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Question

Workflow with Lightroom Desktop, Photoshop, and iPad?

Forum|Forum|18 days ago
August 29, 2026
6 replies
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Hi Everyone...

Recently, I moved over from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom Desktop. I did this for a few reasons, but mostly because I wanted the freedom to fully work on my Lightroom and Photoshop files at home on my computer, or out and about on my iPad and everything would sync perfectly. Or at least that was my understanding of how it would work.

In my current setup in Lightroom Desktop, I have my entire photo library (681gb of 1TB) synced to Adobes Cloud. I also have Lightroom Desktop store a copy of all originals on my local external hard drive (which is also then backed up to another hard drive via Apples Time Machine). My plan was that once my 1TB plan was nearly full, I would then begin to save older individual photo shoots locally, and keep only the keepers from that shoot in the cloud.

Okay, so here comes what I have experienced...

Editing the cloud based photos in Lightroom works pretty smooth. My issue arises when taking a photo in Lightroom and clicking to edit it in Photoshop. Just a standard RAW photo takes maybe 10-15 seconds to open in Photoshop which isn't a big deal. However, when I go to open up any of my TIFF files (that automatically get saved back to Lightroom) they take a long time to open. For example, a 1.54 GB TIFF file took just shy of 2 minutes to open in Photoshop. I spoke to Adobe about this and they told me that even though I have Lightroom also save a copy of it locally to an external hard drive, Lightroom will download the copy from the Cloud to open it up and not use the locally stored version. So, what do I do? Do I somehow only keep my edited TIFF files stored locally and take them completely off of the Cloud? What is the best Workflow?

I've also noticed that with this setup that Photoshop gets pretty bogged down and stops responding fairly often. I get the Mac spinning beachball icon and I have a MacBook Pro with M3 Pro chip and 36gb of RAM which should handle nearly anything I throw at it.

My final issue also comes down to having access to everything everywhere. I had thought that on Lightroom on my iPad, if I clicked on a photo that I have saved to the Cloud as a TIFF because it has edited layers in Photoshop, I could then open it in photoshop on my iPad and still have access to all of the layers. Adobe tells me that the way it works is that Lightroom on iPad can only see the flattened version of that photo. They did mention something about a Photoshop Cloud Document (.PSDC) and that if I started to edit the photo on my iPad first that it would be automatically saved into that format. But, to be honest I am still a bit confused on what's the best workflow for this.

My apologies if this is a long post or if it should have been split into multiple posts (if so, just let me know). But, this was all of the thoughts that I had on this topic and I would love to hear what others experience has been and what type of workflow they've found works best for this.

Thank you in advance

Nadeem28230335k4xr

Known Participant

@EngineFD223 what do you envision your workflow would be if you are traveling? Take your Macbook along with your iPad and follow the same workflow? Personally, I have a Mac Mini and an iPad so my first stop is to load images via my ipad first. I do want to incorporate Photoshop into my workflow and not sure how I would want to go about it.

E

EngineFD223Author

Participating Frequently

I would assume when traveling that I would want my workflow to be something like this:

Import my whole photo shoot from my SD card into Lightroom on my iPad into a new album. That way my photos are safely in the cloud.
Cull my images on my iPad and tag the keepers
Begin editing my keepers directly on my iPad.
When I get back home I open up Lightroom desktop and sort my album to show me the non keepers from the photo shoot
Highlight all of the non keepers and hit Archive Locally. This would place them on my external hard drive in a folder I have called Photo Archive.
The tricky part is that I would also have to select my keepers as well if I wanted them backed up onto my local hard drive. I would do this by sorting my keepers, and then instead of using the archive tool (which would delete them from the cloud) I would have to choose Export > Original + Settings and place them in the same folder.

If you want that hybrid workflow where you can have your images safe locally as well as keepers in the cloud, I see no other way to do it. I wish that Adobe would make the whole process more seamless.

Nadeem28230335k4xr

Known Participant

Agree with you. One of my big hangups is, from what I understand, sending to photoshop from Lightroom (desktop or mobile) a 2nd, 3rd, etc. time will flatten the file and you will no longer have the ability to work on the layers. Also, you can’t send an image as a smart object. You still have to use Lightroom Classic for that. I feel like this would make Photoshop on ipad not very useful.

Anshul_Saini

Community Manager

Hi @EngineFD223,

Thanks for such a detailed description. Your workflow makes sense, and there are really two separate pieces here: the Lightroom-to-Photoshop handoff and keeping layered Photoshop documents editable across your Mac and iPad.

The behavior you’re seeing with the large TIFF is expected with the current Lightroom workflow. When you choose Edit in Photoshop, Lightroom prepares the file for Photoshop rather than simply passing the locally stored original to Photoshop. The local-copy setting is intended to maintain a local copy of your Lightroom originals, but it doesn’t make that copy the source for the Photoshop handoff.

That can become noticeable with very large TIFFs. A 1.54 GB file must be retrieved/prepared before Photoshop can open it, so the transfer and preparation can dominate the time you’re seeing.

I would not move those TIFFs out of Lightroom yet. First, it would be useful to establish where the two-minute delay is coming from.

Could you try the following with one of the large TIFFs?

1. Make sure the TIFF has completely finished syncing.

2. Disconnect the Mac from the internet.

3. In Lightroom, try Edit in Photoshop on that TIFF.

4. Compare the result with what happens when you’re online.

If the file still opens normally while offline, that would tell us something important about the local copy and the handoff. If Lightroom cannot complete the operation while offline, that would point us in a different direction.
_______________________

The M3 Pro with 36 GB RAM is certainly capable of handling substantial files, but a 1.5 GB TIFF can require considerably more working memory once Photoshop expands it into its internal representation.

