# Redefining Workflow



## Juliette (Mar 5, 2021)

I tried a new workflow due to the fact that the pandemic has changed the way I shoot but it’s the wrong way, so need a suggestion. It’s as follows:

1) I import all photos onto my Mac and make a back up onto my external drive, which is where all my photos live, eventually.
2) I create a collection called, “working photos” And I sync it to LR mobile. 
3) I try to do my edits from my iPad from the comfort of my living room and not sit behind a desk, but argh!! These are previews, not the original RAW files. 

Is anyone currently backing up their photos onto external drives and editing on iPad? If so, can you share your process please?

thanks,
juliette


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## clee01l (Mar 5, 2021)

Here’s the workflow that I have adopted since I retired my MBP in favor of an iPadPro:
1: I import to Lightroom on my iPadPro from the camera card. 
2: I cull and do light edits on the iPad Pro. 
3: I let the Lightroom Cloud sync full size image files (RAW NEFs) back to my Lightroom Classic on the iMac. 
4: I finish processing on the iMac and resume my normal workflow there. 

I let TimeMachine do all of my system backups of all of my critical user data onto an EHD. 

If you sync FROM LrC to the cloud, you get proxy image files in the cloud and these are suitable for editing on any screen size as the long edge is around 2580 pixels.
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk


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## Rob_Cullen (Mar 5, 2021)

_"but argh!! These are previews, not the original RAW files."_
Yes. They are proxy Smart Previews with a long edge dimension of 2560 pixels.
You might find they are quite acceptable for most edit functions, with the exception of Noise and Sharpening.
One benefit is that they do not occupy any space whatsoever of your Cloud allocation.

_"back up onto my external drive, which is where all my photos live, eventually."_
If Lightroom-Classic is to be your 'Master Controller' of your image library then you have to consider that the Cloud is NOT a Backup of these files, and you still require the local files available to LrC, AS WELL AS backups of the files to other drives.

My workflow is Lightroom-Classic based. (Accept that the mobile synced files are proxies)
That of Cletus is Lightroom-mobile (Cloud) based.

COMPARE LR & LR-CLASSIC (Lr Queen) 
It is your decision to decide- 
! WHICH LIGHTROOM IS RIGHT FOR YOU


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## Juliette (Mar 6, 2021)

Thanks for the comments and feedback. My workflow is typically Lightroom-Classic based but the proxy files are in most cases annoyingly difficult to deal with... I do like Cletus' workflow though because he ultimately goes back to the Mac for the more in-depth editing. 

I have only two more questions:

1) Cletus, in the workflow below, where are your images actually stored? On your HD or EHD?
2) If I want to remove the proxy images from all collections and start over, what's the best way to get my RAW files into LR cloud with all flags/ratings, etc.? 


clee01l said:


> Here’s the workflow that I have adopted since I retired my MBP in favor of an iPadPro:
> 1: I import to Lightroom on my iPadPro from the camera card.
> 2: I cull and do light edits on the iPad Pro.
> 3: I let the Lightroom Cloud sync full size image files (RAW NEFs) back to my Lightroom Classic on the iMac.
> ...


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## DaveMCO (Mar 6, 2021)

Juliette said:


> Thanks for the comments and feedback. My workflow is typically Lightroom-Classic based but the proxy files are in most cases annoyingly difficult to deal with... I do like Cletus' workflow though because he ultimately goes back to the Mac for the more in-depth editing.
> 
> I have only two more questions:
> 
> ...


Juliette:

I have the 1TB plan that includes LRC, LR, and LR Mobile.

i do something similar to you But slightly different.

I import all images via my iPad.  They then sync with the cloud in full res.  Those images are then pushed by the cloud down into LRC as full res and I then move them into my appropriate file structure on my SSD using LRC.  after the images are moved into my file structure, they remain synced.  now you have the best of all worlds IMO:  full res in the cloud and full images in your folder structure on your SSD and they are all synced.

this videos does a good job explaining it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_BWwmyPCEk

hope that helps.  I now do virtually 100% of my work on my iPad and everything just syncs up.  I am waiting on the day, likely several years, for full feature Parity between LRC and LRM as well as PS and PS Mobile.  However, as it is now most of my work can be accomplished on the 12.9” iPad Pro.

