P: Ability to sync Smart Collections with Ecosystem Clients

[nycgeo]

Collection synching / Lightroom Mobile is a great addition to Lightroom 5.4. Please extend this functionality to Smart Collections as well.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I've assumed that smart collection are supported and searched for the check mark to enable the sync. It took me a while to find out that this only works with normal collections. Who is using them anyway? I never did...

I've now maintained a few synced collections, but maintaining them is just too much work.

[Damon Brodie]

Glad I found this topic, and that it had so many like minded people. I tried LR Mobile, but the workflow is just plain cumbersome for how I want to use the product. Ideally I want to be able to have full access to my LR catalog on my iPad. My typical use cases would be to go through and add/remove stars, mark photos for deleted, and add some commonly used keywords.

Smart collections are one way to make this workflow a bit easier, but overall there needs to be more caching happening so that the interface is a lot faster. If decide to scroll in the grid to a photo from august 2013, then start caching the photos around it since I will likely want to look at photos around it.

I've uninstalled LR Mobile for now, but I certainly will take a look again when the product matures. (No disrespect intended)

[TechSpeed22]

I can see if synching all files (I have about 70K RAW files) the smart previews could quickly use up the space on the iPad... and unlike android devices you can't add storage.

Maybe we could atleast synch large thumbnails or lighter previews to the iPad... that way you can flag or rate if not fully edit.

[Evan.Robinson]

I don't know about you but my whole library is far too large for a mobile device.

As for a pop-up warning, I agree with a previous comment that it would be exceptionally annoying, but if it can be turned off that's a reasonable compromise.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I'm afraid I don't understand what could be taking so long to implement smart collections. With a large base of users begging for this feature for over 6 months, I would have thought Adobe would pull the trigger on it by now. This feature is so fundamental that I consider lightroom mobile to be useless, meaning that I also believe I've been wasting at least part of my monthly payments to Adobe. When oh when will this be fixed?!?!?

[Cloven Life]

If you know of a 4TB Ipad. Let me know

[TechSpeed22]

There are alternatives to actually synching the entire smart collect if the collection is really large... as long as you are on Wifi you could cache small thumbs for the grid view and pull down larger versions for loupe view or editing. There are usually creative ways to handle things we just have to take things less literally.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I agree with all of the commenters. Difficult to come up with a useful workflow without smart collection support. Alternatively, a publish service (which can be based on a smart collection, but only updates when published from the desktop) could be useful.

[Dan_Ger_Dan]

Disappointed that this feature wasn't added to 5.7. Perhaps we'll have to wait for another 9 months to see....

[Dan_Ger_Dan]

^ totally agree.

[remov_b4_flight]

It's enough with 'most recent undo'.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

It would be a great help to sync smart collections to LR mobile. If there's a batch of images I want to edit later, I can just punch in the criteria, let it sync over the cloud, and edit the images while waiting in the doctors office.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Lr user since first beta, i just discover Lr mobile, and first surprise (and disappointment) is that i can't syncronize a smart collection... Most recent undo would be enough, i agree. Thanks for the great work. 🙂

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I'd like to chime in with most of the other posters just how necessary it is to me to have smart collections from my MBP sync up to the cloud and thus to my iPad. I really love to view the images on the iPad, but prefer to store and import them into the laptop. Though ideally if I could import photos directly from my camera into either LR on the laptop or the iPad and have them become accessible on all those devices immediately I'd be so thrilled. C'mon Adobe, Light Room is a great product, I love it, but keep improving it!

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Count my vote for syncing smart collections!

[mcNomis]

Count me in here as well - I'd love to only sync starred photos to my ipad to cut down on the volume of photos kept on there.

[areohbee]

I just added a feature to my Collection Agent plugin which maintains regular collections alongside smart collections which have the same contents but aren't smart. You should be able to Lr-mobile-sync those instead..

Let me know if it helps, or doesn't.. - free:

http://www.robcole.com/Rob/ProductsAn...

Rob

[ryosode]

Great idea. I will try this tonight. Thanks for sharing!

[areohbee]

Please let me know if there are problems with it or you have suggestions for it.., and let us know if it works well-enough as is.. - thanks.

[cweng50]

I've just been trying, and I'm afraid I don't understand how it should work. I suspect it's me, but I can only get it to create another set of smart collections.
Thanks

[areohbee]

In the future, please contact me "directly" (outside the forum) if you have problems with any of my plugins:

http://www.robcole.com/Rob/ContactMe

Anyway, you must not have used the correct function, which should have been:

'Make Dumb Copy of Smart Collections'

I don't see how that function could possibly have created any more smart collections - just regular collections with same contents as their smart counterpart.

Rob

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I've had a lot of good feedback for the new feature in CollectionAgent (Maintain Dumb Copies of Smart Collections) which helps with this Lr shortcoming. The latest version supports automatic updating, so dumb collection tracks smart collection without any action on users part.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

This works great! Thanks for making it. At least now I don't have to abandon my smart collection based workflow with Mobile Lightroom!

[areohbee]

Thanks Scott! - that's good to hear..

I recently automated it (dumb collections auto-updated when smart collections change), so consider downloading the latest version. If you have any other ideas for improvement, do tell.. (preferably by contacting me outside the forum: http://www.robcole.com/Rob/ContactMe).

Thanks again,
Rob