
Lightroom mobile wouldn’t be nearly as interesting if all it did was sync photos for viewing on the iPad, which is why the app includes most basic tools you’d need for editing photos on the go. Once you’re back online, any updates you’ve made will sync back to Lightroom desktop. If you know you’ll be without access but you still want to work on certain images, you can enable a collection for offline editing, which copies Smart Previews of all its images to Lightroom mobile. Of course, to have this conversation between desktop, cloud, and mobile repositories, you need an active Internet connection. There’s even an Auto Import option that grabs and syncs any new photos from your Camera Roll added since you last opened Lightroom mobile. Lightroom mobile can also import images from the iPad’s Camera Roll and sync them back to Lightroom desktop, saving you the effort of manually importing those photos via USB. Edits you make to the photo synchronize back to Creative Cloud and Lightroom desktop when you close the image-in fact, only a small XML file describing the edits is transmitted, which is why updates appear in the desktop and mobile applications quickly. Make a change to a photo on the iPad, and that change should appear in Lightroom desktop within seconds, removing the need to export or import images. In Lightroom mobile, the app downloads low-resolution previews for display in its Grid layout, and when an image is opened it pulls down the higher-resolution Smart Preview file (enabling you to zoom in to check details if needed).


Smart Previews retain much of the editability and detail of the source images (even raw files) but occupy much less storage space. Photos in collections are synchronized between Lightroom mobile and Lightroom desktop.īehind the scenes, Lightroom desktop creates Smart Previews of photos marked for sync and uploads them to the Creative Cloud servers.
