P: Ability to sync Smart Collections with Ecosystem Clients

[nycgeo]

Collection synching / Lightroom Mobile is a great addition to Lightroom 5.4. Please extend this functionality to Smart Collections as well.

[BrotherBloat]

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... 😉

[BrotherBloat]

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...

[roymerchier]

@ 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.

[BrotherBloat]

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.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

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.

[Colin RedGriff]

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.

[ryosode]

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...

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

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...

[bikernz]

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!

[cweng50]

I'm one of those fortunate ones to have the plugin from robcole.com, see post from about 5 months ago, before it disappeared.
This just syncs the status of selected smart collections whenever Lightroom is running but doesn't reflect changes on the iPad. They become static collections on mobile.
I have a workflow where I start with my imported photos unflagged. I have a collection for that. I can work through them on the iPad and set flags and stars and these all sync when I next run Lightroom. I can then delete the rejected photos in Lightroom, and add keywords and tag the flagged ones with the appropriate colours depending on the stars. I then unflag everything.
It will become more powerful when Adobe supports colour tags and keywords on mobile, but it's already incredibly useful to be able to sync a certain class of photos from a smart collection in Lightroom.
Adobe, please at least give us this. From experience, it's very very useful.

[BrotherBloat]

none taken - I'm all for having it sync automatically! and also I'm all for having the app sync in the background, too!!

[BrotherBloat]

actually, this is a very good point. I forgot the syncing works only with desktop Lr switched on!

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

Syncing on mobile devices works at any time you have an internet collection - it doesn't need the desktop turned on.

[BrotherBloat]

you mean syncing to mobile and from mobile. I meant syncing new photos from Lr Desktop up to the CC 😉

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

Ah! Great

[asmithjax]

Lightroom Mobile. Love the ability to sync, but I'm a serious amateur and I can take 1000 pics in a shoot, but I only need 50 of them to sync to my mobile. Why can't we set a global option to Sync only flagged photos, or some other variation?

[SJ_Fotography]

If you can, Help to upload the plugin in dropbox or google drive and share the link here friend 🙂

[SJ_Fotography]

Hi ashleigh, the alternative would be to create a smart collection with flagged photos and then copy the photos to the collection you sync

[rubend4895290]

how do you make  a normal collection ? im having the same issue. Also it seems like nothing is really updating on the phone from the desktop. Thank you in advance for any help.

[ManiacJoe]

In the Library module, in the Collections panel, click on the "+" in the Collections header, select "create collection".

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

The whole idea of smart collections is that they are generated on the fly in an intelligent way, and adding an option to have this synced to mobile automatically would make smart collections far smarter than they are now.

[clindh]

Yes, being able to sync Smart Collections as well would be awesome! I don't see the "accidental remove" as a problem, as others have pointed out it is not lost - and you can do the same mistake on desktop as well. Actually, I'd expect it to be removed if I changed something so it no longer match the smart rules for the collection - same functionality as on desktop. (There are other mistakes you can do even now, like setting the Rejected flag on a photo - which could lead to it being deleted physically if you delete rejected on desktop later on). So Adobe, pretty please implement this.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I would like to sync a smart collection between LR Desktop and LR for mobile. That's not possible for the moment. Will this feature be included in the next update?
Thank s for your work!

[David Rossberg]

Adobe; it seems the People have spoken! We want to sync smart Collections and we are not mindless Creatures that does not understand the implications of doing changes to Your smart Collection on the fly.

And in the case of an accidental swipe... the world won't stop.

[tobenama]

Would it be possible to add the "Sync with Lightroom mobile" option to Smart Collections as well? I'd very, very happy to be able to edit the photographs from, say, the last week or two with my iPad and the collection would always be up to date.