Lightroom 5.4 to Lightroom Mobile sync is soooo slow - why no local sync?

[x2mt]

I am testing the new Lightroom 5.4 with Lightoom Mobile. What really annoys me is the fact that all photos are going up to the Creative Cloud. I have private pictures which should be private. Always. No upload. No Cloud sync. It is important!

Speed is the next major problem. LR 5 is way too slow for a fluid workflow. But this is mentioned from other users.

What absolutely makes me sad ist the sync speed of LR5.4 to LR Mobile. 100 Photos took up to 4 hours. On a typical wedding I have 2000+ images. Depending on the speed of the first 100 photos I have to wait 80+ hours? Are you kiddding me? This makes LR Mobile unusable. My clients are expecting results fast. Speed is one factor to the next contract.

Overall, I don't want to sync anything into the Cloud. I want a to use my fast local sync via WiFi or USB. Only those two options. I want to sync photos even without any internet connection successfully and quickly.

I'm fine with authentication with Adobe servers for licensing verification. But that's it. The rest should be configurable by the users whether they Cloud sync or not.

[Shetty]

@Peter: Thank you for the info. You are right. The status can be seen at the top left in LR, above id plate. I use windows.

Shetty

[Andre Schneider]

Tom, thank you for taking your time to come here and enlighten us with the decision making process behind what was done. Like it was said before here, the Lightroom Mobile so far has been very, very frustrating. I came home very excited to test it and make my dream come true. To be able to take my catalog (or a shoot) with me on the subway, etc and be able to choose the photos on my iPad. See, I am a photographer and I shoot mainly fashion and beauty, so my workflow starts as soon as I finish shooting by importing all images into Lightroom and then going through the painstaking process of choosing which picture to use. I would shoot anywhere between 5-12 looks in a day, around 100 photos per look and at the end of the process I need to choose only one photo from each look. This normally involves going back multiple times to be able to get to only one from each look. The LR Mobile would have been the perfect solution for me, making me able to look at photos while out of the office, on the subway, at home, etc. It would have made my editing process much faster (or less slow). Instead, I've been sitting and waiting for 6 hours so far and only 18 photos showed up on my iPad (from the 500+ that were chosen to be synced from my desktop LR. Now I know it's not my internet that is making it that slow because I have 80+Mbps of download and 40+Mbps upload. And that haven't helped me much as my LR is stuck on "Syncing 527 photos" for the last 5 hours. Most professional photographers that I know deal with a huge amount of photos from a photoshoot. Wedding, fashion, advertising, we all shoot 1000+ images in any given work day. To come home and have to wait 100 hours before we are able to edit on the iPad is just not useful. This will be useful for the amateur photographer that will take photos of their children/dog/flowers and want to be able to show their guests the photos without having to get them in front of the computer.

Now I understand what you said about having to have a centralized place so that all the clients up to date on the changes, and I think that is great but I also think that it's paramount that there's a different way of syncing, a faster, more efficient way. Even if it is, like mentioned, not a "everything in sync" solution. Something like sync the desktop to the iPad and only those two work together. If both are changed before the next sync, a "the 'blabla' catalog has been changed since you last synced, do you want to overwrite it?" takes care of the problem, much in the same way that Photoshop asks us when we are saving something that has been somewhat modified by some external agent between saves. But the beauty of shooting all day, loading everything in Lightroom at night at the hotel and in the morning catch your flight and edit your shoot on the iPad while traveling, or being able to show the clients on the iPad right after you shot the wedding, or (what I was dreaming was going to be possible just to have my dreams crushed when started to use it) shooting tethered on the job and giving the art director the iPad so that he/she can see the shots without having to stay in front of the computer during the whole shoot. Now THAT would be a game changer! That was what I was expecting from LR Mobile but unfortunately got disappointed. I'd pay for the app alone if it did that!

[Henrik Eidem Kurka]

Tom Hogarty wrote:

Also, I realize that some of you are uncomfortable with your images going through Adobe's cloud before reaching your iPad.  But Adobe's servers need to act as an omniscient entity to reconcile your efforts between multiple clients.   We already have a web interface and the phone app is on the way.  A centralized, sever-based agent is needed to keep clients from colliding with sync conflicts. 

I am not uncomfortable myself, but I can understand if someone are. To have fool-proof sync, we definitely need a centralized server-based agent to keep things in control, but in theory, this central server does not need the photos - just the metadata. This is most likely far from the current sync design, but it should theoretically be possible to allow for local sync of photos while metadata are synced via your servers. This will allow for both much faster sync (wifi or even cable) and retaining an option for photographers that are in desperate need for privacy to have full control of where their photos are. On the other hand - how safe are photos that are stored in cache (or offline) on a mobile device anyway? But faster sync at least seems to be a big issue for someone.

