due to the external wisdom of the Apple Product Strategy I have move some years ago to Adobe Lightroom with Photoshop after Apple decided to sack Aperture - a stupid decision, if you ask me! Photos does by far not fulfils the criteria I have on a Photo-SW. So I decided to move to Adobe and subscribed to their Photography-subscription, which about 100$ year, so not to bad for the functionality delivered.
I do not use the Lightroom CC Cloud version but Lightroom Classic CC - which is important for the question I have.
With the improvement of the camera on the X and the excellent Moment Lenses I am using I decided quite frequently on my business trips not to take my camera with me but just use the lenses on my iPhone and still make great pictures.
So I am working on my workflow iPhone - Lightroom Classic CC
Here are my two problems:
When I hook up my iPhone to my MacBookPro (2017 with OS 10.13.6) I do see in the import dialogue the iPhone as a device, I can choose the set of pictures I want to import and no matter of how many pics I choose nothing will be imported.
When I copy all pictures from my iPhone to my iCloud Drive I cannot chose the iCloud Drive as a source in the import dialogue of Lightroom - it simply does not show up, while e.g. the Dropbox folder as a source shows up. Where the heck is the iCloud Drive
My Dad uses Adobe Bridge and it has the option to import from a folder, due to something going wonky (he has the last version before the Creative Cloud) I set him up with Image Capture on the Mac which imports to that folder and then Adobe takes it from there. Is it possible that workaround would work for you? I rarely use Adobe products myself nowadays (Photos and Pixelmator suffice) - so it’s quite possible this is the worst solution ever
Although i am on an older iPhone (The new Xs is going to be mine soon ) I still use LR camera. This gives me some advantages:
The Photo editing is much better especially if you’re already used to LR. Typically I edit them on iPhone or iPad and immediately export them to the film roll as well.
The images are immediately included in the LR ecosystem. That means if I am on my iMac the images are already in LR.
and although they are immediately exported to the iPhone photo library, the LR database is always my primary storage.
So, that could be a workflow for you as well. On the other hand, my wife uses the standard iPhone camera, but has LR open in the background. If setup such that it ingests all photos automatically they also end up in the LR ecosystem.
What it comes down to I think is to choose between the library you want to use as a basis: Lightroom or ICloud Photos.
I have a similar situation, ADobe Photo plan using LightRoon Classic CC on the Mac and importing photos from iPhone. I’ve faced all of the smae issues you’ve seen with using iCloud. After numerous attempts to get various cloud solutions to work I decided they all sucked big time and moved instead to this workflow.
I regularly connect my iPhone to my Mac using WiFi and use PhotoSync to download all photos from phone to a folder on my Mac. I do not delete them from the phone at this time it’s just a copy.
Once a month I run LightRoom and import from that Mac folder into my catalogs with all my presets. I move the files from the temporary folder PhotoSync puts them in into my main picture storage system on our RAID server. The files are renamed according to my scheme based on source. My current iPhone digital photos and videos are labeled RG002_iPhone8_--capture date DD_.jpg put into folders by day under folders by year under 2018_Oogie_Pictures_LRCAT in Picture_Files_Cataloged and tagged with a defined set of metadata. This includes my workflow keywords for later use in smart collections, year as a separate keyword, copyright, author and contact info.
I use the workflow keyword smart collections to process those images later including adding the rest of the content keywords and other metadata including titles, captions etc.
About once a quarter I delete photos off my phone that I no longer need knowing they are already ingested into my LR system.
If I was going on a trip what I’d do is just add an option to upload pictures to dropbox while on the road as a backup in case my phone went tits up. I would not delete any of the pictures off the phone until I got back home and could do it according to my regular workflow as described above.
Probably not what you wanted to hear, but it’s what I ended up doing after all the hassles trying to get other ways to work properly withiut any success.
I simply put the photos I want to import in LR Classic in a specific album in the Lightroom app on the phone (it’s easy to import from the photo app) and sync tha album with Lightroom Classic. When the sync is done I move the photos in my LR structure (and the files too, since I keep them on an external drive).
The only issue is that I cannot use the auto rename feature in the import panel in LR Classic.
Thanks - definitely not the worst solution ever
As a matter of fact, I could do this also without Bridge (which is kind of outdated, if you use Lightroom. I will look into this, thanks!
I am hardly using the LR camera nor the iPhone one - I am switching between different ones, depending on what I am up to. When I use my Moment lenses I usually use the Moment Camera App (the new version is great!), I love Halide and sometimes the iPhone camera.
That is somewhat the case, as the moment I am using the iPhone camera or Halide or others, I am using the Photos library - just with the LR camera, I am using the Adobe library … and I need to be flexible
@memex - your process is pretty much the one I am using - Photosync is a great tool, I was just hoping for a more integrated process ;)
@Sven I guess I never tried something else because I don’t take a lot of photos with the iPhone, so it works for me.
maybe this will change with the Xs =P
I’ve been using Lightroom since the v2.x days and for the last couple of years I have subscribed to the Adobe CC Photography Plan.
Photos taken with LR Mobile will show up in LR Classic on the desktop in a specific folder. You can choose/change this in Preferences -> Lightroom Sync.
I then drag the photos I want into my “Workflow” folder structure that resides on my Mac to merge with photos I may have taken with my camera from the same event. I’m still working on a full end-to-end workflow that incorporates both mobile and normal camera which will be centred around using Lightroom CC Classic for the most part.
When I went on holiday in August I only had my iPhone X with me and I wanted to see if I could get by with just a mobile phone and I was pleasantly surprised with the results. The vast majority of the photos were taken with LR Mobile with a handful taken with Portrait mode with the iPhone camera and then imported into LR for editing.
),
) I still use LR camera. This gives me some advantages:
