Today’s Question: If I import photos into the Lightroom app on my tablet while traveling, how do I get them into Lightroom Classic when I return home?
Tim’s Quick Answer: Photos imported to the Lightroom mobile app will appear in your Lightroom Classic catalog as long as you have synchronization enabled. You can them transition those photos to your normal workflow.
More Detail: Photos added to the Lightroom mobile app, Lightroom in a web browser, or the Lightroom (non-Classic) desktop application will automatically synchronize to the cloud. As long as you have synchronization enabled in Lightroom Classic, those photos will then appear within your catalog.
First, make sure you have synchronization enabled for Lightroom Classic. You can do so by clicking the cloud icon at the top-right of the interface, making sure that the button at the bottom-left of the popup shows “Pause Syncing”. This indicates that synchronization is enabled, and that clicking the button would pause that synchronization.
Next, I recommend going to the Lightroom Sync tab of the Preferences dialog and turning on the “Specify location for Lightroom’s Synced images” checkbox. Then click the Choose button to the right of the checkbox and choose the folder where you want the photos to be saved.
Photos you add to Lightroom’s cloud-based storage outside of Lightroom Classic will then appear in the folder you designated within your Lightroom Classic catalog. From there they can be transitioned to your normal workflow.
I recommend first marking the photos in some way to identify them as having come from cloud-based storage, such as by assigning a color label to them. You can then select the photos in the folder you designated for synchronization and drag-and-drop the images to the desired storage location.
While dragging the photos to a different folder will cause them to be moved to that folder, they won’t be automatically removed from cloud-based storage. I recommend removing them from cloud storage to avoid confusion, since synchronization is managed via collections in Lightroom Classic.
To remove the photos from cloud-based storage, go to the “All Synced Photographs” collection in the Catalog section of the left panel in the Library module. Select the photos you want to remove, which can be streamlined by filtering based on the color label or other attribute you updated for the photos that were added via synchronization. Then right-click on one of the selected photos and choose “Remove from All Synced Photographs” from the popup menu.
