Working Standalone with SSD and LR CC on iPad

When you can't count on the Internet during a trip, one way to do this is to disable syncing in the Lightroom iPad app and keep it that way for the whole trip. You should be able to import from the SSD, edit, and export, and as long as syncing is disabled, it won’t try to connect to the Internet and upload. However, because images aren’t getting uploaded, the iPad could fill up if there isn’t enough free space for all the photos you import, so if your iPad storage capacity is limited you probably just want to import the images you want to edit during the trip.

If, after you get home, you plan to locally bulk-import all photos directly from the SSD to Lightroom Classic, you probably want to delete the copies you imported into the iPad app first. The reason is that when you enable syncing again, all those images are going to upload out of the iPad and download into Lightroom Classic, and I forget whether that means you might end up with two copies on the Mac.

The iPad app is designed so much for Internet syncing that if you want to go around that, there are lots of parts to keep track of. To summarize:

1. In the Lightroom app for iPad, disable syncing just before you leave on the trip, and leave it disabled for the entire trip. You don’t have to disable wifi on the iPad, just disable sync within Lightroom.

2. Import from the camera card directly through the hub to your SSD, as you already plan to do.

3. If you want to work on a few photos, import them into Lightroom on iPad from the SSD. Any photos imported will be copied to iPad internal storage. (There is no way to link to the images on the SSD.)

4. If you must save edits for any raw image you edited on the iPad, you can export it as DNG. That is the only export option that preserves both raw data and edits. The Raw export option doesn’t include edits.

5. At the end of the trip, in the iPad app delete all photos, and then go into the Deleted category and delete them all permanently. Otherwise they will use up Internet syncing as Deleted photos.

6. At this point it is OK to enable syncing on the iPad again.

7. Import all the trip photos from your SSD to Lightroom Classic.

There is so much to get right with this that you probably want to rehearse the entire workflow before the trip, just to make sure everything above is still true (the way it works changes sometimes). Disable sync on the iPad, take some photos and import them, and leave iPad sync disabled for several days to make sure it’s possible to edit and export that way.

Note that if you import images, and enable syncing, and the iPad app has a chance to sync some photos, if you then disable syncing or lose Internet access you probably won’t be able to export any of the photos that managed to upload, because (at least the way it worked recently) it wants to download the full original before exporting and it’s no longer on the iPad. That’s the reason for disabling sync for the entire trip.

It’s kind of a hassle, but Adobe really does not intend for Lightroom for iPad to be used in an offline/local way.

I'm a bit confused as everything seems to have to revolve around LR CC connecting with the internet to upload to the Cloud which I might be able to do on limited bandwidth here and there but cannot rely on.

By @Adrian Battersby ARPS

In "normal" use, then indeed using Lightroom (it's not called LRCC any more, hasn't been for a few years) is designed around using the Adobe cloud as the hub to and from which your images would flow. So typically you would ingest into one of the Lightroom apps, such as the mobile version on the iPad, they would automatically sync to the cloud (full originals) and from they they become available to use in any other of your connected apps/devices.

Lightroom Classic gets to participate as well, though limited in some areas. Images that are added to the cloud from any Lightroom app will automatically download into a sync-enabled LrC catalog (full copy of the original), though images ingested into LrC and synced UP to the cloud only go up as smart previews, not full original.

So, when travelling with an iPad when internet access is good, the flow would be to ingest into the iPad (making a backup copy on an external drive is good), and start working on the images as they are being synced up to the cloud. Any work you do also travels up to the cloud. On returning home, fire up LrC and the images and their edits will download into the LrC catalog. Nice and simple (though take the time to setup the desired location for the downloaded images in the catalog via the options on the LrC Preferences>Lightroom Sync tab first).

But, when the internet is not likely to be available, you expose yourself to some risk. Taking backup copies of the new captures is great, but what about the edits that you might do while away? You'd also need to decide if you still want to allow the cloud upload to happen when you get back home, or if you prefer to import directly into LrC from the backup external drive. The difference is that using the cloud will likely take a big bite out of your cloud storage allowance (and if you only have the standard 20GB allowance it won't be sufficient and that can lead to some complications), though it does preserve the editing work. Using the direct import into LrC protects the cloud storage allowance, but you would lose the editing work. In that no-internet scenario, I would probably carry on editing some of the images, but I would then export them as DNG (thus the edit settings would be preserved in the DNG) back to the backup drive. It would also be further protection against losing the iPad before I got home. On return I could then do either of the two options (import into LrC or let the cloud upload from the iPad to happen), though in practice I would use the sync upload from the iPad route (because I have a sufficient cloud allowance to allow me to have my entire library stored in the cloud as originals). Having the exported DNG backups is an additional peace of mind thing.

My advice would be to figure out whatever workflow would work best for you, then verify before you travel that it's all working as expected.