Just thoughts …

Tag: Lightroom

  • My simplified (dummy’s) guide to getting images from Lightroom (Lr) into Lightroom Classic (LrC)

    My simplified (dummy’s) guide to getting images from Lightroom (Lr) into Lightroom Classic (LrC)

    [Originally posted 20th December 2020;
    Revised 12th April 2021    ]

    I’ve lost count of the number of posts on the subject of Workflow and Lightroom, Mobile and Classic (see links at the bottom) … and I’m still not using Lightroom (as opposed to Lightroom Classic – the desktop version)! That may, or may not, be a failing in me; it may be a failing in my understanding of whether I can actually find a place for Lightroom (the mobile cloud version) in my workflow. However, I’m determined to find out whether I’m missing out on something that might be useful, especially in the context of new Apple hardware. I’m talking now not just about the iPad Pro, but also the possibilities of benefiting from the M1 Chip in the new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, as well as whether my iPhone 12 mini can be part of the workflow.

    It occurred to me that with my MacBook Pro (mid-2012) beginning to show it’s age (trackpad failing), and with my experiments with my iPad Mini and iPhone 6s with the Lightroom app not exactly being a resounding success, that perhaps, just perhaps, technology had moved on and I would have to move on with it! When you add to this, that a native Lightroom (Lr) for the M1 Chip (to be followed later admittedly by Lightroom Classic) was to be released then I began to wonder whether I really needed Lightroom Classic (LrC) on a laptop, especially when benchmarks seemed to be showing that you didn’t need so much memory with the M1 Chip to do anything – other than for video editing. So to be “ahead of the curve” perhaps I needed to introduce Lr into my Workflow not as a replacement to LrC but as a stepping stone. So here goes … I will describe my proposed Workflow [revised 12th April 2021] as a number of Use Cases.

    Importing images from my camera to Lightroom (Lr).

    I could link the Sony A7rIII to Lightroom on iOS/IPadOS using wireless, or buy a cable to join the two, but to be honest it’s fiddly and as I have a Lightning to SD-Card dongle, it’s easier to just eject the card from the camera and insert it in the slot of the dongle.

    I purchased the iPhone 12 mini with 256Gb RAM to allow the possibility of adding images from the camera, but also more importantly to enable the use of the Lightroom camera on the phone. We’ll deal with that Use Case later.

    I need to make sure a few things are setup on my iPad – my chosen device to import photos into Lightroom (Lr).

    1. I’ve created an album which I’ve called Sony to Classic Sync – this is the album I’m going to later synchronise with Lightroom Classic (LrC). I don’t enable Auto Add from Camera Roll – I don’t want anything seeping into the sync process that is outside manual control. I might decide to setup Albums for a special shoot/event/trip as an alternative to this album if that seems more appropriate, but I will use this album as the default one for syncing to the cloud and on into LrC.
    2. I check the Cloud icon and make sure that Syncing has been Paused – again I don’t want syncing to take place until I’m ready! Having done both of these and having inserted the dongle into the iPad …
    3. I go to my chosen Album (see 1 above) and Select – Add Photos, and Choose – From Files (this is the source Location for the images to be imported). I will then Browse to the Named SD-Card (it may appear in the list of possible Locations as “NO NAME”).
    4. Click then down through the folders (eg DCIM > 100MSDCF) to get to the images and click on Select. Either click on Select All, or select individually the images you want to Import. Click on Done to start the import process. The images should appear in the Album you’ve chosen.

    At this time the images have only been imported into Lightroom (Lr) on the iPad – if they are RAW images, that is what will have been imported. You can Select, Edit and Delete, add some Metadata such as Title, Caption and Keywords and Rate your images – you can’t apply Colour Labels. At this moment, the images will not have been synced to your Adobe Cloud account – that comes later!

    Taking photos with my iPhone and syncing them to Lr

    There are two Use Cases here. One where you are using your iPhone to just quickly take “snaps”; the other where you intend to do some post-production in Lightroom Mobile on the iPad, or after syncing to Lightroom Classic.In the first case you use the iPhone’s Camera app (which will if you’ve set things up in the right way upload the images to Apple’s iCloud, and /or Google Photos); in the second case you will use the Lr Camera rather than the iOS Camera to take the photos. Let’s deal with both cases …

    Using the iOS Camera App and Camera Roll

    After you’ve taken the photo it will appear in Photos your Camera Roll.

    These are the settings I use to save the image to my iCloud account and to be able to see them on my other Apple devices as well …

    If you want to have them uploaded to Google Photos as well, you need to open the Google Photos app, click on your icon in the top right-hand corner of the screen, and then firstly select Photos settings …

    … and then enable Backup and sync from the Backup and sync screen as well as making a decision of the size of image you want uploaded, as well as whether you want to use mobile data to do the upload (I choose not to, just doing uploads when connected to WiFi).