PS:  there is a way to also load full res images on a Mac from LRC up to the cloud.  It’s a bit of a hack— but it can be done and I have done it personally and it worked for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLfOB4hhUaw


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## Juliette (Mar 6, 2021)

DaveMCO said:


> Juliette:
> 
> I have the 1TB plan that includes LRC, LR, and LR Mobile.
> 
> ...



Hi Dave, thank you SO much for this, as you helped me fine tune my process and that last part is EXACTLY what I needed! I have all these images already culled, you see... and so now I need to reverse the process and get those into LR. 

THANK YOU! I will try this and report back in case others need to do the same.


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## DaveMCO (Mar 6, 2021)

Juliette said:


> Hi Dave, thank you SO much for this, as you helped me fine tune my process and that last part is EXACTLY what I needed! I have all these images already culled, you see... and so now I need to reverse the process and get those into LR.
> 
> THANK YOU! I will try this and report back in case others need to do the same.


You are more than welcome......

one note:  on the second hack (LRC full res load to LR via drag and drop on a Mac... second video), the only issue that I have had is large tif files (over 100mb)..... LRC does from time to time throw error messages on these files and it’s a bit of a pain to clear the error message — the file actually seems to load into LR but LRC “pretends” to hang.  If you have a bunch of large tifs that you want to load to LR from LRC, do step into that process slowly....  load two or three and see how it goes before trying to load 50 of them.  

the “large file glitch” is the only glitch that I found With this “hack”.......


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## clee01l (Mar 6, 2021)

Juliette said:


> Thanks for the comments and feedback. My workflow is typically Lightroom-Classic based but the proxy files are in most cases annoyingly difficult to deal with... I do like Cletus' workflow though because he ultimately goes back to the Mac for the more in-depth editing.
> 
> I have only two more questions:
> 
> ...



If I start with Lightroom Cloudy, full size images gets stored both in the cloud and in LrC on my iMac. If I only have full size images in LrC, then LrC will sync proxies to the cloud. If I want to store full size images in the cloud, then I need to import these full-size images using Lightroom (Cloudy). Lightroom Cloudy will replace proxies with the full size file. 

You will need the larger 1TB photography plan to manage more than 20GB of full size images in the cloud. 


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk


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## Juliette (May 10, 2021)

Thanks to all who responded to this a couple of months ago. I have a great workflow now and all is well. HOWEVER, I have a question: my great new workflow pulls in RAW to LR mobile first. I did not do that historically. What's the best way to be able to edit my older photos remotely? Should I pull my key, five star photos from that LR classic folder I created years ago and export them? Or do I do this another way? I just want access to be able to edit older photos that were part of my old workflow (RAW versions). 

Thanks!


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## johnbeardy (May 11, 2021)

You could import copies of these older raw files directly into Mobile, Lr Web or Cloudy Lightroom. Adobe's Sync mechanism should recognise that these originals in the cloud should be associated with the original files already in the Classic Lightroom catalogue. 

To create these import files, maybe export copies of these 5 star raws from Classic, choosing Original as the format in the Export dialog. These are just temporary files which can all be in a single folder,  and you can delete it after sync has completed.

Try it on a small scale first.


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## DaveMCO (May 11, 2021)

Juliette:

I’m not entirely sure that I follow you.  I think that you are saying that you want to get some “old” Raw files from LRC to LR and LR Moile so that you can work on them in LR Mobile and have everything sync.  Is that correct?

If that’s correct and you are on a Mac, does the drag and drop method (second video above) not work for you?


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## Juliette (May 11, 2021)

@DaveMCO the problem is that I don't have my historical RAW photos in LR mobile anymore so there are no Smart Previews to replace via drag and drop. 

