Today’s Question: Using the built-in camera app with my smartphone, there are 3 different lenses that can be selected. The Lightroom mobile app also has a camera feature that automatically synchronizes images to Lightroom Classic. This is a nice feature, but I don’t see how to use the various lenses with this camera. Is there a way?
Tim’s Quick Answer: The solution in this case is to use the option to automatically import new photos into Lightroom mobile and use the built-in camera app on your smartphone to take advantage of the additional lenses and other special features of the camera.
More Detail: The camera feature in the Lightroom mobile app is certainly convenient, as all photos you capture with that camera feature are added directly into the catalog in Lightroom mobile. Those photos will then synchronize to the cloud and then back to Lightroom Classic (or the cloud-based version of Lightroom) on your computer.
However, that camera feature within the Lightroom mobile app is not able to take advantage of all features of the smartphone camera, such as multiple lens selection or the Portrait mode feature on recent iPhone models.
In the Import section of Settings within the Lightroom mobile app you can enable the option to automatically add photos from your device to the Lightroom catalog. Keep in mind that turning this option on will only affect new captures, not existing captures that are already on your device. There are individual settings for automatically importing photos, screen captures, and videos.
It is also worth noting that adding photos to the Lightroom mobile app with the automatic import feature will not remove the photos from your device. In other words, you’ll have photos both on your device and in the Lightroom mobile app. You may therefore want to delete photos after they have synchronized to the cloud, or consider a different workflow such as downloading smartphone photos to your computer for import to Lightroom Classic rather than making use of the Lightroom mobile app for photos that you capture with the built-in camera on your smartphone.