in that album.

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