You see, I had most of my images in LR mobile, some in RAW, some just smart previews as exported from LR Classic, until I started having a separate problem synching. So I deleted everything from LR mobile - down to zero. Then I started my new workflow as described above and for the first time started importing RAW into LR mobile instead of LR Classic CC. 

So now the workflow is perfect. I'm happy with my new photos and how I am able to edit and sync with desktop. However, it's about getting older RAW versions into LR mobile now so that I can have access to those while on the road. Those older RAW files are part of my portfolio too and I'll need to have access. 

Hope that makes sense!


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## DaveMCO (May 11, 2021)

@Julliette:

you don’t need smart previews ….. you can just load the Raws.

On a Mac just  select the raws in LRC that you want to load to LR Desktop (which will also sync to LR Mobile) and drag the raw files into LR desktop.  Everything will sync up.   The full raw files will be available  to you on LR Mobile.  Forget about smart previews totally…. On a Mac, Just drag the RAW files into LR Desktop as shown in the video above…. Everything will sync and will stay in sync (changes you make to raws In LRM will sync with LRD and LRC (And vica-versa).

I have zero smart previews …… I dragged and dropped all the raws and tifs from LRC to LRD and, save for a few issues with trying to sync large Tifs, everything loaded and sync’d exactly like the SECOND video above.

I hope that helps.  If not, perhaps others can chime in.


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## Juliette (May 11, 2021)

@DaveMCO I'm giddy with excitement now!! I'll give it a go this afternoon and let you know .


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## Juliette (May 11, 2021)

@DaveMCO  - Back in March when I posted here, I didn't pay too much attention to that other half of your video because I was so focused on getting the right workflow. Now that you've pointed out that this was also the solution to my quandary about RAW images and how to get them back in properly, I'm SOOO grateful to you!!

I just literally only spent ten minutes isolating my 5 star photos from 2009 - 2021 from their respective folders in LR Classic and dragged them year by year into LR Mobile app on my desktop. Not only did they resolve into LR mobile with no hiccups, the process was lightning fast and bonus: LR recognized duplicates!! This is brilliant! 

Now my only confusion. While this is happening.... syncing to the cloud, is it OK to have both LRC and LR open on desktop the whole time? I seem to remember reading somewhere that you shouldn't have both apps open.


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## DaveMCO (May 11, 2021)

Juliette said:


> @DaveMCO I'm giddy with excitement now!! I'll give it a go this afternoon and let you know .


Great!

my recommendation is to load one or two raws via drag and drop to see how it goes.  When you when you drag to the tool bar (LR icon as shown in the video), make sure to then select the folder that you want to put the raws into …….   You’ll be amazed at how all this works …….

lastly, once you have “practiced” are ready to get the rest of your files Loaded, I would suggest that you do them in smaller batches.  I did them over a series of days a couple hundred at a time.  Never had an issue with a raw file — only had a few issues with some large Tifs.


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## DaveMCO (May 11, 2021)

Juliette said:


> @DaveMCO  - Back in March when I posted here, I didn't pay too much attention to that other half of your video because I was so focused on getting the right workflow. Now that you've pointed out that this was also the solution to my quandary about RAW images and how to get them back in properly, I'm SOOO grateful to you!!
> 
> I just literally only spent ten minutes isolating my 5 star photos from 2009 - 2021 from their respective folders in LR Classic and dragged them year by year into LR Mobile app on my desktop. Not only did they resolve into LR mobile with no hiccups, the process was lightning fast and bonus: LR recognized duplicates!! This is brilliant!
> 
> ...


Awesome!

as for “open at the same time” yes, I had both “open” at the same time and had no issues.  I would NOT try to edit or change any of them however until the sync was complete.


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## Juliette (May 11, 2021)

Ah, ok, thank you again SOOOO much!! This has been a lifesaver!!


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## Juliette (May 13, 2021)

@DaveMCO -- I finalized this process of copying the originals into LR mobile. HOWEVER, upon sync now it's pulling down all of those images that I took from LR classic and putting them into my sync folder, which is of course, duplicating all of what I exported out! What should I do??


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## johnbeardy (May 13, 2021)

Check the detail first. When you write  "all of those images that I took from LR classic", are you absolutely certain that it is "all" ? And what exactly do you mean by "sync folder"? Where / in what app do you see this?


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## Juliette (May 13, 2021)

Thanks @johnbeardy for trying to assist. That message was for @DaveMCO since he knows where I left off.  The issue was that I started this great new workflow based on the feedback from this thread. That part went well.

Later as a step 2, I wanted to then go back in my historical photos, the ones not part of the new workflow that were sitting on external drives but in my catalog. Because those show up as smart previews in Cloudy, I was told by Dave that if I wanted the RAW versions in the cloud, I'd have to drag and drop them into LR cloud version app on my desktop, which I did.

So I was happy that my historical 5 star RAW images were now in the cloud... until I realized they were syncing right back into my hard drive from the sync process! I had not thought about this happening.

I went ahead and contacted Adobe. They offered a really good solution which was the following:

I created a brand new catalog with NO references to external drives at all. Those original raw images are safe to stay on the external drives, unplugged for now. 

I started the sync process. LR Classic started pulling down (again) the images and syncing to the cloud. This is fine. Now what I have is all my images together in one place - the same ones that were referencing to my external drive. All same info. 

Now when the sync completes, I'll ask LR Classic to change location of my sync folder to a blank external drive. This way all of my photos are off of my hard drive. 

After that, I'll resume my workflow as planned.  I'll have a "clean" catalog with no more need to plug in external drives except when I come back from a trip and need to sync up into LR CC. 

I hope that makes sense. Dave's initial idea still works in theory. I just needed to tweak the behind the scenes structure.


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## Phil Terry (Aug 6, 2021)

@Juliette - following these threads has been incredibly useful as I migrate my workflow from pure Classic to include Cloud. Would you mind sharing your step-by-step workflow? Thanks!


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## Juliette (Aug 10, 2021)

Hi @phil9971-me , I'm glad it has helped you. It has certainly been quite the journey and not over yet! I had a mishap with one of my external drives which has thrown the entire plan out the window. I no longer trust only using a workflow that involves external drives. Therefore, it's 100% cloudy with plans to keep the external drives connected and syncing through Classic, but more as a 'historical' back up, if you will. When things are sorted out, I'll go back to the regular workflow, which is as follows:


*WORKFLOW AT HOME - ( LR Classic preferences point sync folder to internal drive. I tried moving it to external HD but LR changed my subfolder structure and it created a mess. Moved it all back to Mac drive, but this is not sustainable as the catalog and sync images grow, so will need to address this at some point).*

1 - Create folder 20xx/DATE/Location on external hard drive
2 - Copy all contents from SD card to the above location on external drive
3 - Import new folder in LR Classic from external drive (add, not copy or move). This provides the reference.  Leave Classic open.
4 - Open LR
5 - Drag images from SD card into LR
6 – When requested, choose to add all images into a collection called "working folder".
7 - Cull images LR  in the “working folder” collection as time allows.
       a) Flagged items get moved into different collections, according to subject
       b) Unflagged items get LR. (You'll have originals, as all images will have already been imported to external drive in step 2)
       c) Rejected items get deleted from LR.
8 - When sync occurs, this will add ONLY flagged Photos to LR Classic in corresponding collections. The rejecting and removing all others at end disposes them from your master LR collection.
9  - Export all “flagged” images to Amazon Photos as a secondary backup.
10 - Sync all drives to Backblaze.
11 - Back up LR Classic.


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## Phil Terry (Aug 11, 2021)

@Juliette  - this is great, thanks for sharing. I’ll work through it in more detail when I’m back from holiday. I really like your online backup solutions as well, particularly as I recently formatted a drive by mistake and ended up having to buy specialist software to recover my files. I think that because I’m now so paranoid about losing files I’m importing everything straight into Lightroom cloudy and then letting it sync with Classic in due course.


