Moving photos from LR mobile on iPad to LR Classic on iMac without Cloud

[jsopoci]

Lightroom Version Number

Lightroom Classic CC 8.2.1

Operating System

1. macOS 10.14 Mojave

Hello! I've been a Lightroom Classic subscriber for a few years, but am still a beginner. I would like to utilize LR mobile while traveling, uploading photos directly from my camera into the iPad for use with LR. However, my photos while traveling (which is only 2-3 times/year) will probably be in the 100-200 gb range - far maxing out the 20 gb Cloud storage provided. I'm not willing to upgrade the plan to 1 tb when it is only needed few times per year. According to Adobe support I can use a USB cable to connect iPad to iMac and import the photos to the Mac, and then open LR Classic and import from the location on the Mac into LR. However, they said that the edits I made on LR Mobile will come across, but those edits will not be revertible to the original file if I would choose to start over with editing on LR Classic. Does anyone use this workflow, and have you found this to be a dangerous/problematic limitation? I understand I could go back to the photos on the iPad and revert them there and reimport, but what a pain! Plus I won't be keeping those photos on the iPad longterm due to storage limitations.

Just for background, I take a few photos on my iPhone, but am happy to just have those come across to the Mac Photos app and be imported into LR Classic on my desktop. So, I don't need the Adobe Cloud storage for iPhone photos on an ongoing basis. I am beginning to wonder if all the hoops I seem to have to jump through using LR is worth it.

Thank you for your help.

 

[Johan Elzenga]

According to Adobe support I can use a USB cable to connect iPad to iMac and import the photos to the Mac, and then open LR Classic and import from the location on the Mac into LR. However, they said that the edits I made on LR Mobile will come across, but those edits will not be revertible to the original file if I would choose to start over with editing on LR Classic.

That is because in this setup you would have to export the images from Lightroom Mobile to the Camera Roll, meaning you'd don't transfer the raw file but a jpeg with 'baked-in' edits.

In theory you could sync the Lightroom Classic catalog to the cloud. After Lightroom Mobile has filled the 20 GB to the brim, and these images have been synced to Lightroom Classic, you could remove them from 'All Synced Photos' in Lightroom Classic. That deletes the images from the cloud, giving Lightroom Mobile room for the next 20 GB... That's the theory, I never tried it in practise and I'm not sure if I wanted to try it with important images...

 

[jsopoci]

Thank you for your reply, John. I was reading this blog: Traveling with the iPad Pro and Lightroom CC, which says that when you import photos into your iPad from your camera, it first goes to the Apple Photos camera roll, and from there into Lightroom CC/Mobile, where you would do the edits. Then they would be imported into LR Classic on the iMac through the Cloud (or as Adobe says for direct-to-computer/bypassing the Cloud, from a USB connection onto the Mac and then imported into LR Classic). That doesn't sound like it would go back to the Photos app before getting onto the Mac. Do I have this wrong?

I like your theory about syncing because it seems logical to me - although I would be going the other direction if I was going to trust that the 20 GB I have in my plan would work that way: Uploading via the Cloud to Lightroom Classic on my computer. Adobe told me that once the transfer filled the 20 GB, I would be out of luck with ever getting the rest of the images to transfer. It seems to me there should be some way around this, but, like you, I hesitate to experiment with photos I don't want to lose!

 

[Johan Elzenga]

I was reading this blog: Traveling with the iPad Pro and Lightroom CC, which says that when you import photos into your iPad from your camera, it first goes to the Apple Photos camera roll, and from there into Lightroom CC/Mobile, where you would do the edits. Then they would be imported into LR Classic on the iMac through the Cloud (or as Adobe says for direct-to-computer/bypassing the Cloud, from a USB connection onto the Mac and then imported into LR Classic). That doesn't sound like it would go back to the Photos app before getting onto the Mac. Do I have this wrong?

Yes, you first import into the Camera Roll, and when you then import into Lightroom Mobile you make a copy in Lightroom Mobile. The import into Lightroom Classic via USB would be the import of the original photos from the Camera Roll, not the copies + edits in Lightroom Mobile. Lightroom Classic can only access the Camera Roll if the iPad is connected by USB-cable. iOS does not allow it to access the copies in Lightroom Mobile.

The original photos in the Camera Roll are raw, but they are not edited, so you would lose all the edit work you had done in Lightroom Mobile. The only way to import with edits (without cloud sync) would be to export the edited photos from Lightroom Mobile to the Camera Roll again, but those exported images will be jpegs with 'baked in' edits, not raw.

So if you wanted to get the original raw photos into Lightroom Classic by USB-connection, you would first of all need room for two copies of each photo (one copy remains in the Camera Roll, the other one is in Lightroom Mobile), and secondly you could only import them without edits.