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Moving to Universal apps on MacOS

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In the C1P opening dialog, they now state their next step is for iPad in 2022. Evidently the big work moving from MacOS Universal to an iPadOS app is that you have to redesign the UI for touch screen.

With WWDC next week, and nothing I know about from Adobe, I have to wonder if Adobe is gonna wait for Christmas to fulfill their commitment for porting to Universal design for PS, ACR, and LrC.
 

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Adobe already has iPadOS apps for Lightroom and Photoshop. With the new M1 version of the iPadPro, it might even be possible to run M1 compiled MacOS apps like Lightroom Classic


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Adobe already has iPadOS apps for Lightroom and Photoshop. With the new M1 version of the iPadPro, it might even be possible to run M1 compiled MacOS apps like Lightroom Classic
AFAIK, that won’t be the case. The iPad may have an M1 chip, it runs on iPadOS, not MacOS. So an M1 MacOS application does not run on an iPad, just like an Intel MacOS app does not run on Windows.
 
AFAIK, that won’t be the case. The iPad may have an M1 chip, it runs on iPadOS, not MacOS. So an M1 MacOS application does not run on an iPad, just like an Intel MacOS app does not run on Windows.

That is not what I mean. Because of the M1 Chip compile, Lightroom Classic might be able to run on an iPadPro running iPadOS. Apple has already said that iOS and iPadOS apps might be eventually running on M1 MacOS laptops and desktops.

Also MacOS can run virtual on Windows computers and Windows OS can be installed on intel Apples.


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Personally, don't care at all about Lightroom. We don't have ACR for PS or LrC for iPadOS.
 
Personally, don't care at all about Lightroom. We don't have ACR for PS or LrC for iPadOS.

I can used Lightroom on my iPadPro to share to Photoshop on the iPad Pro. I don’t need a separate ACR. Personally I think the ACR interface is antiquated and stale compared to the interface used in Lr and LrC.
PS on iPadOS is like it’s Lightroom partner lacking in functionality compared to its more mature MacOS counterpart. But since it is not so complex as the original, it find it easier to use.


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That is not what I mean. Because of the M1 Chip compile, Lightroom Classic might be able to run on an iPadPro running iPadOS. Apple has already said that iOS and iPadOS apps might be eventually running on M1 MacOS laptops and desktops.
Yes, but that is the oposite and that is what Apple is going to suport. They did not say they will support running MacOS apps on iPadOS one day, and it is unlikely that Adobe will try to do that on their own. Adobe already has Lightroom for iPad, so they have no incentive to make Lightroom Classic run on an iPad too. My bet is that this is never going to happen. It would make much more sense to improve syncing between Lightroom Classic and the Lightroom cloud ecosystem, and they even refuse to do that much!

ACR for iPad is another matter. Adobe has Photoshop for iPad, but that app cannot open raw files directly. It makes sense to port ACR to the iPad, so that photographers who do not use any version of Lightroom (there are quite a lot of photographers who use Bridge / ACR / Photoshop) can still work with raw files in Photoshop for iPad.
 
Yes, but that is the oposite and that is what Apple is going to suport. They did not say they will support running MacOS apps on iPadOS one day, and it is unlikely that Adobe will try to do that on their own. Adobe already has Lightroom for iPad, so they have no incentive to make Lightroom Classic run on an iPad too.

Once Lightroom Classic is compiled to run with M1, then It might not be too difficult for Adobe to create an iPadOS version.
You are correct that Apple has not indicated the M1 MacOS apps will run on iPadOS but they have not indicated that these will not. Apple already has its office version of apps running on iPadOS and MacOS. It seems reasonable that the same Apple office app would be running on MacOS and Apple only supports one compiled version and Intel disappears from the Apple line up.

This whole thread is about speculation. So, you can speculate the way you want and so can I.


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Once Lightroom Classic is compiled to run with M1, then It might not be too difficult for Adobe to create an iPadOS version.

I doubt that. Apple (and many others) have MacOS and iPadOS versions of certain apps, that is true. But the iPadOS versions are real iPadOS apps, not simply MacOS apps ported to iPadOS. They are optimized for touch, and do not rely on right mouse button clicks, just to name one major difference of these two OS-ses. Adobe already has an iPadOS version of Lightroom. It simply does not make sense for them to create yet another version, and certainly not a version that won't run very well on an iPad because it is a ported MacOS version.

Speculation? Yes sure, but you can base speculation on common sense and common sense tells me that Lightroom Classic for iPad is not going to happen.
 
I doubt that. Apple (and many others) have MacOS and iPadOS versions of certain apps, that is true. But the iPadOS versions are real iPadOS apps, not simply MacOS apps ported to iPadOS. They are optimized for touch, and do not rely on right mouse button clicks, just to name one major difference of these two OS-ses.
Very true. Simply porting the Lightroom Classic code to iPad OS would probably be the easy part. Having that pile of code be productive on iPad OS is the real challenge. The UI is a major problem. Some Lightroom Classic controls are so thin or tiny that they are easy to miss even on a Mac or PC with a high precision mouse, like resizing a side panel or hitting the sync icon…those controls are absolutely not usable with touch in their current form. And like Johan said, you can’t use computer gestures like right-clicks and hovers (unless supported when a mouse is connected to the iPad).