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## dkinpgh1 (Aug 23, 2021)

DaveMCO said:


> Juliette:
> 
> I have the 1TB plan that includes LRC, LR, and LR Mobile.
> 
> ...


I've been lurking here and following the discussion on workflow. I like the idea of loading new pics into Lightroom Mobile on the iPad and having those full res pics in the Cloud to sync with LR Classic. My question is: is it possible, once those pictures are downloaded into LR Classic, to remove the full res pix and only have the smart previews in the Cloud? I'd prefer not to update to the 1TB cloud subscription.

Thanks,
Don


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## Juliette (Mar 5, 2021)

I tried a new workflow due to the fact that the pandemic has changed the way I shoot but it’s the wrong way, so need a suggestion. It’s as follows:

1) I import all photos onto my Mac and make a back up onto my external drive, which is where all my photos live, eventually.
2) I create a collection called, “working photos” And I sync it to LR mobile. 
3) I try to do my edits from my iPad from the comfort of my living room and not sit behind a desk, but argh!! These are previews, not the original RAW files. 

Is anyone currently backing up their photos onto external drives and editing on iPad? If so, can you share your process please?

thanks,
juliette


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## Jim Wilde (Aug 23, 2021)

dkinpgh1 said:


> My question is: is it possible, once those pictures are downloaded into LR Classic, to remove the full res pix and only have the smart previews in the Cloud? I'd prefer not to update to the 1TB cloud subscription.


Normal workflow for this would be:

1. Wait until the new images arrive in LrClassic.
2. In Classic, select them and click on the All Synced Photographs special collection in the Catalog panel in Library.
3. Then right-click on any of the selected images and choose "Remove from All Synced Photographs". That removes them from the ASP and in doing so it "unsyncs" them and consequently they are deleted from the cloud (but remain in the Classic catalog).
4. Find them and select them again and add them to a synced collection (or to a new collection which you enable to sync). That adds them back to the cloud, but coming from Classic only "free" Smart Previews are uploaded to the cloud.


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## dkinpgh1 (Aug 23, 2021)

Jim Wilde said:


> Normal workflow for this would be:
> 
> 1. Wait until the new images arrive in LrClassic.
> 2. In Classic, select them and click on the All Synced Photographs special collection in the Catalog panel in Library.
> ...


Thanks, Jim - that sounds easy enough!


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## Johan Elzenga (Aug 23, 2021)

dkinpgh1 said:


> I've been lurking here and following the discussion on workflow. I like the idea of loading new pics into Lightroom Mobile on the iPad and having those full res pics in the Cloud to sync with LR Classic. My question is: is it possible, once those pictures are downloaded into LR Classic, to remove the full res pix and only have the smart previews in the Cloud? I'd prefer not to update to the 1TB cloud subscription.
> 
> Thanks,
> Don


Yes, that is possible. Remove them from ‘All Synced Photographs’ in Lightroom Classic. Wait till they are gone from the cloud. Then add them again to ‘All Synced Photograpns’. They will be synced again, but now as smart previews. If you want to retain an album structure you may have, then first ‘unsync’ the collections in LrC before you remove the photos from All Synced Photograps’ and enable sync again after you added the photos again.


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## Juliette (Aug 25, 2021)

phil9971-me said:


> @Juliette  - this is great, thanks for sharing. I’ll work through it in more detail when I’m back from holiday. I really like your online backup solutions as well, particularly as I recently formatted a drive by mistake and ended up having to buy specialist software to recover my files. I think that because I’m now so paranoid about losing files I’m importing everything straight into Lightroom cloudy and then letting it sync with Classic in due course.


@phil9971-me  - you might want to know that two changes are causing me to revisit and change this workflow slightly. 

1) I have decided NOT to hang onto as many RAW files going forward. I am incorporating a step which will exclude RAW images that I don't need, thus saving space.

2) I ended up investing in a NAS. I had ongoing issues with the Apple Mac mini's conflicts with WD external drives (I have the M1 chip). I had been unable to access my photos as a result while this very LONG troubleshooting has been going on with Apple. My plan was to invest in a NAS anyway, so this just pushed me to do it.

