Is there a way to use the synced photos on LR Mobile to feed Apple Photos? I can only find ways to do the other way
There probably isn’t a way through a synced photos method, because Apple Photos isn't set up to import photos that way. There are other ways that are only semi-automated, but would still streamline the process a bit. Because it’s Lightroom Classic, the route might be through a Publish Service or Export preset. This is one way to do it:
- In Lightroom Classic, set up an Export preset or Publish Service that exports copies of selected images to a specific folder. Because you are transferring the copies to your wife, it might be good for that folder to be cloud-synced, such as a folder both of your computers can reach on Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, or similar. It can also be a folder on your computer that she can reach if you enable file sharing, or a folder that you can reach on her computer if she enables file sharing. Or, the folder could be on an external volume that you hand to each other to do a transfer.
- When you want to send a batch to your wife, mount that folder, select the images in Lightroom Classic, and run the Export preset or Publish Service. It will export copies of the images to that folder.
- After you tell your wife there are new photos, she can select them in that folder and drag, then drop them in Apple Photos or onto the Apple Photos app icon (or on a shortcut to it, such as its icon in the macOS Dock). Apple Photos imports the images. She has to do this because Apple Photos doesn't have auto-import, as far as I know. (It might be possible to use separate Mac software to set up some kind of automatic import, saving her this step. For example, a utility I use, Hazel, is able to watch a folder, and one of its watched folder rules is Import to Photos.)
- After Apple Photos imports the images, either of you can delete the copies in the transfer folder. Apple Photos copies photos into its managed area (Photos Library) by default, so the copies in the export destination folder aren’t needed any more, and you probably want to clear out that folder so that the next time you export photos to that location, she can just Select All and know they are all new ones.
You would have to do those steps every time you want to transfer new photos to her.
The main issue here is that Apple Photos is a modern metadata-based image organizer, which means it follows the same philosophy as Lightroom (not Classic), Google Photos, and others like it: Each of those apps copies photos into a hidden area it manages, and in there, the photos are not visible to any other app on the computer in normal folders in the file system, not even on the desktop. One reason they do this is to simplify photo organization for non-pros (you can use the easy front end to manage photos with metadata, instead of creating a mess of manually organized folders in the file system), and to greatly simplify cloud sync of those photos to the user’s other desktop and mobile devices (if she has iCloud Photos enabled). The controlled, hidden, and typically cloud-based file system lets Apple Photos, Adobe Lightroom, and Google Photos maintain that organization consistently across devices with different file systems. If you want another app to use a photo stored by any of those apps, you export a copy.
That walled-off proprietary photo management area means you usually can’t maintain a folder out in the normal file system that apps from multiple companies can read and update automatically. For example, in your case it would be nice if both Lightroom Classic and Apple Photos could point to the same folders of originals, avoiding duplication and extra work. But even if you could achieve that (I do know of a way), it still fails as a solution because each app uses its own database that doesn’t talk to any other in any way. Which means, even if both of the apps do point to the same folder of images, there is no way that the edits either of you makes (correction, cropping, adding captions) could be read by the other app…exporting copies is still required if you want her to have edited versions. And if either of you changes the organization of that folder (moving or deleting images), image paths would break in the other.
That’s why the best way to do this might be for you to export temporary copies of edited files from Lightroom Classic, which she imports into Apple Photos.
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