Workflow for shooting on iPhone, synching via cloud, editing in Classic, posting to social media?

[erictheise]

I'm traveling with a MacBook Pro running Lightroom Classic and am shooting on an iPhone (8). My main photo library is at home on an iMac also running Classic.

While I am traveling I would like to be able to add metadata to my .heic images, export reduced-size images as .jpgs, and post those "singley" or as "albums" to Instagram where they'll also propagate to Facebook. It seems I need to post from my phone for the propagation to work.

When I return home I'd like to be able to integrate my trip photos and exports into my main library without having to repeat all this work.

I cannot figure out how to do this in a reasonable way. I am open to dropping old habits and would appreciate hearing how others accomplish this. I can't be the only one wanting to do something like this.

I don't understand why "Imported Photos" can't be configured to organize files into year-month-day folders, or where the files I've already exported have gotten to.

[Michael J. Hoffman]

I do pretty much what you're talking about. I have Lightroom Classic at home, and use Lightroom on my mobile devices set to auto import from Camera Roll.

My settings in Lightroom Classic have the "imported photos" organized just as you mention. Note that this happens when the files come down from the cloud to my desktop computer (since Lightroom on the mobile devices does not have folders). Here's what I have in Lightroom Classic's Preferences. My synced photos get integrated right in with everything else that I manually import within Lightroom Classic:

[Michael J. Hoffman]

@erictheise , one other point I noticed - you mention you are using Lightroom Classic on both your Macbook as well as your iMac at home. The Lightroom ecosystem only allows one instance of Lightroom Classic (the master catalog) to be synced. You might be better off considering using Lightroom (not Classic) on the MacBook, as that would allow the images to sync back to your iMac at home just as they do from your phone.

Note that there are some compromises here, as Lightroom (both on mobile and on the MacBook) have limited metadata editing capability compared to Lightroom Classic. Also, Lightroom on the MacBook is not as fully featured in the editing department (plug ins, edit multiple photos in Photoshop at once, multiple secondary editors, etc). It is fine for one-file-at-a-time editing workflow with Photoshop (although in my opinion still not as smooth as it should be).