The Adobe Lightroom Ecosystem Explained

Using Lightroom Classic to Sync Photos Across Devices and Cloud Storage

I've been using Lightroom Classic for many years now, and one of the things that I love about it is its ability to sync photos across devices and cloud storage. This feature has been a game-changer for me, especially when I'm traveling or working on the go. With Lightroom Classic, I can easily upload my photos to the cloud and access them from any device with an internet connection.

I have to admit that at first, I was turned off by the idea of using cloud storage because it seemed like a hassle and expensive. But after trying out Lightroom Classic's syncing feature, I'm hooked. One of the coolest things about this feature is how easy it is to use. All you need to do is select the photos you want to sync, and then click on the "Sync" button. You can also use folders to organize your catalog, which makes it easier to find specific photos.

One of the pro tips I've learned is to create smart folders in Lightroom Classic. This allows me to easily search for specific photos based on metadata such as camera type or location. For example, if I'm reviewing cameras with a bunch of different phones, I can set up a folder that only shows images taken with those specific cameras. This makes it easy to find and review all the photos at once.

Another cool feature of Lightroom Classic is its ability to sync photos with cloud storage automatically. When you click on the "Sync" button, Lightroom Classic will start uploading your selected photos to the cloud. You can also use the web browser to sync photos directly from any device. This makes it easy to access and edit my photos from anywhere.

One of the benefits of using cloud storage is that it allows me to easily access all of my photos from one place, no matter where I am or what device I'm using. When I come back to the studio, everything downloads to Lightroom Classic and lives in this catalog. This makes it easy to work on multiple projects at once, as all of my photos are available in one place.

However, there is a potential downside to using cloud storage. Because you're dependent on an internet connection, if you don't have access to Wi-Fi, you won't be able to sync your photos or access them online. Additionally, there may be limitations on how much data you can move around, depending on the size of your photo library and the speed of your internet connection.

To mitigate these issues, I've started using external hard drives and portable storage devices to back up my SD cards while I'm traveling. This way, I can have a local backup of all my photos in case something goes wrong with my cloud storage or internet connection.

In terms of pricing, 100 gigabytes of space is actually usable for me, as long as I'm careful not to delete anything on my local catalog when I delete things from the cloud. This means that I don't need a lot of extra space, which makes it a more affordable option. However, if you need more storage, you may want to consider getting a little bit more.

