iPhone to LRC Workflow

[Annek73]

Lightroom Version

12.5

Operating System

1. macOS 13 Ventura
2. iOS

I am on a MacBook Pro running Ventura 13.5 and an iPhone 13 Pro Max. I am running LRC 12.5 and LR 8.5.0 on my phone. Operating systems on both devices are up to date. My question is about the iPhone to LRC workflow. I can usually bumble my way through the process, but I don’t understand the flow. I do not want to pull every photo on my phone into LR so I have turned off Auto. I have nested folders in LR on my phone by year and month. I have folders on my hard drive that correspond to this same heirarchy. I know that Albums on the phone correspond to my hard drive folders. But can someone explain to me step by step what I need to do? Here is what I do now (I have both LRC and LR open):

1. Create an album for the current month on my phone nested under 2023.
2. Load my chosen photos into the album on my phone
3. I have also chosen where to send the photos on my Mac hard drive in LRC
4. I also have a collection in LRC to mimic the folder/album structure on my phone. It is synced.

Sometimes it syncs and other times it doesn’t. Sometimes a folder shows up in LRC nested under a collection call Lightroom. I usually just move that folder into my nested heirarchy and everything syncs for the rest of the month.

But what should I be doing? Is this correct? I have the LRC ebook, but I couldn’t find anything in there about this.

 

[Califdan]

First of all we need to get terminology straight. It seems that uou are using the term Folder to mean several different things many of which do not relate to folders. As, such it's hard to follow what you are doing. If you don't mind, let me see if I can deduce what you mean.

I do not want to pull every photo on my phone into LR so I have turned off Auto

I assume you mean that you don't want your entire camera roll of images (taken with phone app that came with the phone) to go into LR and as such you have turned off the "auto import" feature in LR/Cloudy.

I have nested folders in LR on my phone by year and month

In LR/Cloudy, Albums reside in folders. So I assume you have something like this

2023 (folder)
.........2023-08 (album for august 2023)
.........2023-09 (album for September, 2023)

I have folders on my hard drive that correspond to this same heirarchy.

I'll assume you really mean "folder" here and not "Collection set". In other words in the folder panel in LR/Classic you see something like this
2023
........2023-08
.......2023-09

I know that Albums on the phone correspond to my hard drive folders.

This is not a correct statement. Albums on the phone correspond to Collections in LR/Classic (not folders). However, if your collections are in a hirerarchy, all but the bottom level are called "Collection Sets". So, I'm not clear if your previous Year/month hierarchy comment is indeed your Folder structure or is a Collection Set Hierarchy?

So let's look at your 4 steps
1. Create an album for the current month on my phone nested under 2023.
Good

2. Load my chosen photos into the album on my phone
Good

3. I have also chosen where to send the photos on my Mac hard drive in LRC
Not sure this is realated to your question

4. I also have a collection in LRC to mimic the folder/album structure on my phone. It is synced.
So you also have a Collection set for each year in inside of that is an Collection for each month.

When images sync from LR/Cloud to LR/Classic, two things happen in LR/Classic. First of all the images are placed in a designated folder which you can see in your Folders panel. The location on your hard drive for this folder can be found in the Preferences -> Lightroom sync tab. That tab also contans a control to allow LR/Classic to automatically create a date/month folder structure underneath the specified folder for the images based on their capture date. In your case I'd specify the parent folder one level above your "Year" folder so that the LrC provided date structure just merges into your existing Year/month structure. As I can't see your exact format for the name of the "month" level of your folder structure I can't tell you if LrC has that format as one of its optons, so let's assume you are using a format that Adobe has included as one of the options.

The second thing that happens is that if the images in LR/Cloud were in albums those albums will become collections in LR/Classic but the folders containing those Albums will not automatically become Collection Sets in LR/Classic. However, you can move those collections around with drag and drop to put them under their proper year Collection Set after which additional images from that same LR/Cloud album should go into the moved Collection.

 

[Annek73]

I really didn't need all the snark and being told I don't know the correct language to use with the tone you used. The last two paragraphs were helpful.

 

[Califdan]

Sorry you took it that way. it was not intended to be "snarky" or condescending. But, honestly I had trouble determining from your post when you were talking about information in the folders panel or the Collections panel. Maybe if I was more familiar with you or your background it would have been clearer to me.

