Use Lightroom across your devices

In this tutorial, we'll cover how you can use Lightroom across devices. And in this lesson, how your photos and any changes you add to them automatically sync between Lightroom on a mobile device and Lightroom on your desktop. To set up for this lesson, let's import some photos into Lightroom on the desktop, as we've done throughout this series. Click Add Photos, navigate to the sample files for this tutorial that you can download from the Adobe webpage for this tutorial. Click Review for Import or choose Folder if you're on a Windows machine, and in the Import Preview window, make a new album for just the files for this tutorial. And then click Add Photos. Over in the column on the left, click on the album that you just made when you imported these photos and you'll see just the photos in that album. Now I'll switch over to my iPhone. Here in Lightroom on my iPhone, I'm logged in with the same Adobe ID that I use in Lightroom on my desktop. And you can see that all the albums that we made throughout this tutorial series in Lightroom on the desktop automatically appear here in Lightroom on the mobile device too. I'll tap the album we just made a few minutes ago while importing photos into Lightroom on the desktop. And here in Lightroom on my phone, we see the same 4 photos in the same album that we created in Lightroom on the desktop. Now often you'll be adding photos to Lightroom on your mobile device. For example, you might take a photo with the Lightroom in-app camera, in which case it's automatically in the Lightroom ecosystem. Or you can add photos to Lightroom on your mobile device from the camera roll on that device. Let's give that a try. I'm going to tap the three dots at the top right. I'll choose Add Photos and here I can choose the source of photos that I want to bring into this album. I'm going to tap Camera Roll. And that opens the Camera Roll on my device. Here's a photo I'd like to bring into Lightroom, the first one. Now if you're following along, you can bring in any photo of your own. So, I'll tap that photo to select it and you can select more than one photo at a time, and then at the bottom of the screen I'll tap Add Photos. And that adds the photo not only to Lightroom, but also into this album of sample files for this tutorial. And then let's see what happens when we edit that photo. I'll tap the photo to open it into the editing space in Lightroom on my mobile device. I'm going to crop this photo, so I'll tap Crop at the bottom of the screen. I'll go to the Aspect Ratio menu on the far left of the menu bar, and I'm going to choose 1 x 1 Square. That adds a square crop box around the photo. I'll click, hold, and drag to position the photo where I want it in that crop box. And then I'll tap the checkmark at the bottom right. That crop and any other edits that I make automatically sync up to the cloud and from there to Lightroom on all my other devices, including Lightroom on my desktop. So, let's jump back over to the desktop app to see this photo there. Here in Lightroom on my desktop, I have the same album selected and as you can see, it now contains the photo that we just added to Lightroom on the mobile device with the edit - the square crop that I applied in Lightroom on the mobile device. Now here I can go ahead and edit this photo further. I'll select the photo, I'll press E on the keyboard or click the Edit icon, and I'm going to use one of the local adjustment tools, the Brush tool. I'll select that and I'm going to lower the Exposure slider a bit, and then I'm going to click and drag over the tent. When I'm using the Brush tool, I prefer to do it here on the desktop because I have more room to work. I'll come back in and I'll fine-tune that adjustment to make the tent just a little darker. And now back on my iPhone, I can see that this adjustment has automatically synced to the mobile device and appears on the same image there as well. One of the great things about this system is that everything is done for you automatically through the cloud. It's worry-free so that you don't have to think about syncing, instead you can focus on editing, organizing, and sharing your photos from Lightroom on any device.
 