Overall, using Lightroom Classic's syncing feature has been a game-changer for me, especially when I'm traveling or working on the go. It allows me to easily access and edit all of my photos from anywhere, which makes it easier to work efficiently and stay organized.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enokay welcome back in this video we are going to talk a little bit about Adobe that's right to the company that everyone hates to love and loves to hate but I'm actually loving them these days and once you're a little bit about my mobile setup and workflow now I have done a series of videos over the last few months I travel a lot during the year and it's really important for me to have a workflow where I can start to gather my images and call them on the road begin some basic edits at least sometimes their final but either way I want them synched up to my catalog when I get home and so it's kind of fascinating to me because I talked to a lot of friends before I started this video and what I was working on my process and it's kind of amazing how people get really confused about Adobe Creative Cloud and this is what I want to demystify I'm going to show you some cool things that you can do with it real quick before we dive in I want to give a shout out to our sponsors today who are the awesome folks over at Skillshare com if you haven't seen Skillshare you should check them out skill share is an online learning community with thousands of classes on photography film production design and many other creative fields a Premium Membership will give you unlimited access to high-quality classes from experts in their fields you can improve your skills unlock new opportunities and do the work that you love so I'll give you an example here if you were still trying to get your head around Lightroom classic CC there is a wonderful course in here that is led by Tabitha park that will explain everything from the ground up so if you want to understand how catalogs work how to call and sort your images have to use development sliders and then even more advanced things like filters and so on and so forth this is an excellent course tutorial in here and I think it's one of the best ones I've seen Skillshare is also one of the most affordable learning platforms out there an annual subscription costs less than $10 a month so if you head over to skill share using the link below in the description you can get a two month free trial so you've got absolutely nothing to lose or even purchase so just go check out skills share today by using that link in the description and when you give a special shout out and thanks to skill share for sponsoring this episode of the art of photography ok so let's talk about cloud syncing with Adobe Creative Cloud or Adobe CC as sometimes it's shortened to I have some visuals prepared so let's go over the computer here and I'm going to talk you through this so right now one of the things that's very confusing is we have two versions of Lightroom for the desktop there is this one on the Left which is known as Lightroom classic and the one on the right is actually previously known as Lightroom mobile now they're calling it Lightroom cc remember the CC stands for Creative Cloud now let's forget about both of these apps for just a second this is going to help it make more sense to you guys so I'm gonna move those over and real quick I want to talk about the cloud this is my cloud image here and what is the cloud do well the cloud is software but it runs server-side so this is all controlled by Adobe and what we can do is we can use devices to sync images with this cloud I think everybody understands how cloud computing works like Dropbox something like that so for instance when I'm on the road actually own two iPads I don't travel with both of them I usually just take one but either way I have iPads and so the other thing I might do is I might bring a camera and this is typically the way I work and what I do is I take my images from this camera I use this awesome overpriced dongle and I put the SD card in here sink this through the lightning port and I also have one for USB C and these images are imported onto the iPad and then I bring them into Lightroom Mobile which is installed on the iPad so let's say I put some images on this iPad here what it's going to do is it's going to upload those to the cloud now what actually gets uploaded to the cloud and how are these files managed well essentially what the cloud does is it takes your source image and so this could be a raw file if you shot on a cell phone maybe it's a JPEG or HDI C file either way it takes the source image the second thing it takes is what Adobe calls the XML sidecar file which is basically an XML documents text it's really small really portable now remember Lightroom does not do destructive editing so I can make all these edits and essentially what you're viewing in the end is Lightroom's interpretation with the edits that you made onto the raw files so it does that by recording all of that information into that sidecar file so those two things are synced up to the cloud now what comes back down I've oversimplified this by just saying a group of images but let's say you have thousands of images well it's going to keep those in the cloud it's not going to download those onto every device so for instance if I take my second iPad here and I open up Lightroom cc what it's going to do is it's actually going to download preview images to that iPad now when I open an image to edit it it gives me a slightly larger I can work on it from there both of these iPads are now synced up through the cloud so any images that I edit on the second iPad will reflect on the first now most people including myself don't travel with two iPads so what's a more realistic situation here well I've got one for you so I have a bunch of cell phones why on earth Ted do you have a bunch of cell phones well I'm actually working on a video that's requiring a lot of work where I'm actually going to compare some cell phones and I'm really interested in what Google have done with the pixel 3 and a lot of the computational imaging and I want to compare that to an iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy so and so forth so I actually have four phones right now that are synced up with Adobe cloud so basically I have installed Lightroom on each one of these devices and what's really cool is images because I'm testing these cameras I take on the iPhone for instance versus the pixel three versus the Samsung S 10 these all sync up into the cloud I can view them on any device and what's really cool is when I want to do some more serious editing and I want to get on to a desktop we have more that syncs up at the cloud so let's bring Lightroom mobile into the equation this will now