Jan Erik Moström

I’ve found it to be very convenient to edit photos on my iPad, it’s not where I edit 100+ photos but if I got less than 50, then I really like editing in Lightroom Mobile. My main photo app is Lightroom Classic, I’m not enthusiastic about it, but I’m used to it and knows how to edit my photos. With the promise that I can sync photos I’ve imported and edited in LR Mobile to LR Classic, it seems like a no-brainer to use this combo.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. The syncing between LR Mobile and Classic is 100% unreliable! Unreliable in the sense that there is always one or more photos that LR Classic tries to sync, but it never finishes. This mean that I don’t know if the photo has been copied from “LR Cloud” to my desktop, sometimes it has, and sometimes it hasn’t.

Searching for a solution, a common comment is “Let it be, it will sort itself out eventually”, my experience is that it doesn’t happen. I’ve been waiting for weeks, but Classic is still waiting for the same photo to finish syncing. Numerous times I’ve tried starting from scratch, deleting everything in “LR Cloud”, then start to import new photos on my iPad and usually in a day or two I have a photo that doesn’t finish syncing.

Yesterday, something happened that made me decide to stop trying. I had taken two photos on my phone that I needed on my desktop, the photos had synced on my iPad and everything looked OK. However, Classic refused to download them and instead was trying to finish a sync of another photo. I tried everything I could come up with to get Classic “un-stuck”, but I couldn’t figure something that worked. Instead, I exported the RAW file to Photos, let it sync to my Mac (less than a minute), exported it from Photos to my desktop and imported it into Classic where I could do what I needed to do (printing).

This was the final straw and I decided that from now on, I’ll be importing photos into Photos on my iPad, do my editing in Darkroom and later archive the photos in Classic using PhotoSync. This means that my editing will disappear, and it’s a bit cumbersome. But, according to my experience, it’s 100% rock solid. I will of course test LR Mobile once in a while to see if the syncing have improved (it hasn’t in several years, so I’m not holding my breath).

I’m amazed the Adobe hasn’t managed to get this to work, given that they have had such a long time to fix it.

PhotoSync is an app that let you transfer photos from your mobile device to some cloud service or to your computer, or from your computer to a mobile device. PhotoSync also allows you to use your mobile device for tethered shooting — works very well for me. I mostly use it for transferring photos from my iPad to my desktop … but why? Why don’t I use Apple Photos syncing capability? I agree, it seems like I’m complicating things, and perhaps I do, but there is a reason for the madness. Let me explain.

My setup and my problem

I use Lightroom Classic for managing all my photos, this is where all of my photos end up. I also use Lightroom “Cloud” for importing and editing photos from my camera when I use my iPad (this allows me to sit in the sofa and edit photos 😋). By syncing LR “Cloud” with LR Classic, I get all my camera photos into LR Classic.

I also take photos with my iPhone and these are saved to the camera roll. These photos should also end up in Lightroom Classic, and it’s here the complications start. The obvious solution would be to turn on “auto-import from camera roll” in LR “Cloud”, and sync the photos from there to LR Classic. True, and it would have worked well if it hadn’t been for that I use Apple Photos to keep a mobile “photo album”.

This means that I have photos that I’ve edited in LR Classic stored in Apple Photos. “So what’s the problem? Just add them to Apple Photos”. Well, if I export photos from LR Classic and add them to Apple Photos, LR “Cloud” sees them as new photos and import them, resulting to in duplicate images in my LR library. Trust me, it quickly becomes a mess.

“OK, but can’t you just have your ‘photo album’ in LR ‘Cloud’ instead? As long as you store previews, you can store unlimited number of photos?” Also true, but I really dislike how LR “Cloud” store/organise photos (I always mess up the library after a while) + I’ve had problems with LR “Cloud” sync, so I want to avoid using LR ‘Cloud’ in this way.

