LR Classic & LR Mobile photo trip workflow

[cianmcliam]

Lightroom Version Number

Classic 8.3.1

Operating System

1. Windows 10
2. iOS

Hi all, I am going on a two-week trip and will be backing up all my photos to a 512GB iPad Pro and move them to LR Mobile along the way. I know the folder structure won't sync back to LR Classic when I return but I am wondering about how the cloud storage limit will affect this workflow.
At the moment I have the basic 20GB that comes with the Photography Plan with a very large number of smart previews uploaded from Classic to sync with LR Mobile. These don't affect my cloud storage limit. What I was planning on doing was adding all the photos to LR Mobile on my iPad and allowing it to sync the 20GB I have free when I have good wifi. I'll end up with a lot more than 20GB of photographs during the trip though.

When I return from the trip I was thinking if I let the 20GB it does upload from the iPad sync and download to Classic on my desktop, I can then delete the RAW files that have downloaded from my LR Mobile cloud storage. If I do this correctly, I assume all my edits and ratings will transfer back as well. What I hope will happen then is another 20GB of the photos in LR Mobile will upload to the cloud and download to Classic CC, I can then repeat the sequence.

Has anyone tried this and verified it would work?

I am also concerned that if I delete my LR Mobile Library as explained near the bottom of this page Traveling with the iPad Pro and Lightroom CC I will also lose all my Smart Previews uploaded from Classic synced folders?

 

[Jim Wilde]

I believe some users have done it that way, and it does work. But you must be very careful to ensure that each 20GB chunk has completely downloaded into Classic before you delete it from the cloud.

And yes, do NOT use that option to delete the entire Library from the cloud, as that will indeed remove all the smart previews that you've previously synced from Classic.

 

[cianmcliam]

Super, thanks for clearing that up.

I think I may have an idea that will make this a little easier if I have good wifi along the way. If I leave my old low-power consuming Windows tablet online at home connected to an external storage drive, I can log into that remotely from my iPad using TeamViewer every couple of days and manage the RAW files this downloads through Classic as often as I can manage. That would help keep my Adobe Cloud storage as low as possible and I should be able to organise the photos into collections in Classic at the same time.

 

[Zenon]

Another option only using Classic if you are interested. When I travel I use a latptop, create a new catalogue and name it based on the trip. I keep it on the HD and all the files are stored on an external portable drive. When I get home I copy the catalogue to the portable drive, plug it into my desktop and use the Import From Another Catalogue command. It merges that catalogue into the main one, moves the files off the portable drive and all the edits are retained.

I know this defeats the purpose of having cloud storage available but I just find that the easiest method.

 

[PhilBurton]

Another option only using Classic if you are interested. When I travel I use a latptop, create a new catalogue and name it based on the trip. I keep it on the HD and all the files are stored on an external portable drive. When I get home I copy the catalogue to the portable drive, plug it into my desktop and use the Import From Another Catalogue command. It merges that catalogue into the main one, moves the files off the portable drive and all the edits are retained.

I know this defeats the purpose of having cloud storage available but I just find that the easiest method.

Zenon,

When you do this merge catalog operation, are the photos contained in the travel catalog automatically moved to the location where you store all your photos in your desktop system?

Are you concerned that your travel catalog have all the same plug-ins, presets, smart collections, etc that you have for your main catalog?

Since I don't use LR Mobile at the moment, I like the idea of an all-Classic workflow.

Phil Burton

 

[johnbeardy]

I think I may have an idea that will make this a little easier if I have good wifi along the way. If I leave my old low-power consuming Windows tablet online at home connected to an external storage drive, I can log into that remotely from my iPad using TeamViewer every couple of days and manage the RAW files this downloads through Classic as often as I can manage. That would help keep my Adobe Cloud storage as low as possible and I should be able to organise the photos into collections in Classic at the same time.

In which case, a safe way to delete them from the cloud is to do it in Classic. If you see them in Classic, they've downloaded safely. Then, for example, go to All Synced Photos and remove them from there. Since this removes them from synced collections, first you might want to put them into the quick collection and then add them back to their synced collection afterwards.

 

[Zenon]

Zenon,

When you do this merge catalog operation, are the photos contained in the travel catalog automatically moved to the location where you store all your photos in your desktop system?

Are you concerned that your travel catalog have all the same plug-ins, presets, smart collections, etc that you have for your main catalog?

Since I don't use LR Mobile at the moment, I like the idea of an all-Classic workflow.

Phil Burton

No. I have all the same plug-ins and presets on both devices.

 

[PhilBurton]

No. I have all the same plug-ins and presets on both devices.

How do you manage to maintain consistency between the devices? Is your process completely manual?

Phil

 

[Zenon]

How do you manage to maintain consistency between the devices? Is your process completely manual?

