# Lightroom Sync - Not mobile specific



## Lazgoat (Apr 1, 2016)

I've been using LR for a few years now, but never used Mobile Sync. I do almost all my editing on my main desktop PC. I can see a use case for Mobile Sync, but wondered why this can't be extended to LR in general, so you can Sync Collections and open them up in LR on your other machines?

Apologies if this has been answered before, but it seems like a no brainer for the next step. To me anyway.


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## johnbeardy (Apr 1, 2016)

Well, you know you can use a browser on other machines and edit synced pictures at lightroom.adobe.com.

Technically, it could be done, though it's probably a matter of priorities. 

John


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## Lazgoat (Apr 1, 2016)

I guess what I'm looking to achieve is to be able to use the full features of LR on my laptop for a synced Collection on my desktop PC. I know there are ways of using Cloud storage for the Syncing but it seems that technology is almost there in LR to do it already. Why hasn't it been done yet?


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## johnbeardy (Apr 1, 2016)

I always expected a networked Lightroom after 3-4 years, but Adobe have never seemed to want that market and we then had the rise of mobile which they could imagine might become an existential threat. So that's remained the priority. But as I recall, the first time I saw LrMobile I remember asking if I could run it on my laptop. After all, we can already run a catalogue with smart previews, so we would be accessing smart previews which had already been synced. In the end it's priorities, and adding features to the browser is an efficient way to develop a client for both Windows and Mac.


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## Victoria Bampton (Apr 1, 2016)

I'd bet it'll come... I think they're just ironing out the sync bugs before a desktop synced client.


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## clee01l (Apr 1, 2016)

Victoria Bampton said:


> I'd bet it'll come... I think they're just ironing out the sync bugs before a desktop synced client.


The demarcation line between tablets/phones and mobile computers is too imprecise.  Adobe has focused on the mobile OSes like iOS & Android.  A Microsoft Surface is just as much a tablet as an iPad and an MBA or MBP are also just as portable as any other portable device. There only limitation wrt the mobile sync is that they run 'real' operating systems .  I'm glad to see that Adobe may finely be thinking in this direction.  I'm sure that had to put a lot of resources initially into mobile platform development that there were few resources left to implement the same functionality with mobile devices that run OS X or Win10.


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## clee01l (Apr 1, 2016)

For OSX, you can install the iOS emulator and install iOS apps in it. There probably is an Android emulator for Windows that might do the same thing.


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## tspear (Apr 1, 2016)

clee01l said:


> For OSX, you can install the iOS emulator and install iOS apps in it. There probably is an Android emulator for Windows that might do the same thing.



Android Emulator | Android Developers


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## rob211 (Apr 16, 2016)

There are ways to "sync" a collection, kind of, from say laptop to desktop.

For instance, you can have Lr-desktop and Lr-laptop both reference the same folder of images on say a NAS. If you write the data to the files themselves then a write-read/synchronize combo can achieve much the same results.

But for synching across devices—smartphones, tablets, NAS, cloud, laptops—the best solution right now is Mylio in conjunction with Lr. Unlike Lr Mobile it's not oriented to a one-direction synching process (i.e. desktop TO mobile). And you have much more control over the images in that cloud storage isn't required, and you can synch thumbnails, previews, or full sized copies. It can synch keywords, unlike Lr Mobile (although not hierarchical ones directly), faces, most common adjustments, etc with both other copies of Mylio and with Lr itself.

Check it out. Free for up to three devices and a certain number of images. I expect it will solve most of your problem.


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