How collaborate between multiple photographers and editors with Lightroom Classic?

Question

Hi,

Curious as how it would be possible for several photographers and editors in a studio to collaborate in a Lightroom Classic setting. If there would be two assistant photographers and the owner, how could these get the new images into the main Lightroom environment? If they are physically on the same location I guess bringing over SD cards to the main editing computer would be possible, but could this be accomplished over the Internet somehow?

Similarly, after selecting images to be edited the raw images or PSD files should be delegated to offsite editors, and then transferred back after editing. How could this be accomplished in a Lightroom Classic environment?

Or, is it impossible with LrC? Could these kinds of use cases be supported by Lightroom CC? But then, I have understood that application is limited compared to classic in the organising and editing department.

Or, could these two worlds somehow be combined?

Rgds,

Carolina

Conrad_C · Answer

Lightroom Classic doesn’t have any team/collaboration features; as you are finding it’s very much designed as a single-user app using local storage. The closest you might come is syncing collections to the Lightroom cloud which can then be shared with others from the Lightroom web browser app, but I forget if that lets others actually edit.

This might be changing, though. Just this week Adobe announced that Lightroom (not Classic) would start supporting the frame.io camera-to-card workflow. frame.io is a cloud-oriented team editing service that’s popular in professional video production, and Adobe recently acquired them. Supporting still photography workflows is a newer thing for them. I don’t know for sure, but maybe one reason it’s Lightroom and not Classic is that Lightroom is designed to manage and edit originals in the cloud, while Classic is locally oriented so it syncs up only Smart Previews.

For example, this is a quote from the web page linked above:

By introducing a direct connection with Lightroom through Frame.io, photographers can now instantly access their images, edit them, and deliver them. There are no tethers required and no need to remove and download camera cards.

Connecting one of the many Camera to Cloud-enabled cameras to a Frame.io project is a simple process that takes seconds. Once the camera is connected, all that’s required is for the photographer or editor to click “Connect to Lightroom” within their Frame.io project, where they’ll be prompted to log in with their Adobe ID.

Photographers can automatically send all files uploaded via C2C into their Lightroom account. If a more controlled approach is desired, photographers can also make selects in Frame.io and send their best shot into Lightroom for editing. Editors can access the images no matter where they’re located, in real time, and once the images have been retouched or edited they can upload them back into Frame.io for delivery or distribution.

That may or may not be exactly what you’re looking for, but I don’t know if there is a better option right now.

If you were to try and integrate Lightroom Classic into it, I am guessing that this might be one way:

1. Keep Lightroom Classic as the main organizer.

2. During a job, connect cameras to Lightroom cloud through frame.io.

3. As long as multiple people need to work with the images, leave the images in the Lightroom cloud so that they are accessible to all through frame.io.

4. If a Lightroom Classic catalog has sync enabled, it will pull down copies of the originals from the Lightroom cloud. I think the originals stay in the cloud until specifically un-synced from Lightroom Classic.

That will have to be tested, because I haven’t used the frame.io integration.

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