I’d be particularly interested in whether the beachball occurs only with TIFFs coming from Lightroom, or also when you open similarly large files directly from your local drive in Photoshop.

That distinction would help separate a Lightroom-to-Photoshop handoff/storage issue from a more general Photoshop performance issue.

___________________

Keeping Photoshop layers available on iPad. This is the other important distinction in your workflow.

A TIFF/PSD file that is imported into Lightroom is treated as an image asset. Lightroom doesn’t provide Photoshop-style layer editing for that document on iPad.

A Photoshop Cloud Document (.psdc) is different. It is a Photoshop document stored in Photoshop’s cloud workflow and is designed to remain editable, including its layers, across Photoshop on desktop and iPad.

So for a workflow like yours, it can help to think of the two applications as having different “masters”:

Lightroom: RAW processing, organization, Lightroom edits, and your photo library.

Photoshop: layered compositing/retouching where you need the individual layers to remain editable across Photoshop devices.

The Photoshop Cloud Document would therefore be the appropriate master for work that you specifically need to continue editing with layers in Photoshop on your iPad. The Lightroom version can remain your Lightroom-managed/rendered version.

Your idea of keeping local copies of your originals for backup is also reasonable; I wouldn’t change that part of the workflow simply to work around the Photoshop handoff until we’ve established exactly where the delay is coming from.

One additional useful test would be to take a similarly large TIFF stored directly on your local drive rather than coming from Lightroom, open it in Photoshop, and compare the opening time. That gives us a clean comparison between the Lightroom-to-Photoshop path and Photoshop’s normal handling of the file.

Please also share the Photoshop & Lightroom > Help > System Info, and approximately how much free space is available on your Photoshop scratch disk.

That should give us enough information to work out which part of the workflow is actually creating the bottleneck.

Best,

Anshul Saini

E

EngineFD223Author

Participating Frequently

Hi Anshul Saini,

First of all, thank you for taking the time to respond. Below are some of the answers to your questions, as well as what I've learned about the limitations of the Lightroom Desktop platform, what I am still confused about, and how best to develop a workflow for LR Desktop.

I did some of the testing that you requested with my TIFF files. I used the exact same TIFF file (1.54GB) in the Cloud as well as locally on my external HDD. In all cases, I made sure that Photoshop was completely closed prior to initiating the "Edit in Photoshop" command.

Cloud: 54 seconds
Local: 7 seconds
Cloud with Wi-Fi turned off: 1:10

I don’t even fully understand how, with Wi-Fi turned off, it was able to open the file from the Cloud tab. I’m guessing in that case it timed out and fetched the locally stored copy? I do have LR set to "Store a copy of all originals locally."

I’ve also caught another quirk of how LR Desktop behaves with PS files, which is very different from LR Classic. I had a bunch of TIFF files both in the Cloud and Local. Some would open up in Photoshop on my Mac with the layers intact, and others would just show a flattened background image. After a bunch of digging, I realized that the ones that would open as a flattened image had some finishing touches done in Lightroom (masking, color grading, vignette, etc.). LR Desktop doesn't give you the option to "Edit Original." It automatically defaults to editing a copy with Lightroom adjustments baked in. If I reset the photo's Lightroom adjustments, then it lets me open it and shows all of the Photoshop layers. Is there not a better workaround for this?

As far as the System Info is concerned for LR and PS, what specifically would you like me to paste in here? There is a ton of information in there (especially in PS) and it would be a gigantic wall of text. I also don’t want to post any identifying information about myself if it is contained in there. I checked the scratch disk for PS and it is using my main SSD, which has 413GB available at the present time.

I’m going to pivot slightly away from my scenario that I had when I originally posted this. Since posting, I have spent hours watching videos, talking to Adobe support, and using AI (Google Gemini) to help me diagnose my issues and figure out the best overall workflow. I have come to the conclusion that I would like to use LR Desktop utilizing both the Local tab and Cloud tab to their fullest extent. This is the workflow that I am imagining:

I come home from a photoshoot and offload all of my images from my SD card onto my local 2TB HDD (which we will call ‘Photo Archive’).
Within the Local tab, I cull all of my images and tag my picks with a flag.
I then sort my picks and upload them onto Adobe's Cloud from my HDD.
When I am ready to edit, I do so within the Cloud tab on my MacBook in LR Desktop, or I can choose to edit the photos on my iPad.

The Cloud would essentially only store my picks from each photoshoot, instead of having all of my cloud storage eaten up by pictures that I may never touch.

However, in this scenario, I have one big disconnect that I don’t know the best way to overcome. Once I am done editing a photo session in the Cloud (and I want to keep all of those photos in the Cloud), how then can I sync those edits back down to my local HDD to maintain a master copy?

If I use the Archive feature in the Cloud and select the original local folder, it will replace the local photos in my Photo Archive on my 2TB HDD. This is the behavior that I would want, but then it also removes the photos from the Cloud and I would have to re-upload them.
I could alternatively use the Export option from the Cloud and choose "Original + Settings." But if I choose the same folder where the originals came from in my Photo Archive, it won’t replace the unedited versions. All it will do is put the edited photos (from the Cloud) next to the unedited ones and add a "-2" to the filename. So for example, Photo Session 1.ARW would sit right next to Photo Session 1-2.ARW.

In both of those scenarios, there are a lot of moving parts and I risk deleting my photos inadvertently. I wish there was an easy way to just sync my edits across the Cloud and my local HDD similarly to how LR Classic works. I get that LR Desktop treats both the Local tab and Cloud tab as separate masters, but there has to be a better workflow for this.

I would love any further insight that you can provide me with.

Thanks again!

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