However, I don't know you, I don't know if you are a long time user or started using the products recently. I don't know if you are technically oriented and tend to use language precisely or are less technical and tend use language more loosly. I also don't know if you appreciate that Adobe often uses confusing, contradictory, and redundnat terminology across and even within products. For example a folder in LR is not the same thing as a folder in LrC so context is importan. Another example is how Adobe calls 3 totally different functions "syncronize" and that's just within LrC. Because of this, I felt it was prudent to disclose how I interpreted your poa as my interpretation informed the solution I proposed. I'm sorry you took it the wrong way.

 

[Annek73]

Thanks, I think you can help me. I am a long term Lightroom user probably back to LR4 or before. I have always been a Classic user. I have a Sony a6 for my "big girl camera." Importing photos from the camera card is easy. I don't have any problems at all. It's just that I don't use it as much as I used to. I am taking many more photos with my phone. I am going to include some screen shots here and what I am most interested in is the workflow from the iPhone to LRC on my computer.

#1 is a screenshot of my External Hard Drive folder hierarchy.
#2 is the same hierarchy in LRC. This shot is a mirror of the EHD in LRC - not Collections.


#3 is a screen shot of Collections in LRC. Ignore the Travel Project. It is a Collection in LRC for a project upon which I am working. It is not synced. Red Box is explained under #4.


#4 are two screen shots of my phone. The years are called Albums, but when I add a month (2nd shot) I also have add Album to nest it under 2023. I am set for September. But what happens when October rolls around?


I don't know what to do when a new month rolls around. Do I create the "album" in 2023 on my phone first? Or do I create it in LRC first. In the screen shot #4 I have drawn a red box around "Lightroom." Sometimes my phone albums end up coming in under this title. I move that album up under the correct month in the 2023 Collection and anything I add to that is synced.

This time please do not hesitate to ask if you have questions.

Sorry you took it that way. it was not intended to be "snarky" or condescending. But, honestly I had trouble determining from your post when you were talking about information in the folders panel or the Collections panel. Maybe if I was more familiar with you or your background it would have been clearer to me.

However, I don't know you, I don't know if you are a long time user or started using the products recently. I don't know if you are technically oriented and tend to use language precisely or are less technical and tend use language more loosly. I also don't know if you appreciate that Adobe often uses confusing, contradictory, and redundnat terminology across and even within products. For example a folder in LR is not the same thing as a folder in LrC so context is importan. Another example is how Adobe calls 3 totally different functions "syncronize" and that's just within LrC. Because of this, I felt it was prudent to disclose how I interpreted your poa as my interpretation informed the solution I proposed. I'm sorry you took it the wrong way.

 

[Califdan]

I don't know what to do when a new month rolls around. Do I create the "album" in 2023 on my phone first? Or do I create it in LRC first. In the screen shot #4 I have drawn a red box around "Lightroom." Sometimes my phone albums end up coming in under this title. I move that album up under the correct month in the 2023 Collection and anything I add to that is synced.

In your #4 pair of screen shots from the phone, the 2023 item is an LR/Cloud "folder" and each individual month (eg. "01 January" are your albums. When October rolls around, create a new Album under the 2023 folder for it. I don't use LR/Cloud apps all that much so am unaware if there is an automated way to have LR/Cloud create an album automartically based on the date of the image but I just took a quick look and did not see a setting for that in the preferences so I assume not.

When October rolls around, the easiest is to create the new "10 October" album inside of folder 2023 on your phone. When you create the new "10 October" album, and it syncs to LrC, a new "10 October" synced Collection will be created with the images from the similarly named album on the phone.
I'm not sure how it knows what Collection Set to put this new collection in so I can't answer that part of your question but the Album name from LR/Cloud became the Collection name in Lrc. As you are already doing drag this collection to under your "2023" collection set if it didn't go there on its own. Further images taken with the phone will know you moved the collection and go to the right place.

The physical image files will be placed into a folder on one of your disk drives according to what you have in the preferences in LrC. The closest "automatic" folder structure to what you currently have is a folder per year (2023) and then within that a folder per month. The month folder can be one of "09", "Sep", or "September" as shown below. There is no "09 September"

After the end of the month, you can rename the "09" folder to "09 September" if you wish. However if you do it before that the next time you add new images from the phone you'll get a new "09" folder.
Here's what you'll get (I have my preference set to save in folder "LR Mobile Captures" and slected date mode "2023/09" as shown above.

Hope that helps.

 

[Annek73]

Thank you for your help. I’ll give this a try next month.