sync up with the cloud - let's put over here I'm running out of space for crazy arrows so now I can sync back up to Lightroom cc and we'll come back to classic in a second but there's also another point where you can access the cloud that most people don't realize which is the Adobe website which is Lightroom Adobe com so if you have a Creative Cloud account you can sign in with a web browser and view everything that's in the cloud collection now how does Lightroom classic come into this equation it actually talks to the cloud as well but in a slightly different way by default and let me explain so this is kind of what I deal with when I'm traveling I have mobile devices I have a camera that I will bring images into a mobile device well when I get back to the studio I have Lightroom classic running and this is where my entire catalog of images lives on a raid server over here that is backed up in the cloud and so this is my catalog of every image that I've ever done for the most part that is in Lightroom and it's a massive catalog anyway what happens is when I get back to the studio i fire up lightroom classic and it's going to actually take all the images that are in the cloud and it's going to download as long as I'm signed in it's gonna sink them into my local catalog here this is really cool now why is this cool well it allows me to use the cloud just for a mobile workspace now theoretically you could put your entire catalogue of images everything you've ever done into the cloud I actually know somebody who has done that he has access to every image that he's ever made it's like 12 terabytes or something crazy all in the Adobe Creative Cloud he can get to them from any device he can get to them from a web browser I don't quite need that type of mobile access and the reason I say that is because when you actually price out what it's gonna cost you to get that kind of storage with Adobe it becomes astronomically expensive and originally that's what put me off - even using the cloud at all because with your account your basic and Creative Cloud account you get like a hundred gigabytes of space right which is not very much if you're looking for more long-term solutions for storage and also Adobe and I think it's probably because a couple years ago there were a lot of syncing issues in the cloud they do not recommend that you use it as a backup solution that you really need a third party to be back in your catalogue up as well anyway that's gets confusing and beyond the point of this but my point is is that I was turned off to it because the storage space was so expensive and I hope this is something that Adobe decided to come down on in the next few years we will see but what is really cool is go back to our model here I have downloaded everything that might rip here that I've put into the cloud all these cellphones are synced up my iPad in the images I took with cameras they're all in the cloud now when I come back to the studio everything downloads to Lightroom and now it lives in this catalog so here's what's amazing is I can actually take all of my data in the cloud and the fastest way to do this is actually to use the web browser and let's say I just go delete all of my images in the cloud oh my gosh are they gone no they're not they're actually in my local storage still so Lightroom classic will talk to the cloud but it doesn't delete anything on its local catalog when you delete what's in the cloud so for this reason that 100 gigabytes of space actually works really well for me I've made it usable but if you need more storage you can probably just get a little bit more storage to use and it's just a temporary solution while you're traveling now again this isn't a great backup plan here but there are other ways to do that I use drives and stuff to backup SD cards while I'm on the road that cope Island stuff I'll link up to a playlist here if you want to see the whole mobile workflow it's a little beyond the scope but this video to talk about but that's essentially what I do and so I'll clear it off after a trip when I know everything is synced up and downloaded now here's the other cool thing is I can actually use Lightroom classic to push images to the cloud and it's really cool how you do that so if you're in library view and if you're not just hit the letter G on your keyboard it will take you there over on the left hand side you will see all these folders here now I love to use folders to organize my catalog little pro tip here because I'm doing a review with a bunch of different phones this could be cameras it could be lenses whatever that is I like to create smart folders so basically I'm not looking at a library stuff and I'm having to go through the metadata and figure out what was taken on what phone I can just set up folders and so basically you set up a folder with criteria and that criteria is let's say give me every image taken on the Google pixel 3 give me every image that was taken on an iPhone 10 xmax whatever and you can see that so that's pretty easy setup I also do folders for selects well there's a number of ways you can do folders but I might grab like for instance this portraits folder let's say I want to push all of those images to the cloud that is something that I want to refer to on mobile devices or I'm going to be traveling whatever that is if you look all the way over to the left there's a little box you can check and when I tick that you're going to see that it's going to start syncing photos and if I look up at the top here this is syncing 172 photos that's how you turn on sync there's a second way you can do it where you can actually cut just right-click on the folder and you go down and you say sync with Lightroom it will do the same thing and so what this does is it's going to push things to the cloud and once again I can turn off this syncing but the cloud for me is just basically a central hub where I can have everything synced up while I'm on the road I can get two files I can get two images and I can start working on them if I have time on an airplane or in an airport now this isn't totally bulletproof at this point and I think this is important to mention because you do have some sticks in here because you're dependent on an internet connection and so for instance with the phones I don't have all of these hooked up with accounts so they basically just act as a giant ipod touch so I have to have Wi-Fi on those or I can tether them to my iPhone and you could be capped in terms of how much data you can move so these are things you need to think about so this isn't perfect yet but as long as you're traveling in an area where you have decent access to Wi-Fi this can be a huge boon for what you're doing when you travel and the fact that I can come home and everything is already synced up it's