[Jens Gaethje]

Hi Tom

i really appriciate by Adobe to get LR onto the Ipad. I do see the whole CC pillar as bound to fall in the long run though. It is not just gaining the customers trust back after Cyber Attacks on Adobe, it is the whole principle of relying on the Internet for a photography workflow. Just today i had to change my email address for my CC due to possible data theft, which is not in any way related to Adobe. This will take up to three days according to a Adobe chat rep, as my account did not accept my new email address (for whatever reason).

I am going professional with my photography and the troubles and time spent with Adobe help forum or customer service since Creative Cloud is out will soon not be worth it anymore.

I cannot believe any of the reasons given by Adobe for Creative Cloud. There are thousands of software providers that continously update their programs with new features without any membership. there are home based programmers that create apps for the Ipad reading wifi jpgs and then syncing them LR later.

Photographers will eventually choose the programs that will allow them spending their time on shooting or editing whichever they like more, but not troubleshooting.

I love PS and i am starting to love LR, but my time will soon be too valuable to wait for web syncs, uploads, bugreports, attempts to make Adobe aware of Bridge bugs and so on.

I hope Adobe will be remebered for it's amazing products and not for the price it might sell its client data base to some global player one day.

sincerely,

jens

[Jens Gaethje]

Hi Tom,

quick update, i spent about 2 hours with both Adobe and my email provider and the issue will take still a few more days to be resolved.

While this is not Adobes fault per se it is the eco system that Adobe is building its Software distribution and workflow on these days.

From my perspective this is not the future of digital photography. The software should serve the user and not dictate his/her workflow.

Sincerly,

Jens

[Tom Hogarty]

Jens,

The onus is on Adobe to exceed your workflow expectations and regain your trust in a service-based solution.  I hope you will give us the time and opportunity to do so.

Regards,

Tom

[Martin_Klefas]

I'd like to add another to the list of people with one of the faster connection speeds that's just not being seen when using LR Mobile. I've got ~80Mb download and ~24MB upload speed, and am just not seeing that speed in LR Mobile Syncing.

I shoot on an old digital camera, and end up with 4 MPix raw images. I just ran a test of uploading all the images from one card (600 Images (2GB)) via various methods (one at a time I might add):

Dropbox Upload: 30 Minutes

FTP to UK Cloud host: 22 Minutes

Google Drive:  40 Minutes

Lightroom Sync: 4 hours, 8 minutes.

Download time for offline editing is around the same - where is the cloud hosted geographically? And how on earth is it getting such low speeds?

[Rie_Mho]

Using speedtest,net is not a good solution, that only will test the users connection to the*LOCAL* speedtest.net server and not the connection FROM USER TO ADOBE (clearly a 100mpbs connection from SanfranCa to Adobe wont be the same as a 100mbps from Beijing to Adobe, explanation unnecessary I hope). Also educating the users as to the difference between mbps and Mbps** would be useful as one user wrote "68mb download 19mb upload, fibre optic." in megabits that's not fast at all, of course in megabytes that's not bad. Adobe provide a server address to test our connection speeds to your cloud servers, that is if you are *serious* about your cloud business.

**

Mbps: (Small "b") A megabit per second (Mbit/s or Mbps) is a unit of data transfer rate equal to 1,000,000 bits per second or 1,000 kilobits per second. 8 Megabits per second is equivalent to 1 Megabyte per second (ie. 8 Mbps = 1 MBps). Hence 1 Megabits per second = 0.125 Megabyte per second (ie. 1 Mbps = 0.125 MBps)).

MBps: (Capital "B") A megabyte per second (MB/s or MBps) is a unit of data transfer rate equal to:

1,000,000 bytes per second, or
1,000 kilobytes per second, or
8 megabits per second.

[OogieM]

How about if you let us the users worry about sync conflicts with multiple devices? I do not want any photos on any server I do not control. Omnifocus dealt with that by support WebDAV and I run my own server and it provides full sync for all my devices, a desktop, laptop, iPhone and iPad with no problems. Why not allow that for LR?

My Ideal workflow is pictures taken and synced via wifi from camera to iPad. Allow me to star rate, keyword and edit all metadata on iPad. When home sync to LR Desktop and all that work is included in the current catalog.