Phil

When I make any changes to my iMac regarding process, plug-ins, etc I immediately do the same to the laptop so when travel time comes it's ready to go.

 

[cianmcliam]

In which case, a safe way to delete them from the cloud is to do it in Classic. If you see them in Classic, they've downloaded safely. Then, for example, go to All Synced Photos and remove them from there. Since this removes them from synced collections, first you might want to put them into the quick collection and then add them back to their synced collection afterwards.

That's great, thanks for the advice. I've not used Quick Collections before but this is a perfect example of it's usefulness!

 

[cianmcliam]

Well now I'm back from the trip and everything worked exactly as I expected. Thanks for all the tips and advice.
I wanted to edit the RAW files on my iPad on the trip and then when I got back, switch to editing the original RAW files in Classic as well as the Smart Previews on LR mobile on my 12.9" iPad Pro. This has worked out very well.

It's a bit laborious compared to how it could be but it basically went like this:

On the trip:
- I imported all of the days photos into my iPad camera roll.
- I manually imported them into LR Mobile from the camera roll. See note below on using Siri Shortcuts for this, almost ended in disaster.
- In LR Mobile I added them all to a folder with the trip name. I didn't bother creating subfolders for each day/place as these don't carry over into LR Classic.
- I was able to edit, rate and cull the images in LR Mobile as I went.
- LR Mobile uploaded all the original RAW files until my 20GB storage was full.

When I got home:
- Fired up LR Classic. It immediately started to download the 20GB of images LR Mobile had uploaded.
- Once these photos were downloaded I added them all to the Quick Collection.
- I then selected all these files in 'All Synced Photographs' and deleted them from there.
- This freed up another 20GB of cloud storage and the iPad started uploading another 20GB of my RAW files.
- Once these downloaded I also added them to the Quick Collection and deleted them from All Synced Photographs.
- Repeated the above until all photos were downloaded.
- Once the downloading had completed and I had deleted all the synced photographs, I bulk selected photos of particular places or specific shoots
and added them to a new set of sub-folders.
- I set each of these new sub-folders to sync with LR Mobile so within an hour all my photos were back on my iPad as Smart Previews.

The next concern was to fit all this back into my RAW file archive and backup drive and folder structure.
- LR Classic downloads all the files and sorts them into folders by the date they were taken, one folder for each day. I think you can change this a little but it didn't bother me too much.
- To get my RAW archive folder structure back (Shoot name/description plus date as the folder name) I had to cut the files from the date based folders that LR Classic made into new folders on my catalog and backup drives.
- Cutting and pasting the files from their original folders into new locations with new folder names broke the link in the LR Classic Catalog to the RAW files. I already knew this would happen so after moving each set of files I went into that folder of LR Classic and clicked on the little exclamation mark that appears when the RAW file is missing. I then used the prompt box that pops up to navigate LR Classic to the new location of the first RAW file in each folder. This then synced up all the other photos in the same folder.

Overall I was happy I didn't go photo crazy or was on an actual photography job over the two weeks or it would have taken quite a bit of time to sort out when I got home. It's not a difficult process at all, just time consuming.
It could be made an awful lot faster and easier if folder structures from LR Mobile synced back to LR Classic. That seems an obvious miss on Adobe's part.

* I had previously used the Siri Shortcuts method to import last imported photos into LR Mobile automatically and then delete the photos from the camera roll. However, I found that with a large number of photos they were not fully or even partially imported into LR before the Siri Shortcut started deleting them from the camera roll. Thankfully, I had not ticked yes to delete the original files on the SD cards when prompted by the Photos app after import. Otherwise I could have lost a large number of files by using this. Not sure why this happened.

 

[mcasan]

The wife and I each use an iPad Pro and WD Passport Pro on the road. Each of us take the SD cards from our two cameras and puts one into a card reader attached to the iPad. The other card goes into a WD wireless passport pro where incremental backups are automatically made to its internal HD (SSD version now available). When both those copying procedures are completed, we swap the cards between the devices and do a second backup procedure. That puts all images on the cards onto both the iPad and onto the passport's HD. Then the cards can be put back into the cameras and reformatted for use the next day.

If there is a long flight home, culling can be done on the iPad. We do not typically use Lr Mobile for any editing unless someone wants a couple of edited images while we are on location. When we get home we use Image Capture on our iMacs to import the images into a temp folder on the iMac. Then we can tell Lr Classic to do the usual import process that copies our images into date-based folders and also renames the images. We do not convert to dng. After the import is done and the Lr catalog has been backed up, the temp folder is deleted and a complete MacOS backup is done. Then we delete the images from the iPad and from the Passport.

This approach will be even easier with iPadOS 13 when we will have the option to use a cable between iPad and Passport along with the Files app to copy the incremental card backups from the Passport to the iPad at USB 3 speeds. Lots more possibilities with the new iPadOS 13 in September.