pretty cool so I would love to know what you guys think if you're using anything like this drop me a comment below I'll see you in the next video until then laterokay welcome back in this video we are going to talk a little bit about Adobe that's right to the company that everyone hates to love and loves to hate but I'm actually loving them these days and once you're a little bit about my mobile setup and workflow now I have done a series of videos over the last few months I travel a lot during the year and it's really important for me to have a workflow where I can start to gather my images and call them on the road begin some basic edits at least sometimes their final but either way I want them synched up to my catalog when I get home and so it's kind of fascinating to me because I talked to a lot of friends before I started this video and what I was working on my process and it's kind of amazing how people get really confused about Adobe Creative Cloud and this is what I want to demystify I'm going to show you some cool things that you can do with it real quick before we dive in I want to give a shout out to our sponsors today who are the awesome folks over at Skillshare com if you haven't seen Skillshare you should check them out skill share is an online learning community with thousands of classes on photography film production design and many other creative fields a Premium Membership will give you unlimited access to high-quality classes from experts in their fields you can improve your skills unlock new opportunities and do the work that you love so I'll give you an example here if you were still trying to get your head around Lightroom classic CC there is a wonderful course in here that is led by Tabitha park that will explain everything from the ground up so if you want to understand how catalogs work how to call and sort your images have to use development sliders and then even more advanced things like filters and so on and so forth this is an excellent course tutorial in here and I think it's one of the best ones I've seen Skillshare is also one of the most affordable learning platforms out there an annual subscription costs less than $10 a month so if you head over to skill share using the link below in the description you can get a two month free trial so you've got absolutely nothing to lose or even purchase so just go check out skills share today by using that link in the description and when you give a special shout out and thanks to skill share for sponsoring this episode of the art of photography ok so let's talk about cloud syncing with Adobe Creative Cloud or Adobe CC as sometimes it's shortened to I have some visuals prepared so let's go over the computer here and I'm going to talk you through this so right now one of the things that's very confusing is we have two versions of Lightroom for the desktop there is this one on the Left which is known as Lightroom classic and the one on the right is actually previously known as Lightroom mobile now they're calling it Lightroom cc remember the CC stands for Creative Cloud now let's forget about both of these apps for just a second this is going to help it make more sense to you guys so I'm gonna move those over and real quick I want to talk about the cloud this is my cloud image here and what is the cloud do well the cloud is software but it runs server-side so this is all controlled by Adobe and what we can do is we can use devices to sync images with this cloud I think everybody understands how cloud computing works like Dropbox something like that so for instance when I'm on the road actually own two iPads I don't travel with both of them I usually just take one but either way I have iPads and so the other thing I might do is I might bring a camera and this is typically the way I work and what I do is I take my images from this camera I use this awesome overpriced dongle and I put the SD card in here sink this through the lightning port and I also have one for USB C and these images are imported onto the iPad and then I bring them into Lightroom Mobile which is installed on the iPad so let's say I put some images on this iPad here what it's going to do is it's going to upload those to the cloud now what actually gets uploaded to the cloud and how are these files managed well essentially what the cloud does is it takes your source image and so this could be a raw file if you shot on a cell phone maybe it's a JPEG or HDI C file either way it takes the source image the second thing it takes is what Adobe calls the XML sidecar file which is basically an XML documents text it's really small really portable now remember Lightroom does not do destructive editing so I can make all these edits and essentially what you're viewing in the end is Lightroom's interpretation with the edits that you made onto the raw files so it does that by recording all of that information into that sidecar file so those two things are synced up to the cloud now what comes back down I've oversimplified this by just saying a group of images but let's say you have thousands of images well it's going to keep those in the cloud it's not going to download those onto every device so for instance if I take my second iPad here and I open up Lightroom cc what it's going to do is it's actually going to download preview images to that iPad now when I open an image to edit it it gives me a slightly larger I can work on it from there both of these iPads are now synced up through the cloud so any images that I edit on the second iPad will reflect on the first now most people including myself don't travel with two iPads so what's a more realistic situation here well I've got one for you so I have a bunch of cell phones why on earth Ted do you have a bunch of cell phones well I'm actually working on a video that's requiring a lot of work where I'm actually going to compare some cell phones and I'm really interested in what Google have done with the pixel 3 and a lot of the computational imaging and I want to compare that to an iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy so and so forth so I actually have four phones right now that are synced up with Adobe cloud so basically I have installed Lightroom on each one of these devices and what's really cool is images because I'm testing these cameras I take on the iPhone for instance versus the pixel three versus the Samsung S 10 these all sync up into the cloud I can view them on any device and what's really cool is when I want to do some more serious editing and I want to get on to a desktop we have more that syncs up at the cloud so let's bring Lightroom mobile into the equation this will now sync up with the cloud - let's put over here I'm running out of space for crazy arrows so now I can sync back up to Lightroom cc and we'll come back to classic in