    You will now have the images accessible to you should you wish to Add photos from Camera Roll in the Lightroom Mobile app.

    I have chosen to create an Album (a Collection in Lightroom Classic) which will Auto Import from Camera Roll when Sync is switched on …

    … but I’ve also chosen to only Import Photos, not Screenshots or Videos – I don’t want, or need, them in Lightroom Classic …

    … you should make your own decision about the RAW Default Settings.

    So, if I take a photo with the iPhone Camera app it will automatically appear in the Lightroom Mobile Album – “Camera Roll to Classic Sync”.

    You will notice (hopefully), that I’ve Paused Sync, so that anything added from the Camera Roll will not be Synced to Lightroom Classic.

    It might be a good idea to NOT “Use Cellular Data” and to Enable “Only Download Smart Previews” – the latter is important because Smart Previews DON’T count against your Storage Quota on Adobe Cloud.

    What I tend to do at this stage, or at least before I select “Resume Syncing”, is to go into the “Camera Roll to Classic Sync” album and delete the images I DON’T WANT to Sync to Lightroom Classic.

    Using the Lightroom Mobile app (on iPhone or iPad)

    The Lightroom camera app is much more sophisticated than the basic iPhone Camera app, so using it as a camera when you intend to include the image in your Lightroom Classic Catalog with, or without, post-processing is a Use Case you should seriously consider.

    If you do this then the shots you take will appear under the Library > Lr Camera Photos menu in the Lightroom app …

    … from there it’s relatively easy to …

    1. Go to the ellipsis icon “…” click on “Select“;
    2. Select the images you want to sync, and then
    3. Click on “Add To” which appears at the bottom of the screen when you start selecting images, and then
    4. Choose the Album you want to synchronise – usually in my case the one entitled “Lightroom Camera to Classic”.

    You’re now ready to Sync

    It’s relatively straightforward now to go to the Cloud icon and select Resume Syncing. You will see the progress of the syncing which for a lot of large RAW images can take quite a bit of time.

    When the Synced and Backed Up checkbox has a tick in it – the import has finished, I will then click on Pause Syncing so that I don’t get inadvertent syncing taking place.

    [NB I don’t want, or need, Adobe Cloud to provide a Backup for my images – if I’m importing from my cameraI I won’t delete anything from the SD-Cards until I’m confident I have the images I want imported into Lightroom Classic (LrC) – which has it’s own Backup arrangements.

    If I’m syncing from the Camera Roll on the iPhone there will be copies in the Photos and Google Photos apps – “in the cloud”. ]

    At this point you could check the synchronisation has gone to plan by starting-up Lightroom (Lr) (NOT Lightroom Classic) on your desktop/laptop. This will grab the images that are in Adobe Cloud and present them in a similar fashion to the iOS/iPadOS interface …

    [NB Lightroom (Lr) can only sync with one Lightroom Classic (LrC) catalog, so you need to remember this when selecting your Catalog, or use that fact to your advantage if you don’t want to sync with Lightroom (Lr). You could do that by using different catalogs for synced and non-synced images.]

    Preparing to Sync Lightroom (Lr) with Lightroom Classic (LrC)

    In the same way that I want to do the upload to Adobe Cloud manually, and not have automatic syncing going on …

    1. I need to make sure that the “normal” setting for the Cloud icon in Lightroom Classic (LrC) is “Sync Paused” – unfortunately the Default setting is to have Sync Active.
    2. I need to provide Lightroom Classic (LrC) with information on what I want it to do with the images it’s going to import from Creative Cloud. You do this from the Lightroom Classic > Preferences … > Lightroom Sync page. You can see from the image below I’ve decided to Upload Images (using Lightroom Sync) to a folder on my local Google Drive, and to put them into Sub-folders by year and date …

    [NB Since writing this, I have changed the Specified Location to be the actual folder that I want to store the images in; hence removing the need to move the images mentioned below.]

    Syncing and what happens next

    Once I’m confident that I’ve got Lightroom Classic (LrC) set up and ready to receive images from Creative Cloud, I can go to the Cloud icon and click on “Resume syncing“.

    The album(s) I’ve created in Creative Cloud – and this can be either those on an iOS/iPadOS device OR Lightroom (Lr) on the desktop/laptop – will now be synced to Lightroom Classic (LrC).

    The Albums from Lightroom (Lr) will appear in Lightroom Classic (LrC) as Collections, and the images will appear in the folder(s) that I determined in the previous step.

