P: Ability to sync Smart Collections with Ecosystem Clients

There have been a number of thoughtful comments on this topic but no solid reason why smart albums should not be able to sync with LR Mobile. I am trying to transition from Aperture where I have 60,000+ images and have used smart albums based on flags, ratings, keywords etc for years. This has allowed me to always have a subset of images available on my iPhone and iPad that automatically update as new images are added to my Aperture library and are post-processed. Sure, there may now be some extra steps required due to LR Mobile being able to edit flags and ratings but if a few bright young minds were applied to the challenge I think a great solution would not take long to develop. There are already many ideas offered in this thread as a starting point. Come on Adobe, we are all waiting!

This is no issue at all. The smart collection online should not know the rules. It should just sync. So even if you remove a star by accident the picture would still be there with the lower rating. It will be removed once Lightroom on the computer starts up, syncs the changes, and deletes the picture with the not matching criteria.

Really just like it is working now, only with smart collections. There is nothing big to code for this.

Well, I am a software developer, but Adobe sometimes is very special...

Anything is better than manual approach. No offense to Mike, but I assume most us would rather have the smart collection sync first, then refine UI later. We purchased LR and we bother talking about lack of Smart Sync so you all probably aren't casual smartphone snapper, right?

Right now, we can't access our images via cloud w/o managing sync-ed collection. This is a non-productive workflow. By comparison, a couple of images disappearing from cloud because I messed up a flag = acceptable.

I think having a bigger bucket smart collection like "Imported in last 2 weeks" to catch all, would be a good idea to counter the issue. That way your image may disappear from another smart collection but not from catch-all smart collection. Beyond that, if you need some of your images to be permanently in cloud, creating a static collection for the purpose seems logical...

I really don't see why this such a big issue. Yes you might accidentally lose access to the picture in your collection on your mobile device; but it's hardly the end of the world. It's not like the photo is lost forever. Your not deleting the phot it is just removed from the collection because it no longer meets the criteria.

If it is such a worry you could easily have another smart collection to show photos modified in the last say 2 days. Even if it was un-flagged it would still be in that smart collection and you could re-flag it or add the keyword back in.

I don't see this as challenging at all from a UX experience. You change a flag that which would remove from a collection, the picture grey out but stay on the device. Change it back it ungreys. Add a "commit" button to remove the pictures from the collection.

Now coding this might be harder if the mobile device doesn't know the collection rules, but it couldn't be that hard.

Good point indeed - and I do hope the good folks at Adobe crack this issue. I think there was a comment from staff at the beginning of this thread.

@ Mike Obuchowski

I'm not a software specialist.
Would it be that hard to protect such "accidental deletes" for smart collections specifically?

Or give a warning when you are doing this. This maybe even better then blocking, because maybe you really want to delete something from a smart collection.

I sure do hope that the people of Adobe are considering this, and that they would reply to this topic. That would be a good sign to their customers who are paying good money.

think about it: if you had that collection synced automatically, an accidental swipe on the photo to reduce / increase star rating while on mobile, could result in the photo vanishing from the collection entirely without you being able to get it back unless at your computer... that's why this is not a no-brainer...

long story short, it would open a loophole where you could basically create a smart collection that pulls files based on flags, for instance. In such case, you could accidentally remove a flag from a photo while away from your computer and it would make it suddenly vanish from the collection. There are a million and one ways to break such a system in all sorts of creative ways, so the problem is not trivial to solve... 😉

Sign me up for smart collections on LR mobile!