Did you know that you can use Lightroom with the same photos on more than one computer? You can add, organize, and edit photos on one computer and all those changes will automatically sync through the cloud down to your other computer. For example, here I'm working on my desktop computer in my studio where I added this photo to Lightroom at the beginning of this tutorial. Now let's say it's later in the day and I've gone out and taken my laptop computer with me. I'm going to switch over to my laptop computer to show you this. Here on my laptop, I'm signed in to Creative Cloud with my same Adobe ID and I've already downloaded, installed, and launched Lightroom. Since my Adobe membership plan lets me run the Lightroom app on two computers. As you can see, this same photo that I added to Lightroom on my desktop computer automatically shows up here in the Lightroom app on my laptop too. That's because Lightroom is a whole integrated system that stores my photos in the cloud and makes them accessible to me here too. And any changes I make to my photos on either computer are automatically synced through the cloud to my other computer too. So, let's give that a try. Here on my laptop, I'll quickly convert this color photo to black and white by applying a black and white preset. I'll click the Edit icon to open this photo for editing. I'll come down and click Presets, and I'll click the B&W category of Presets. I'll hover over these presets until I find one that I particularly like and I'll click that preset to apply it. That change to black and white is automatically uploaded to the cloud where the original of this photo is stored. And if I don't have internet access right now, that's okay. Lightroom will hold on to my edit and upload it when I do have internet access. Now let's say it's a little later and I'm back in my studio and here I am working on my desktop computer again. As you can see, the B&W preset that I applied on my laptop automatically shows up on this computer too. This is a big benefit to any of you who want to use Lightroom on more than one computer. It means you can go from desktop to laptop, from work to home, or from shooting studio to the editing day all without having to worry about exporting part of a catalog or taking external drives full of photos with you. The system uploads full resolution originals of your photos to the cloud as soon as you add them to Lightroom on either computer, or even on a mobile device, or on the web for that matter. And it automatically syncs changes you make to your photos through the cloud too, whether you're editing a photo or arranging it in albums and folders. And best of all, you don't have to do anything to make this all happen.
 

Another place that you can access and work with your photographs in the Lightroom ecosystem is in Lightroom in a web browser. That means that your photos are available to you anywhere, even if you don't have your own computer or mobile device with you. Just launch your favorite web browser. I happen to be using Chrome, but you can use anyone that you like and navigate to this URL – https://lightroom.adobe.com. Sign in with your Adobe ID. And that will take you to all your photos in Lightroom on the web, including all photos that you've added to Lightroom from any of your devices - your desktop app, or Lightroom on a mobile device. You'll also see any albums that you've created in Lightroom over here. Go ahead and click the album of sample files that we made earlier in this tutorial. So here I have access to photos that I imported into Lightroom on my desktop, as well as this photo which I added from Lightroom on my phone earlier in this tutorial. Now if you've been following along with the tutorials in this Get Started series, you'll see that Lightroom on the web has many of the same capabilities that we covered in Lightroom on the desktop with just a slightly different interface. For example, you can add photos to your Lightroom ecosystem directly from here in Lightroom on the web, and as we just saw, you have access to all of your Lightroom albums and you can add more here. From here, you can view your photos as a Slideshow and you have various options for sharing your photos, including sharing an album of photos and creating an online gallery of your photos that can include text and that you can post or share with a selected group of friends. If you make a gallery from here, you can allow visitors to download your photos and to comment and like your photos. I'm going to select the album of sample files for this tutorial again to show you that you also can edit your photos here in Lightroom on the web. I'll select a photo to edit, and then I'll click the Edit button. To access the editing controls on the right that are very much like the editing controls that we saw in this tutorial series in the Lightroom desktop app. So, if I scroll to the Color panel, you'll see that I can adjust the color Temp and Tint. I'll warm up the overall color of this photo by dragging the Temp slider over to the right. And I'll add a little magenta too with the Tint slider. When you're done editing, go over here and click Save & Exit. And whatever edits you made are syncing through the cloud to Lightroom on your other devices. So, let's switch back from Lightroom on the web to my Lightroom desktop app on my computer. Here in Lightroom on the desktop is the photo that I just edited in Lightroom on the web. If I select that and then I click the Edit icon, and we look at the Color panel, we can see that the controls that we set in Lightroom on the web have synced over here to Lightroom on my desktop and are reflected in this photo. So that's an introduction to Lightroom on the web and where it fits in the Lightroom ecosystem - giving you one more place to organize, edit, share, and access your photos.