There is another issue. For the current Lightroom on iPad, one reason Adobe went with storage of masters on the cloud with Lightroom on the iPad is that iOS does not seem to support path-based referenced files, which are required for local storage of masters in Lightroom Classic. Even though the Files app appears to present hierarchical folders, I can’t think of an iPad app that lets you work with its files using paths. I don’t know the technical details behind this, but iOS seems to require all apps to use their own sandboxed storage that makes traditional path file referencing impossible.

That might explain why we have not (as far as I know) seen any iOS application that uses path-based file links on Mac/Windows, such as Adobe InDesign, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Apple Final Cut Pro, QuarkXPress, etc. None have made it to iPad. Adobe has released Photoshop and Illustrator on iPad, but…they are cloud storage only, just like cloud Lightroom: When you open a file into iOS Photoshop or Illustrator it is always uploaded to the cloud (to Adobe Cloud Documents, which works like Lightroom Photos online). If you open a file from local iOS storage into iOS Photoshop or Illustrator, there is absolutely no way to avoid it being uploaded to the cloud and being edited from there from that point on…just like cloud Lightroom on iOS. Porting Photoshop and Illustrator to iOS did not preserve the ability to save their documents to any local folder.

Of course, I’m interested in whether any of those iOS restrictions will be lifted in iOS 15…if they are, we might hear about it at WWDC 2021 two days from now.

In short, If Lightroom Classic ever appears on iPad OS, it will require a complete redesign, and the possible loss of several features that can’t be properly supported on iPad OS (Will plug-ins work? Publish services? Printing with profiles?). There is no guarantee that a user of Lightroom Classic on Mac/Windows will recognize or enjoy using an unavoidable total redesign of Lightroom Classic for iPad OS.

If the way things are in iOS 14 doesn't change soon, it’s more realistic to hope that the current Lightroom on iOS gains more Lightroom Classic features.
 
The current IPadOS release of Lightroom does support some gestures. Right Click in MacOS brings up the context menu. Context menus are not really applicable in iPadOS. Other gestures that might work with a Lightroom Classic could be added. Since iPadOS v13.x, Apple has supported files and attached storage. Lightroom Classic uses a catalog file to store the information about the managed images Lightroom on the iPad, sends this same information to the cloud. My M1 iPadPro when it arrives will have 1TB of storage as well as the ability to mount external volumes. My iMac has a 1TB primary SSD. You can see where I am going with this. If I were writing code for M1 MacOS and M1 iPadOS, I would want to maintain only one set of code. Already Adobe has one or nearly one code set for Mac and Windows.
Intel Macs are on their way out and it will be just a matter of time before Apple and Adobe cease to support intel based apps.


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The current IPadOS release of Lightroom does support some gestures. Right Click in MacOS brings up the context menu. Context menus are not really applicable in iPadOS. Other gestures that might work with a Lightroom Classic could be added.
Yes, I think it’s safe to assume that, as with existing iPad OS apps such as Photoshop, if Lightroom Classic came to iOS it would take advantage of the mouse and keyboard shortcut support already present in iOS. But to be a true iOS app, Lightroom Classic would have to be productive even when no mouse or keyboard is attached, and that’s a big reason a complete redesign would be needed. Unless Adobe took the non-standard step of mandating a keyboard and mouse in the system requirements for the iPad version.

Since iPadOS v13.x, Apple has supported files and attached storage.
But with the deal-breaking limitations mentioned above: Right now on the iPad you can have Lightroom and Photoshop open a photo from external storage, no problem there. But there is absolutely no way to use Lightroom to manage the original files on that external storage, so the photo you open is immediately uploaded to the Lightroom Photos cloud as the master…with no further connection to the original you imported from external storage.

Despite support for external storage in iOS, currently Lightroom can use that external storage only as a big holding area for importing, not as master storage. For example, this is a problem if your iPad has only 256GB internal storage and you have 1TB of photos on an external SSD. If you tell Lightroom to import all the photos on your external SSD, although I haven’t tried this it sounds like Lightroom will attempt to upload your 1TB of imported photos to cloud storage as soon as it can, but in stages because it cannot copy all of the 1TB of photos into the 256GB iPad at once. And Lightroom will never again look at the originals on your external storage.

This appears to be the behavior across a wide range of iOS apps, from Photoshop and Illustrator to LumaFusion to Affinity Photo. They all “support” external storage, but only in terms of access for import and export. Not editing. If you want to edit a file on external storage, they always copy it to their own internal iPad storage first. On iOS we can’t use external drives to provide more space for files being actively edited by iOS apps, and until that changes, that’s another reason we don’t have a true Lightroom Classic on iOS.
 
It will be interesting to see how Phase One will address this in their iPad app next year. Their advantage is that they do not have web-centric version, like Lightroom CC, to protect. Lets hope we never see a web-centric version of C1P, Affinity Photo, Pixelmator.....etc.
 
Apple Silicon support....Universal mode! ;)
 
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