[Damon Brodie]

Ian,

I think the direct to PC option is a method to go around the internet sync.  For example - the iPad has multiple ways to share content.  You can airdrop (bluetooth), you can do a wifi sync to iTunes and you can sync via iCloud.  Translate that to LR, and they have implemented the equivalent of the iCloud.  I'd love to see the product  evolve to support alternatives to the cloud.

[Ian Lyons]

Damon,

Your preaching to the choir regarding direct connection but as Tom has already indicated there are reasons for the Cloud based approach. Some of those are technical others may well be commercial, I don't know.

[TheDigitalDog]

Ian Lyons wrote:

Short of accessing a faster internet connection there is no way of improving the sync speed.

Exactly! And that isn't going to happen any time soon. And to answer Tom's question, my internet speed is quite good*. That's not a fix for moving huge amounts of data to a device that is ill suited for the job when another tool (my laptop) does the job better and faster. And is color managed. And provides every tool in LR and other tools provide that I need. So in the end, I can do more faster and better just sticking to my laptop and an external drive with all my photo's than anything I could do with LrM and an iPad. The iPad is a nice tool for some tasks, like how it sits in my kitchen with all my recipes. Or surfing the web. For large (and raw) image editing it's a sick joke. And I'm a patience fellow. I recall waiting 20 minutes to rotate a 15mb Photoshop document 1 degree on a IIci with 8 megs of ram back in 1990. I'm willing to wait but the tool has to be adequate for the job (the IIci was back then). Today the iPad isn't nor is getting all that data from point A to point B then back to point A again.

*56Mbps down, 11.63 up.

[Parrot_Man]

I agree on the reject/rating ... the iPad interface is perfect for deciding which pics are keepers and how to rate them...super easy to flip around and manipulate those bits. Actual editing should be done elsewhere.

[johngersh]

My hoped-for workflow:

I'd like to travel without having to take a laptop; just bring the iPad. I'd load images onto the iPad using the camera connection cable. I could pick, add keywords and rate them in LR mobile. Maybe I'd crop and adjust a bit to show the pix to folks on the trip. When I got back I could import and sync from the iPad, capturing the added metadata and simple adjustments.

The Photosmith app does part of this, but not all, and not as smoothly as LR mobile. If only LR mobile sync were fast....

[melissap63974182]

what does the photo smith app do?

[LightNotions]

This thread is frustrating!

Lightroom is absolutely fabulous and the mobile tool had promise, but with no direct sync from PC to the iPad, it makes it a toy for iPhone pics at best. As a number of guys had mentioned above, the best use of a companion tool like this is the ability to sort, pick and keyword your images for further development on the PC/MAC, but the speed at which the cloud sync happens makes it completely impractical anyone else in the world other than those in Silicon Valley I presume and even then, it seems to take its time.

For those of you looking for a tool that is a real work companion, try PhotoPhile which has all the "Selection" capabilities with bi-directional sync but has no editing, which is fine!

Adobe, we understand the vision and the drive to get everyone into your cloud, but please think of the practicality for a serious user.

[powaq]

I think that for most people the bottleneck manifests itself in two ways.

1. The creation of Smart previews, this is very slow unless you have a really fast machine, this takes up most of the time. I don't believe that most people have these made during import so they need to be created before uploading. This is a huge bottleneck and can only be resolved by turning on the generation of smart previews during import. Or by buying yourself a ridiculously fast machine . But I also feel that there is a lot of room for performance improvement when it comes down to generating smart and normal previews in LR. The same goes for exporting. I know that the LR team doesn't really want to use the graphics card but maybe it's time to start thinking about it. I could offer huge performance gains.

2. The upload speed. The speed at which LR uploads is not really an issue (it seems to max out my upload speed, but I need to measure it to be 100% sure). The issue is that, even though smart previews are small, they are still too large for most home broadband connections to upload effectively. A lot of people have really fast download speeds but ISPs limit upload speeds. And this is an issue that won't be resolved quickly, and has nothing to do with LR or Creative Cloud.

Solution: As most of us probably have our computer and iPad on the same wifi network it would be nice if there was an option to use wifi sync. I understand that creative cloud servers are being used to resolve sync issues. So why not have the option to upload a small file to the creative cloud that contains all the metadata about the current running sync and move the smart previews over local wifi or LAN. And optionally you could, after that sync is complete also start to upload the smart previews to CC (or simultaneously) from either the iPad or the desktop LR application (or both simultaneously).

