Freezing Smart Collections: I'm not sure whether anyone has suggested this already but why not have Lightroom Mobile (and Web) just treat Smart Collections like manual collections, i.e., the selection criteria for the Smart Collection should only operate on the desktop to select the photos for sync to the cloud and mobile. If the pick flag is one selection criterion and it is removed in Lrm, then the photo would not disappear from the collection until next time the desktop sync'ed. There would probably have to be a block on moving photos in and out of such "frozen smart collections" on Web and Lrm.
I agree. I have installed Lightroom Mobile, but I don't use it because of the limitation of not using Smart Collections. It means an extra step for me to add my selected photos to my collections. I'd like to be able to have a keyword like "Lightroom Mobile" and have any image with this keyword or a combination of that and another one populate a collection so I can easily maintain my sync'd collections by simply adding or removing the keyword while working on images in my catalog. Seems like a flaw in the designer's thinking to not have this, and to not express why it isn't included for some technical (?) reason.
I think the first thing to do is to bad rate the mobile applications, Adobe will be probably be more concerned by public comments and rate than user satisfaction message here...
I use Smart collection because of their obvious practical & flexible structure. What's the point of having the feature, allowing regular collections to sync with mobile, but Not having Smart Collections sync with mobile. It's like restricting one to eat only 1 type of lollipop..
Would also love to see Smart Collections on mobile. I know this must be difficult b/c iCloud Photo Library doesn't do Smart Album syncing either, but would love to know more about why this feature isn't available on mobile.
I make a lot of use of keywords and metadata, and I'd love to see Lightroom Mobile take advantage of the Smart Collections I've made on the Mac.
Regarding the point made by Tom Hogarty, if a user amended the pick status and that amendment would remove the photo(s) from Lightroom mobile , surely a dialogue box informing the user would be sufficient? /necromancy
Jumped onto Lightroom Mobile today for the first time, while being a Lightroom CC user since years. I'm thrilled by the addition of RAW DNG capture in Lightroom Mobile on my iPhone 6s Plus (which is why I started digging and testing the app) but the unavailability of syncing Smart Collections through Lightroom Mobile is a huge enthousiast killer. Adobe, please add this functionality, people seem to be requesting this for years.
As a new LR user, after learning how to sync with mobile devices I was very startled to find that smart collections are not included in this technology. A brief read-through of the comments shows that there are some problems, but I urge you Adobe to make some choices and get up some version of sync for smart collections. It is really an essential feature.
3 years after... still #1 request but whatever, it's like Adobe doesn't really care about that and their customers. This "request feature" forum is a joke. It's time to move on and find an alternative.
I just upgraded to the cloud version of Lightroom assuming that this would work. I read the "Sync Lightroom across desktop and mobile platforms" page before deciding to upgrade, but it never mentions that this doesn't work with smart collections. This is an obvious feature, and it's complete crap that it isn't supported.