Complete Mobile Photography Workflow | Adobe Lightroom Mobile + Lightroom Classic

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If you are a photographer who travels or works remotely, you’ve likely struggled with the best way to backup, store, edit, and import your photographs while away from your office or studio. I’ve struggled with this for years as well. I’ve tried everything from keeping multiple SD cards to using a Gnarbox. Over the past few years, I’ve been using a different approach, which is far better.

Ideally, when traveling, I want to ensure my photos are backed up and have a way to edit them. It would be even better if my photos and edits were imported into our Lightroom Classic library. Well, my current workflow does all of that.

I use an iPad Pro (or any other iPad) and Adobe Lightroom Mobile to quickly backup, edit, and sync my photos to my Adobe Lightroom catalog. What is particularly nice about this workflow is that as I travel, my photos are backed up to both my iPad and my laptop back at home.

Here are the steps to back up and process images using my iPad.

Step 1: Import photo to Adobe Lightroom Mobile

I use Sony cameras, which allow me to import photos to my iPad directly through a USB-C cable. With Adobe Lightroom Mobile open on the iPad all you have to do is plug the camera into the USB-C port on the iPad, turn the camera on, and an import dialog will pop up. From this dialog, you can select which images on the camera you want to import. The iPad will import JPEG and RAW files, so you can back up and edit whatever file format you are shooting.

Step 2: Sync with Adobe Creative Cloud

Depending on your Adobe subscription plan, you’ll get 100 GB or 1 TB of cloud storage. Once your photos are imported to Adobe Lightroom Mobile, they will begin syncing with the cloud if you have a WiFi connection. If you have a cellular version of the iPad, you can sync over cellular as well, but be forewarned that this will use A LOT of data. My iPad Pro has cellular, but I don’t use it to sync my photos. Instead, I rely on WiFi at my hotel, Airbnb, or a publicly available coffee shop or restaurant hotspot. Syncing can take quite a while, depending on the number and size of your image files. Generally, I let my iPad sync overnight if I’m doing a lot of shooting.

Step 3: Setup Adobe Lightroom Classic

If you use Adobe Lightroom Classic as your primary software for organizing and editing your photos, you’ll want to go into the preferences and designate where synced photos should be stored. I keep most of my images on external drives but have synced photos stored locally on my laptop. This ensures they will sync no matter whether my external drives are connected. Additionally, when traveling, I leave my laptop on back at my office so that it can receive the photos I’m syncing to the cloud while I’m traveling. This means that my photos are backed up in three places: my iPad, the cloud, and my laptop back at home.

Step 4: Managing cloud storage space

If you have the 100 GB cloud storage plan, this may present a limitation to this workflow. There are a couple of ways to work around this. First, if you cull your images while traveling and only sync “keepers” to the cloud, you’ll reduce the chance that you’ll max out our available storage. For me, this has always been sufficient. Second, if you leave your laptop or desktop on back at your office, you can delete images off your iPad (and the cloud) after they have synced and retain the local copy back at your office. This is a risky option because unless you have remote access to your main computer, there is a chance a syncing error has occurred, and you could lose your photos. I would only suggest doing this if you can remotely log in to your computer to confirm the images have been downloaded locally.

Step 5: Syncing edits

This workflow allows you to back up your photos while traveling and gives you the power of Adobe Lightroom Mobile to edit and share images while traveling. Even better, all of your edits will also be synced with Lightroom back on your computer, so when you get home, you’ll have those edits available. This makes it effortless to share images to social media or give clients a preview of their images before your final edits.

Summary

I’ve been using this mobile photography workflow for the past several years, and it has absolutely changed how I work while traveling or working remotely. If you struggle with how to back up and work with your photos while away from the office, I can’t recommend this workflow enough. If you have questions or suggestions, please leave them in the comment section below.