To summarise: I want to keep as few photos as possible in LR “Cloud”, and I want all my photos to end up in LR Classic. So, how do I get my iPhone photos into LR Classic? And no, I have no intention to do it manually by selecting new photos and export them from Photos to files and then import them into LR Classic.

PhotoSync to the rescue

While PhotoSync is a mobile app, it has a companion app that can be installed on your computer. This app allows you to copy photos to/from your mobile device. An important feature of LR Classic is that it can watch a folder and auto-import images that are saved there. You see where I’m going?

PhotoSync also have the ability to keep track of what photos have been added to the camera roll since the last time it sent photos somewhere.

So, here is my solution for getting all my photos into LR Classic:

• I import photos from my cameras into LR ‘Cloud’, or into LR Classic directly. The LR ‘Cloud’ photos syncs to LR Classic. Done.
• iPhone photos are saved in the camera roll. Once in a while I launch PhotoSync on my iPad (I only do this on my iPad), tell it to send all new photos to the desktop where they are saved into a specific folder — which happen to be the watch folder of LR Classic. So, all photos I send to my desktop are auto-imported into LR Classic. Done. This is done using 4-6 taps depending on how you count.

That is how I use PhotoSync to get all my photos into LR Classic without confusing myself too much.

Disclaimer

I have some additional requirements that I haven’t mentioned in order to keep this post for becoming even more complicated than it is. I also have tried several other methods for getting the photos into Classic, but I omitted them also, for the same reason (Tip: if you want to use auto-import in LR ‘Cloud’, you should only do it on one device, and you should only export photos from LR ‘Cloud’ to the camera roll on that device). And I also do some processing of the transmitted photos before they are added to LR Classics watch folder.

I’m kind of nervous about this

I’ve never cleaned a sensor before but after looking at a few tutorials I decided to try. We’ll see how it goes …

Some time later: Well, partial success I would say. It looks like I managed to get rid of the dirt/dust I wanted to remove, but for some reason a new “dust dot” appeared, and I can’t get rid of it. But it’s better than before, so I will use the camera for a while, and I’ll probably make a new attempt later.

During the last 11 months my total time at work has been about 2 hours. I have spent the rest of the time at home having meetings via Zoom, etc. Support at work gave me a decent webcam that have worked flawlessly … but I wasn’t 100% happy with it. When I looked at the video it looked like some colours got clipped and made my head look a bit strange (yeah, yeah, I know!!) because of how the skin colours were rendered. Since I’m bald, the light gets reflected there and the skin colour looks strange. And I really, really dislike how the result looks like.

At first, I thought the problems was caused by the lighting in the room and tried to fix it but failed. I didn’t really want to spend money on some LED lighting, but I couldn’t really justify spending the money. Once in a while I considered setting up my Lumix G9 as the video camera, but since I’m lazy nothing happened.

But a week ago, I read the article “Why webcams aren’t good enough” where “my” Logitech webcam was tested … and Jeff Carlson had the same experience as I have had. This finally made me set up the G9, and yesterday I had my first meeting.

While we were waiting for everyone to arrive I asked the others if they could see any difference when I was switching between the webcam and the G9.

— Yes, one is much sharper

I was smiling to myself, and asked

— Which one is better?

Here I fully expected the answer to be that the video from the G9 was much better. However, I got the answer that the webcam had a better video and was much sharper. Confused I checked to see that I had focused the G9 properly, yep, and everything looked good on the video feed I could see. So, what was wrong???

— Isn’t the video sharp? Is everything out of focus?

— No, just the background

Duh !!!! I, of course, wanted a shallow depth of field, so the background would be out of focus, but the rest thought that the webcam looked better that because of a sharper background. They didn’t notice a difference in how the skin colours were rendered, not until I asked if they could see a difference.

— Well yes, you’re right. The skin colours do look better on that one.

Sigh, people might not notice the difference, but I will continue to use the G9 because I see the difference, and now I don’t get frustrated about video quality. Yep, I’m a photo nerd 😋.

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.