Unfortunately I also realise that local sync has it's own issues. You would have to copy all your smart previews to your iPad instead of just downloading them "on demand" just like it is now. Which can be an issue on devices like the iPad, where space is limited.

That's why I suggest doing a double upload. First a quick upload, over wifi, to your mobile device. And then a slower upload to the cloud. That way, when LR mobile sees that some collection is also available on CC it would give you to option to delete the local files on your iPad. But until all the smart previews are on CC, LRM won't give you the option to delete the local smart previews, because they would be effectively gone with no way to access them again.

I, again unfortunately, realise that this solution could be confusing to some people. So I don't know if it's a good idea to implement such a thing.

[PeterRHawkes]

I have Smart Peviews generated at import but does not seem to speed the sync process!

Peter H

[powaq]

But what is your upload speed? My VDSL line at home offers 4mbit upload which means a theorical throughput of 512KB per second (4096 kilobit / 8). Substract the overhead and you get a realistic max upload somewhere around 420-450KB/s. That's kiloBYTE not kilobit.

Every smart preview DNG is on average 1MB (for me). So in theory it would take around 2,5 seconds to upload. Add some metadata, some time to fetch the next file and so on and that's where you get to a real life upload speed of around 4-5 seconds per smart preview on a 4mbit UP line.

I do believe that there is some room for improvement. LR doesn't constantly max out my line, it goes somewhat up and down right now. A possible solution would be to pack a few smart previews in one file and upload it. The fluctuation in speed I'm seeing right now is, probably, caused by LR sending every DNG individually. So maybe it could shave off 1 or 1,5 seconds. But that's just in theory..

How long does it take for you, in seconds, to go from "400 remaining" to "399 remaining"? On my machine it's 4-5 seconds per image. Which is very slow but ultimately caused by the slow upload speed provided by my internet connection.

To make this really fast and usefull we need 20mbit or more upload speeds. Unfortunately those lines are rare.

[PeterRHawkes]

From UK to San Jose - 50.57 Mbps down and 8.76Mbps upload. Upload in real life is one image per 10 seconds approximately.

Peter H

[powaq]

That is indeed very slow and hints at an issue with LR. Or it could also be QoS throttling done by your ISP (but unlikely). It's very hard to know the exact cause of this issue. But I agree, that's too slow.
We really need wifi sync and as an added bonus this would also lower the load on CC servers, which could also be an issue right now. Too many people trying out their new LR Mobile at the same time.

The majority of home broadband infrastructure is not really ready for the cloud because of slow upload speeds.

I once tried an online backup service. I would have taken 2,5 months 24/7 uploading to back all my stuff up. Online backup only sounds great on paper.

[PeterRHawkes]

As an aside I use two cloud backup services; BackBlaze is constantly monitoring changes and ClunkClick backs up at schedule times. Both are excellent and fast! I do hope that the speed issue is a result of the number of users getting online and may calm in time!

Peter H

[markalanthomas]

Lightroom mobile is well done for what it is, but, as others have pointed out, the workflow seems backwards. I want to be able to load raw files from my camera to my iPad, sort and do basic adjustments in the field, and then sync to my desktop when I get home, not vice versa. If the only way to get photos into Lightroom mobile is via the desktop version, what’s the point? I’m already home.

[markalanthomas]

I should mention that I tried Lr mobile pretty much the second it dropped, before the servers got hammered by everyone test driving it at the same time, and the syncing speed was excellent.

[johngersh]

Here's some more data:

I have 57 Mb/s down and 11 Mb/s up by Speedtest to a server not owned by my ISP. My test was 42 images, with Smart Preview sizes of 1-2 MB. With those numbers, one would have expected about a minute to synch if local network capacity were the bottleneck. It took six minutes and eight seconds. Note that this was the total time to synch with Lightroom Mobile; an image appeared on the iPad less than a second after Lightroom reported it synched.

In one sense this is good news, confirmed by markalanthomas's report of good early performance: the synch bottleneck seems to be at Adobe's end; it's not a computer or network issue. The relatively instantaneous download to the iPad supports this, too; the time is all spent in performing the synchronization. Another test showed that it can take 20-40 seconds to synch one image after it's been modified, which also supports this idea. All this means that Adobe can fix it. It might mean provisioning more servers or buying more incoming bandwidth. It might mean improving the sync processing speed. It will most likely get better over time.

Of course, nothing would beat a mechanism for local synching over wi-fi or USB, but my guess is that this would take longer, it if ever happens. It looks like that would be an architectural change for Adobe rather than a provisioning or code-tweaking one.