I almost don't know if it is worth this discussion, since it is in effect multiple feature requests, but I would like to understand what the vision is from Adobe for mobile workflow.
It seems to me that the current Lightroom offering is effectively two incompatible ways of working:
- a mobile, cloud based system with limited functionality
- a static desktop experience with immense organisational power, but zero ability to go on the road.
Virtually no progress has been made to reconcile these experiences since the two split several years ago and they don not sync well together.
My use case
I have a pretty large Lightroom Classic library of many tens of thousands of photographs, mainly travel photography, including vast 35mm film scans, going back over 30 years. This is now managed via a powerful (and heavy) 16" MacBook Pro and around 80Tb of redundant, raided, backed up, remote mirrored NAS storage. I still continue to shoot travel photography, and need to process and backup on the road as I do so.
Current methodolgy
I travel with a smaller, older MacBook Pro, with my LrC catalog (complete with Smart Previews) carefully duplicated via DropBox, but without the underlying photos on the road. Current shooting is backed up to Dropbox as I go. Care is required NEVER to have the catalog open on two machines at once. Once home, current shooting is moved into the main NAS storage in Lightroom.
What I would like
I'd like to use Lightroom on my M2 iPad, a small and perfectly capable tiny computer, to do the same function.
What I would need for this to work
- Heirarchical keywording with sync would need to be implemented
- Lightroom Classic compatible People box tagging and keywording with sync would need to be implemented
- a real synced Geotagging ability would need to be implemented so that this can be got right on the road
- It would be nice to be able to generate Denoise AI RAWs as I go, given that the hardware would do it, but not a dealbreaker
- Preferably not having to double my subscription cost from £10 (20Gb) to £20 (1Tb) would be kinda nice. In particular, it would be nice if imports were able to be organised (e.g. by date) in the same fashions as Classic allows so that the on-disk organisation was compatible with the rest of the catalog when moving it off mobile storage.
In the main, my experience is that the work of a photographer on the road is less performing edits on the actual photographs, and more around recording meaningful detail such as where the photograph was taken, what is in it, who is in it etc. the fact that Lightroom is extremely bad at being compatible with LrC on these matters makes it... ...less than useful? In the meantime I suspect I'm going to have to get a MacBook Air just to carry on with my current methodology...
I'd be interested in other people's experience here.
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