Adobe Announces Lightroom Mobile for Creative Cloud Customers

by Grant Friedman posted on April 08, 2014 Apps

Today, Adobe announced some pretty big news in the photography space, a new Mobile Lightroom App that you can use to edit your photos anywhere you go, even without an internet connection.

One of the biggest frustrations that I have as a photographer is that I am constantly stuck on my desktop. If I want to edit my photos outside of my office, or need access to some of my photos while I am away, I am pretty much out of luck. In the past, the only solution that I had was to either store my entire photo library on my laptop, or bring an external hard drive with me wherever I go. Neither of which, are very good solutions when you have a huge library of photos to manage.

That is why I’m so excited to hear about today’s announcement of Lightroom Mobile (App Store Link). There is finally an app that can free me from my desktop and give me access to my photo library wherever I go.

So what is Lightroom Mobile? Lightroom Mobile is an iOS app for iPad (coming soon to iPhone) that helps you organize and edit your Lightroom catalogue anywhere you go, even if you don’t have an internet connection.

So how does it work? It’s actually pretty straight forward. First, download the latest version of Lightroom using the Adobe Creative Cloud. Then, install Lightroom mobile on your iPad from Apple’s app store, sign in with your Adobe ID, then tell Lightroom 5 exactly which collection you want to sync with your devices. The rest happens automagically in the cloud.

In addition to syncing photos from your desktop computer’s Lightroom library, Lightroom Mobile also works the opposite way with photos that you shoot using your iOS device. So if you shoot a photo on your iPad (or iPhone, once the app is available), you can tell Lightroom Mobile to automatically add that photo to your library, make edits to it, and then sync the photo with your desktop computer, so that it is waiting for you when you finally do get back to your office.

Since Lightroom Mobile is a cloud-based application, you will also have the ability to view your photos at Lightroom.Adobe.com. So if you’re without your iPad, and away from your Lightroom library, you can still get access to your photos as long as you can find a computer with a working internet connection.

I should also mention that the mobile app can even let you edit your photos even when you don’t have an Internet connection. All you have to do is download the photos you need before you lose your connection. Once you have them on your mobile device, make the edits. When your connection is restored, Lightroom Mobile will automatically sync those changes up with your library.

There are a few things to note however. Lightroom Mobile will not sync your high resolution raw files. Raw files are just too large to sync over the Internet. Lightroom Mobile works because it creates a much smaller preview of your raw photos on your desktop and uploads them to the cloud. These smaller previews sync much more quickly, so you can begin editing them.

When you make your edits, Lightroom Mobile simply tells the desktop version to make the same adjustments to the raw photos on your computer. It doesn’t actually sync the files themselves, just the data associated with them.

It also is important to note that Lightroom Mobile is also not an app to help you load raw photos from your DSLR onto your iOS device, and then sync. While that is a feature that many photographers would love to see, iOS devices just aren’t set up for that.

I am actually really excited about this release by Adobe. It has the potential to completely change the way that photographers work, and I can’t wait to give it a go. If you have the chance to give it a try, let me know what you think about this new app in the comments below.

Screenshots

Here are a few screenshots of the app from Adobe. I am hoping to get a hands on version of the app soon.

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