In theory, LR syncing is really, really great: by using Lightroom’s syncing feature I’m supposed to be able to take photos on my iPhone and have them synced to Adobes cloud … and when I open Lightroom Classic (I’ll call the other version Lightroom Cloud) on my desktop I’ll have the photos there.

Or even better, I can import photos from my camera on my iPad, do some editing and when I come to my desktop are there with edits. Great, wonderful, perfect … in theory. Reality is not that great.

For some reason I’m not able to add/sync photos without having LR telling me that it is “Syncing X photos” (X usually being 5, 6 or some other single digit number). Lightroom continues to show this message for hours, days, weeks and it drives me crazy since I’m never sure that all photos from my iOS devices have been synced to LR Classic. I think that all changes and photos have come across — but I’m never sure, not a good feeling.

“But just import all photos into Lightroom Cloud and manage them there!!” Sorry, but I don’t trust Adobe handling my photos — remember a few weeks ago when they managed to delete photos from a specific user group, neither do I have the money to give Adobe for storing all my photos, Lightroom Classic have a number of features/plugins that isn’t available for Lightroom Cloud and I don’t really like how photos are organized in Lightroom Cloud. It’s not a real alternative for me at the moment.

Should I switch to some other software. Well, iCloud Photos syncing has been rock solid to me, I always have the photos available on all my devices. OK, some delays have happened and I have had to wait for 10-30 minutes, but it’s fairly rare. Unfortunately, Photos/iCloud Photos miss a lot of the features that is available in Lightroom Classic so it’s not really an alternative either.

Then there is On1 that have gotten some syncing features but since it’s a fairly new system I don’t want start using it at the moment. I’m also unsure how the pricing works out. Otherwise, I don’t know of any real alternative to Lightroom when it comes to syncing.

I really wish that Adobe could create a 100% solid version of iOS LR ↔ LR Classic syncing.