Today’s Question: I want to share JPEG images to the Adobe Creative Cloud that I’ve exported from Lightroom Classic. I think I need to import them into Lightroom Classic, create a collection of them, and then synchronize them to the cloud (as an album). Make sense? Also, can I rearrange the order of the photos on the cloud into a custom order?
Tim’s Quick Answer: Maybe. You may prefer to synchronize the original photos rather than import JPEG copies created from the originals. In either case, once you’ve synchronized photos to the Cloud you can create a custom sort order in the Lightroom mobile app.
More Detail: You can make selected photos in your Lightroom Classic catalog available from virtually anywhere by synchronizing them to the cloud (via Adobe Creative Cloud). The basic process involves adding photos to a collection and then enabling synchronization for that collection. The images will then be available from the Lightroom mobile app or through a web browser pointed to https://lightroom.adobe.com/.
If you exported JPEG copies of original photos and then applied various adjustments to those JPEG images, you may indeed want to import the JPEG copies into your catalog and add those versions of the images to a collection for synchronization. However, in general you may prefer to instead add the original images to the collection, assuming those represent the versions of the photos you want to share.
When you synchronize photos to the Creative Cloud from Lightroom Classic you won’t be copying the original images (such as raw captures) to the cloud. Rather, Lightroom Classic will create reduced resolution Adobe DNG copies of the images for this purpose.
Whichever images you prefer to synchronize can be added to a collection with synchronization enabled, and then representations of those photos will be available from virtually anywhere.
In the Lightroom mobile app on a smartphone or tablet you can also sort the photos in a variety of ways, including a custom sort order. When browsing your photos in the Review mode on the mobile app tap the ellipsis button (three dots) at the top-right of the interface. Choose the “Sort by” option (which will reflect the current sort order) to bring up a list of sorting options. One of those will be “Sort by Custom”, and after choosing this option you can tap the “Edit” link to the right so you can drag images around to change the order of photos, then click “Done” at the top-right to finalize that custom sort order. You can then switch between the other sort options and the Custom sort option, and the Lightroom mobile app will remember the custom sort order for the collection of photos.
