Mobile to Desktop

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Today’s Question: I imported some photos from my camera to the Lightroom mobile app to do some edits. Now I am trying to figure out how to get them into my Lightroom Classic library. Any ideas?

Tim’s Quick Answer: When you import photos into the Lightroom mobile app (or capture directly within the app), those photos can be brought into your Lightroom Classic catalog simply by enabling synchronization on both your mobile device and your computer.

More Detail: The Lightroom mobile app makes use of synchronization for all photos, just as the cloud-based Lightroom application you use on a computer will synchronize all photos. However, the Lightroom mobile app can also synchronize with Lightroom Classic.

The first step is to make sure that synchronization is active on both your mobile device and your computer. In the Lightroom mobile app you can click the cloud icon toward the top-right of the screen to make sure synchronization is not paused. If you see “Resume Synching” on the popup when you click the cloud icon, simply tap on that to enable synchronization.

Within Lightroom Classic you can make sure synchronization is enabled by clicking on the identity plate at the far left of the top panel. When you click the identity plate you’ll see a popup that shows the synchronization status at the top of the popup. If the popup shows “Paused” to the right of the popup, you can click the “play” button (the right-pointing triangle icon) to enable synchronization.

Once synchronization is complete, you’ll see your mobile device listed as though it is one of your hard drives within the Folders list on the left panel in the Library module. You can browse the photos within the folder structure there, and even move photos to other folders and storage locations by dragging and dropping them within the Folders section of the left panel.