    I can identify the Synced Collections (Albums from Lightroom (Lr)) by clicking on the magnifying glass under the Library > Collections menu …

    I can see the images have been uploaded by looking at the Folders menu …

    What I need to do now is Move the Images from the folder I stipulated on the Preferences page to their permanent home in my Images dataset. This I do and can only do within Lightroom Classic – you must never do this outside Lightroom Classic (LrC) because if you do, the LrC Catalog will lose the information of where the image resides in your file structure. For example …

    [NB As mentioned above, I now upload the images to the folder I want them to be in, thus meaning I don’t have to move them.]

    Now that I’ve got the images where I want them in Lightroom Classic (LrC), I need to stop the Collection (Album) syncing back to Lightroom (Lr) should I do any changes to the image – which I undoubtedly would. I thus click on the two-way arrow next to the Synced Collection …

    … read the warning message, and click on “Stop Syncing“. You will then notice that the two-way arrow has become a check box …

    … all that remains is to delete the images from Adobe Cloud, this can be done either from the desktop/laptop application, or from the iOS/iPadOS apps. It would probably be a good idea to move these collections that had been synced to a logical place in your Collections hierarchy before the next step if you want to keep them.

    Deleting the images from Adobe Cloud will release some of your valuable storage space on your mobile device but will not delete them from Lightroom Classic (LrC), only from the Synced Collections. [See article referenced below.]

    You can choose to Remove the Photos from a Synced Collection, but leave them in All Synced Photographs. This will enable you to move them to a different Local Collection, should you wish – if you haven’t already moved them as I suggested a couple of paras before…

    In all cases however the images won’t have been removed from their Folders in your Images dataset, only from Collections …

    The folders are unchanged after images have been removed from Synced Collections.

    … and that’s about it, until I think of something else 🙂

    For more information on Syncing to Adobe Cloud I suggest you look at this article and for further information on how to Remove photos from Adobe Cloud sync, I suggest looking at this article.

    Other links

    Lr Mobile – moving on! (March 2020)

    Lightroom on the move – biting the bullet (February 2020)

    Lightroom Workflow (2019) (October 2019)

    Travelling with my camera and without my MacBook Pro (May 2019)

    Lightroom CC (iPhone) working with Lightroom Classic CC (September 2018)

  • Lr Mobile – moving on!

    Lr Mobile – moving on!

    Following my last post on the subject – Lightroom on the move – biting the bullet – I thought it might be useful to record my experiences with using Lr Mobile and my iPad Mini 4 on a recent trip, so that if I should ever be tempted back to using Lr Mobile, I’d have a benchmark to measure the progress of the software against.

    Let’s start with some background, just in case a reader (is there anybody out there – to quote “The Boss”) hasn’t read previous posts. This thread started with a post written by Nicole Young – that prompted me to try an experiment travelling without my laptop. That didn’t work well for me initially, but I determined to have another go, which I wrote up in the post – Travelling with my camera and without my MacBook Pro – which also didn’t go too well either!

    Now call me a fool (if you will), but having learnt a little more about Lr Mobile (I know it’s not called Lr Mobile, but I need to call it something other than just plain Lightroom – because that’s what Lightroom Classic really is – I’m oldskool), I thought I ought to try it again.
    Some starting points …

    I decided to set up my Sony A7rIII to use SD-Card Slot 1 for RAW and Slot 2 for JPEG. My reasoning here was that I thought I could upload from the Slot 2 Card to my iPhone for sharing images on WhatsApp etc. This worked fine – no need for Lr Mobile at all for this. Just the SD-Card; an Apple Lightning -> SD-Card Adapter AND an iPhone 6s.

    These images also automatically synced to Google Photos where I created an Album to Share with Family. Happy days!

    However …

    Although the upload to the iOS Photos app worked fine, my External Lacie SSD Hard Drive doesn’t seem to be working with this iPhone using a powered Lightning -> USB 3 Adapter; the drive wasn’t recognised in the Files app, thus I couldn’t Export from the Camera Roll onto the external hard drive. Is this a Lacie fault, or is the iPhone 6s too old? I have to investigate this and will report back later!

    Why was this a problem? Well the JPEG Images uploaded to iPhone from SD-card Slot 2 to share from the iPhone were been merged with native JPEG images taken on the iPhone. I couldn’t distinguish where they were coming from. This might not be a problem for some people but the Sony JPEGs were not supposed to replace the RAW images that I was examining in Lr Mobile!

    There doesn’t appear to be an easy way to separate them. There are no filtering options in either Apple Photos, or Google Photos. How then do I merge iPhone JPEGs into my Lr Classic catalog?

    I can’t find a search on filename available on the phone – there might be in iCloud from a web browser, but I haven’t researched that … yet!

