The philosophy in all Lightroom products is that you do not duplicate photos, but use virtual solutions. Lightroom Classic has virtual copies for this purpose, Lightroom mobile has Versions. Check that out to see if this is a solution for what you want to achieve.
I'd love the ability to duplicate a photo from Organize > Dupliate Photo on the Lightroom Mobile app. Currently I can't find a workaround for this, so have to wait until I'm at my laptop.
This feature is urgently needed. Currently we can't create variants of a photo with different edits on mobile, but can on the desktop version. It's not even possible to work around this with shortcuts by exporting and importing a photo again because Lightroom correctly detects it as duplicate and refuses to import it.
Why is is not possible to duplicate a photo? This should be an option, now I have to switch to the desktop version just to make an extra version of an edit... Very annoying
Well, if you want to show a client black/white versions or alternative grades for instance. It's helpful to be able to see different edits of the same photos side by side, since I often send clients a link to a Lightroom album in the editing stage before delivery
Versions aren't a replacement for variants/duplicates. They are great, but I want multiple different *variants* of the same photo in my library, so that I can export different takes and edits at the same time. I don't want to go into each photo and tap around on the versions picker just to review different styles of the same, I want to see them all at once as I can already do on the desktop version.
Currently to create a duplicate on mobile what I have to do is:
- Export the original
- Open it in some EXIF editor
- Change exif tags and modify the original (so that lightroom doesn't detect it as already imported)
- Re-import it into lightroom
- Add it to the same albums as the old one
Some of this is automatable through shortcuts but requires doing some trickery with manipulating the exif/bytes of the image directly which can cause other weirdness.
I work a lot with duplicating images and it is really annoying that this feature is still missing from the mobile version of the application. I would really appreciate if it would be added!
short version: create duplicate photos in Lightroom mobile to export with different edits
If I'm editing on my phone, say 300 or 400 pictures and I want to make a version that is cropped, a version that is black and white, a version that is colour maybe any other choices of the same photograph- the only way I seem to be able to do, it is to create a duplicate in my actual photos and then import that into Lightroom. The problem with that is that I organise all my photographs by date and hour and minute, so when I make a duplicate from my phone it doesn't go in the camera roll in the same place next to the old version, which means I have to try and remember when I send it to a client not just to send the first edit as it appears with all the others, but to send in the other edits. To get to those I have to go and try and track them in my phone. The whole process is really time-consuming especially if I'm working with say 400 pictures and of those I might create another hundred variations, we're talking a lot of time. You might wonder why I'm doing so many edits on my phone it's because I have a small baby and I can't get to my laptop in the middle of the night, and that's the only peaceful time I can use to do my work. (When I take the photos I have childcare or my baby is there with me while I take photos as I do baby Photogrpahy). So I'm doing it on my phone. It's a pain but it could be a lot less painful with some kind of duplicate option and for that edited duplicate to appear next to the original in the flow. I don't care in fact, I want it to be a whole new image, not just an image with a different saved preset attached to it.
Versions is not a solution. We cannot export from versions, and it requires navigating submenus every time. Just give feature parity. What's the point of Lightroom Mobile if it's an entirely different app with entirely different functionality?
Duplicates are a basic part of anyone's workflow. iPads and other tablets are more than powerful enough to have all of the same functionality as the desktop version
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