Today’s Question: I use Lightroom Classic on my laptop. I downloaded the Lightroom app on my iPhone in order to use the Lightroom camera because it can create DNG files. Is there any working relationship between the Lightroom Mobile app and Lightroom Classic? What is your opinion about the Lightroom Mobile camera versus the iPhone camera app?
Tim’s Quick Answer: Using the Lightroom mobile app for photography on your mobile device can help improve overall quality, since the images can be captured in the Adobe DNG format (rather than JPEG capture, for example). Photos captured within the Lightroom mobile app will automatically synchronize to Lightroom Classic, as long as you’ve enabled that synchronization.
More Detail: The Lightroom mobile app works with both Lightroom Classic and the cloud-based Lightroom CC. With the cloud-based version of Lightroom all photos in your catalog are synchronized to the cloud so they are available on all of your devices or through a web browser. With Lightroom Classic only photos you add to collections with synchronization enabled will be synchronized to the cloud.
As long as you have enabled synchronization on Lightroom Classic, the photos you capture with the Lightroom mobile app will appear in your catalog as soon as they are synchronized. The device (your iPhone in this case) will appear as a separate hard drive, essentially. So if you have all of your photos on an external hard drive, you’ll see that drive listed in the header above all of the folders on that drive in the Folders section of the left panel in the Library module.
Once you have synchronized photos from the Lightroom app on a mobile device, you’ll see a header for that device, with a folder called “Imported Photos”. That folder will contain all images captured with the Lightroom Mobile app, and of course you could move those photos to a different storage location within Lightroom Classic.
The result is that using the Lightroom mobile app to capture photos on your mobile device can provide better image quality as well as a more streamlined workflow.