    This “problem” was solved by loading JPEGs into another space on my hard disk, not into my regular Images folder, then Adding them into my Lr Classic Catalog (not Moving or Copying), selecting the iPhone photos from the Sony JPEGs using a filter, and removing the Sony JPEGs from Catalog, then Moving the remaining JPEGs into the regular Images folder on my External SSD into the newly created and correctly titled folders in my Catalog BEFORE doing the Import of the RAW image files from the SD-card that had been in Slot 1. [Not forgetting to delete the Sony JPEGS from the other location to avoid clutter!] All an annoyance that makes the workflow tedious!

    I also encountered other problems ..

    The keywording options available in Lr Mobile are rudimentary and I don’t believe you can create a Preset to apply metadata at the time of the RAW import into Lr Mobile. It can only be done individually to an image. This meant I had to go through the whole collection and tag separately in Lr Classic after the images had been Synced (or in my case Imported as I had abandoned Syncing for the reasons given in my concluding remarks below).  At least I could Select and Tag in Lr Classic, which I couldn’t in Lr Mobile! Another annoyance.

    Even though I decided to use Compressed RAW in the camera, I ran out of space on the iPad Mini 4 – I would need to upgrade to a new iPad Pro (or a new MacBook). Also, the Lacie SSD didn’t work on the iPad either … again, is this a question of old kit, or a Lacie problem – I need to follow this one up.

    I quickly ran out of Creative Cloud space – 20GB definitely not enough, even when using the “Delete folder (saved for 60 days)” trick! See below, a note I wrote to myself on table-top experiments with Lr Mobile before I left …

    Quick note after using “web-enabled” Lightroom last night. It took very little time to sync both iPhone and Camera (using card reader connected to iPad) up to the cloud – 45 photos. I remembered to switch off Sync as well!!!! It took a couple of minuted to then sync to the desktop this morning. What was interesting however was that when I switched on Lightroom Classic, the application already knew how much of my Creative Cloud storage was being used – 1.59Gb for 45 pictures.

    I must say now that I’ve got used to it, it’s much more straightforward than I though to use the Syncing with Lightroom Cloud. I particularly like the way that photos taken yesterday with my iPhone have been easily integrated into the workflow. One thing to note however which I forgot to cover … you need to switch off Syncing from the Lightroom Classic Collection (Albums in Lightroom) by clicking on the double-facing arrow against the Collection, and then perhaps (if you use Collections in Lightroom Classic) move the Collection to a different place. Also, your final task should be to Delete the photos from the Creative Cloud storage by clicking on All Synced Photographs (in Catalog panel) – and deleting them; as long as Sync is still enabled they’ll be deleted from your Creative Cloud storage allocation. You should then Pause Syncing. Remember however that everything you Delete will still be in the Deleted storage in Creative Cloud, and will stay there for 60days without counting against your storage allocation. That’s all. I’ll try and get round to amending the notes tomorrow to add these points.

    However, unlike the experience when syncing at home, syncing in the wild was slow and not a realistic way of saving local storage. Also syncing when I got home was temperamental and I waited for some time, and then gave up, attempting to get a connection to Creative Cloud from my desktop. Things have to work smoothly and not rely on “clever” kludges or workarounds!

    At one time I thought there was duplication in Google Photos due to Backup and Sync but this does not appear to be the case. It’s just a delay issue in refreshing the caches I suspect.

    So a conclusion …

    I would have to upgrade my Apple kit to get Lr Mobile to work for me. Does that mean a new iPad Pro? Or a new MacBook Air?? But I don’t need either as my MacBook Pro works well – it’s just heavy. I do however probably need to review whether getting a new iPhone sometime soon might be a good idea – improved camera(s), connection to external SSD, etc. A cautionary wait and see is probably in order but currently a new iPhone would seem a better way forward.

    I do not like the Default Sync setting which means you have to remember to switch Syncing Off  after an upload. This also reverts back to being the default when the Software is upgraded. It is really the wrong Default and Adobe should review this.

    I do not like the lack of Selection in Lr Mobile. You should be able to Select what you want to Sync – not everything. What’s the point of having the ability of selecting the Collection you want to Sync from Lr Classic to an Album in Creative Cloud, if you can’t do exactly the reverse from Lr Mobile to Lr Classic. It doesn’t make sense and the phrase “hammer and nut” comes to mind; plus of course “upgrade to more Creative Cloud storage needed”, and more dosh for Adobe!

    The inability to Select and Keyword a group of images is also a drawback to me; as is the absence of Colour Labels – which I use a lot.

    So I have decided NOT to sync. photos from the iPad using Lr Mobile. I could not get a quick and reliable Connection. I will however keep watching for developments from Adobe that might encourage me to have another try. I will continue to use Lr Mobile in one situation – that of integrating native JPEG iPhone Photos into Lightroom Collections. That might be a useful addition to my workflow if I get a new shiny iPhone. This “use case” seems to be what Lr Mobile should be good at!!!