a second but there's also another point where you can access the cloud that most people don't realize which is the Adobe website which is Lightroom Adobe com so if you have a Creative Cloud account you can sign in with a web browser and view everything that's in the cloud collection now how does Lightroom classic come into this equation it actually talks to the cloud as well but in a slightly different way by default and let me explain so this is kind of what I deal with when I'm traveling I have mobile devices I have a camera that I will bring images into a mobile device well when I get back to the studio I have Lightroom classic running and this is where my entire catalog of images lives on a raid server over here that is backed up in the cloud and so this is my catalog of every image that I've ever done for the most part that is in Lightroom and it's a massive catalog anyway what happens is when I get back to the studio i fire up lightroom classic and it's going to actually take all the images that are in the cloud and it's going to download as long as I'm signed in it's gonna sink them into my local catalog here this is really cool now why is this cool well it allows me to use the cloud just for a mobile workspace now theoretically you could put your entire catalogue of images everything you've ever done into the cloud I actually know somebody who has done that he has access to every image that he's ever made it's like 12 terabytes or something crazy all in the Adobe Creative Cloud he can get to them from any device he can get to them from a web browser I don't quite need that type of mobile access and the reason I say that is because when you actually price out what it's gonna cost you to get that kind of storage with Adobe it becomes astronomically expensive and originally that's what put me off - even using the cloud at all because with your account your basic and Creative Cloud account you get like a hundred gigabytes of space right which is not very much if you're looking for more long-term solutions for storage and also Adobe and I think it's probably because a couple years ago there were a lot of syncing issues in the cloud they do not recommend that you use it as a backup solution that you really need a third party to be back in your catalogue up as well anyway that's gets confusing and beyond the point of this but my point is is that I was turned off to it because the storage space was so expensive and I hope this is something that Adobe decided to come down on in the next few years we will see but what is really cool is go back to our model here I have downloaded everything that might rip here that I've put into the cloud all these cellphones are synced up my iPad in the images I took with cameras they're all in the cloud now when I come back to the studio everything downloads to Lightroom and now it lives in this catalog so here's what's amazing is I can actually take all of my data in the cloud and the fastest way to do this is actually to use the web browser and let's say I just go delete all of my images in the cloud oh my gosh are they gone no they're not they're actually in my local storage still so Lightroom classic will talk to the cloud but it doesn't delete anything on its local catalog when you delete what's in the cloud so for this reason that 100 gigabytes of space actually works really well for me I've made it usable but if you need more storage you can probably just get a little bit more storage to use and it's just a temporary solution while you're traveling now again this isn't a great backup plan here but there are other ways to do that I use drives and stuff to backup SD cards while I'm on the road that cope Island stuff I'll link up to a playlist here if you want to see the whole mobile workflow it's a little beyond the scope but this video to talk about but that's essentially what I do and so I'll clear it off after a trip when I know everything is synced up and downloaded now here's the other cool thing is I can actually use Lightroom classic to push images to the cloud and it's really cool how you do that so if you're in library view and if you're not just hit the letter G on your keyboard it will take you there over on the left hand side you will see all these folders here now I love to use folders to organize my catalog little pro tip here because I'm doing a review with a bunch of different phones this could be cameras it could be lenses whatever that is I like to create smart folders so basically I'm not looking at a library stuff and I'm having to go through the metadata and figure out what was taken on what phone I can just set up folders and so basically you set up a folder with criteria and that criteria is let's say give me every image taken on the Google pixel 3 give me every image that was taken on an iPhone 10 xmax whatever and you can see that so that's pretty easy setup I also do folders for selects well there's a number of ways you can do folders but I might grab like for instance this portraits folder let's say I want to push all of those images to the cloud that is something that I want to refer to on mobile devices or I'm going to be traveling whatever that is if you look all the way over to the left there's a little box you can check and when I tick that you're going to see that it's going to start syncing photos and if I look up at the top here this is syncing 172 photos that's how you turn on sync there's a second way you can do it where you can actually cut just right-click on the folder and you go down and you say sync with Lightroom it will do the same thing and so what this does is it's going to push things to the cloud and once again I can turn off this syncing but the cloud for me is just basically a central hub where I can have everything synced up while I'm on the road I can get two files I can get two images and I can start working on them if I have time on an airplane or in an airport now this isn't totally bulletproof at this point and I think this is important to mention because you do have some sticks in here because you're dependent on an internet connection and so for instance with the phones I don't have all of these hooked up with accounts so they basically just act as a giant ipod touch so I have to have Wi-Fi on those or I can tether them to my iPhone and you could be capped in terms of how much data you can move so these are things you need to think about so this isn't perfect yet but as long as you're traveling in an area where you have decent access to Wi-Fi this can be a huge boon for what you're doing when you travel and the fact that I can come home and everything is already synced up it's pretty cool so I would love to know what you guys think if you're using anything like this drop me a comment below I'll see you in the next video until then later\n"