I’m new to the Apple world, having used LR Classic on a PC for years, and I just bought an iPad to manage images use LR mobile while travelling. I edited a lot of images in LR Mobile (LR v. 10.0.1) on my iPad (10th generation) while on my recent trip, bringing both .jpg and .mov files from my iPhone and RAW files from my 35mm camera into LR Mobile, assuming that, upon my return home, the synchronization of my iPad LR mobile albums with my PC LR Classic would be really easy.
Alas, I learned a few things, after several frustrating days, that I thought some of you might find useful. Other people who are more savvy with this process than I can correct any misunderstandings I might have about this, but this process finally worked for me.
- I assumed that the images on both my iPhone and iPad would automatically sync with each other in the Apple world, showing the same files on both devices. This didn’t work for me. I could only see some of the iPhone images in my iPad's LR Mobile. To make sure that all iPhone images were imported into LR Mobile, I selected all images I wanted on the iPhone and “shared” (uploaded) them to the iPad. In reality, this just copied the files to iCloud (as compared to LR/Adobe’s online cloud - "LR Ecosystem".. cough cough, I'm a professional ecologist and the use of this term is confusing. ). I then opened LR Mobile on my iPad, selected the Lightroom option at the bottom of the screen (as compared to Device or Community, selected the blue plus icon in the lower right corner (Add photos from …), and then selected Device. This imported all images from iCloud to LR/Adobe’s online cloud.
- To load images from my 35mm camera into LR Mobile on the Ipad, I connected my 35mm camera via a cable to my iPad, but you can alternatively just put your 35mm camera card into a card reader that is cabled to the iPad. Then I selected the blue plus icon in LR mobile as before, but chose Connected Camera/Card instead of the Device option.
- Once I got home, I followed online instructions for syncing my LR Mobile albums with LR Classic on my PC (Windows 11), using a cable to connect the iPad to the PC. The supposedly simple approach of clicking on the cloud in the upper right corner of LR Classic didn’t work. After a bunch of trial and error, I learned that there were two problems with my set up:
- First, clicking on the cloud icon opened a small window, telling me I had nothing to sync. But by clicking on the gear box in that window (“Go to sync preference”), I discovered that LR Classic was synced to an older catalog, not the current catalog. The software then gave me a choice to update to the current catalog, which fixed that problem.
- The syncing process taps into a Mobile downloads.lrcat file on your PC that is supposed under C:/[ your username]/Pictures/Lightroom. Alas I did not have this file -- perhaps I accidentally deleted it in the past. It turns out this is an easy fix. Just add a new subfolder, using File Explorer, under that Pictures/Lightroom folder. For example, just call this new folder MobileDownloads. Then, in LR Classic, go to the Library module, then the Edit>Preferences menu, then the Lightroom Sync tab, then the Location box and “Specify location for Lightroom’s Synced images” and use the “Choose” button to point LR to your new “MobileDownloads” folder.
- Once I had all these settings correct, I left my iPad cabled to my PC (just out of caution, but that probably is not necessary), clicked LR Classic’s cloud icon, and the process copied my edited images (with my edits) from the iPad to my LR catalog on the PC. Yay!
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