I have to keep the external drives in my workflow because BackBlaze won't work with NAS servers unless you upgrade to their more expensive product. So, when Apple is finished with troubleshooting, I will update my workflow to incorporate an additional back up from the external drives to that NAS as a last step. 

I hope you have a good workflow going for yourself!


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## dkinpgh1 (Sep 7, 2021)

Johan Elzenga said:


> Yes, that is possible. Remove them from ‘All Synced Photographs’ in Lightroom Classic. Wait till they are gone from the cloud. Then add them again to ‘All Synced Photograpns’. They will be synced again, but now as smart previews. If you want to retain an album structure you may have, then first ‘unsync’ the collections in LrC before you remove the photos from All Synced Photograps’ and enable sync again after you added the photos again.


this is a somewhat of a follow-on question: Using the iPad as the entry point for loading pictures into LR, what is the recommended size of the iPad? 64BG, 128GB, 256GB or larger? I'm currently using an iPad Air (4th gen) with 64GB - how soon will I run into storage issues? I'm just a hobbyist but going on a trip to Glacier National Park later this month. Thanks,


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## clee01l (Sep 7, 2021)

dkinpgh1 said:


> this is a somewhat of a follow-on question: Using the iPad as the entry point for loading pictures into LR, what is the recommended size of the iPad? 64BG, 128GB, 256GB or larger? I'm currently using an iPad Air (4th gen) with 64GB - how soon will I run into storage issues? I'm just a hobbyist but going on a trip to Glacier National Park later this month. Thanks,



The iPadPro provides a screen large enough to do some serious Lightroom work. IPadOS uses one storage area for both working storage and data storage. You need a storage are large enough to handle both If your camera card is 64GB or even 32GB a 64GB iPad probably won’t do. Once you have Lightroom processed images, these are synced with the Adobe cloud and you can clear the iPad data storage. But this requires constant housekeeping and a good internet connection, especially on a long trip with lots of photos. 

I have an iPadPro with 1TB of storage. This is probably more than enough but I hope I have future proofed the iPadPro that I won’t outgrow it soon.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk


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## dkinpgh1 (Sep 7, 2021)

clee01l said:


> The iPadPro provides a screen large enough to do some serious Lightroom work. IPadOS uses one storage area for both working storage and data storage. You need a storage are large enough to handle both If your camera card is 64GB or even 32GB a 64GB iPad probably won’t do. Once you have Lightroom processed images, these are synced with the Adobe cloud and you can clear the iPad data storage. But this requires constant housekeeping and a good internet connection, especially on a long trip with lots of photos.
> 
> I have an iPadPro with 1TB of storage. This is probably more than enough but I hope I have future proofed the iPadPro that I won’t outgrow it soon.
> 
> ...


thanks for the quick response - I'm negotiating for the the bigger iPad Pro before our trip the end of the month. 

One more question: once you've uploaded the pictures into the Adobe cloud, do the raw photos remain on your iPad?

Thanks, Cletus.


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## Jim Wilde (Sep 7, 2021)

dkinpgh1 said:


> One more question: once you've uploaded the pictures into the Adobe cloud, do the raw photos remain on your iPad?


Initially yes, but the Lightroom app is supposed to intelligently manage the space used, i.e. by removing little used (and uploaded) images, especially when the iPad's overall storage is coming under pressure. However, you can at any time use the "Clear Cache" command which will remove only those originals which have been safely uploaded to the cloud and backed up there.


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## dkinpgh1 (Sep 7, 2021)

Jim Wilde said:


> Initially yes, but the Lightroom app is supposed to intelligently manage the space used, i.e. by removing little used (and uploaded) images, especially when the iPad's overall storage is coming under pressure. However, you can at any time use the "Clear Cache" command which will remove only those originals which have been safely uploaded to the cloud and backed up there.


This is an amazing resource for a novice! Thanks.


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