Desktop LR - Sync with Mobile

[richardh83026275]

Hi there

I thought I had read somewhere that you can only sync a Collection from desktop to mobile.  However, I have synced two Collections which appear on the mobile but, in addition, above those there's an icon named 'Lightroom Photos' which is all the photos in those two collections!

So, my first question is whether it is really necessary to create a Collection before being able to sync?

The next thing is that yesterday I had a long Chat session with an Adobe rep who said you can only sync one Collection.  I thought that odd at the time and seems to be wrong as I've now synced two Collections!  Can you confirm it is possible to sync more than one Collection?  In fairness to Adobe, you have not seen the full Chat session and it may be I was not explaining myself clearly as I'm a LR newbie!

Richard

[Michael J. Hoffman · Accepted solution]

Hi Richard,

Let's take the second question first, since that's the easy one. Perhaps miscommunication on one side or the other... Lightroom mobile can only sync with one Catalog (not one Collection). If you attempt to sync a different catalog, Lightroom will warn you and then if you proceed, you'll replace all synced images with the ones form the new catalog.

Now as to the first query about collections. You can create collections on Lightroom mobile as well as on the desktop. Any synced photo from any collection will appear in the collection called "Lightroom Photos" on your mobile device, but called "All synced photos" in the Catalog panel of Lightroom desktop.

If you have "Auto-add" enabled in Lightroom Mobile settings, but don't have any specific collection enabled with Auto-add, any new images detected by Lightroom mobile will be added to the "Lightroom Photos" collection and synced to your desktop, but will not appear in any of the other collections. I find this to be a bit troublesome, as it's hard to track down synced photos that aren't in a specific collection (so I always keep a special general purpose catalog called "On the Go" with Auto-Add enabled, so I know where to find those photos).

I hope this helps - if any of this isn't quite clear, please do let me know.

Mike