Lightroom sync—I give up
I’ve found it to be very convenient to edit photos on my iPad, it’s not where I edit 100+ photos but if I got less than 50, then I really like editing in Lightroom Mobile. My main photo app is Lightroom Classic, I’m not enthusiastic about it, but I’m used to it and knows how to edit my photos. With the promise that I can sync photos I’ve imported and edited in LR Mobile to LR Classic, it seems like a no-brainer to use this combo.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. The syncing between LR Mobile and Classic is 100% unreliable! Unreliable in the sense that there is always one or more photos that LR Classic tries to sync, but it never finishes. This mean that I don’t know if the photo has been copied from “LR Cloud” to my desktop, sometimes it has, and sometimes it hasn’t.
Searching for a solution, a common comment is “Let it be, it will sort itself out eventually”, my experience is that it doesn’t happen. I’ve been waiting for weeks, but Classic is still waiting for the same photo to finish syncing. Numerous times I’ve tried starting from scratch, deleting everything in “LR Cloud”, then start to import new photos on my iPad and usually in a day or two I have a photo that doesn’t finish syncing.
Yesterday, something happened that made me decide to stop trying. I had taken two photos on my phone that I needed on my desktop, the photos had synced on my iPad and everything looked OK. However, Classic refused to download them and instead was trying to finish a sync of another photo. I tried everything I could come up with to get Classic “un-stuck”, but I couldn’t figure something that worked. Instead, I exported the RAW file to Photos, let it sync to my Mac (less than a minute), exported it from Photos to my desktop and imported it into Classic where I could do what I needed to do (printing).
This was the final straw and I decided that from now on, I’ll be importing photos into Photos on my iPad, do my editing in Darkroom and later archive the photos in Classic using PhotoSync. This means that my editing will disappear, and it’s a bit cumbersome. But, according to my experience, it’s 100% rock solid. I will of course test LR Mobile once in a while to see if the syncing have improved (it hasn’t in several years, so I’m not holding my breath).
I’m amazed the Adobe hasn’t managed to get this to work, given that they have had such a long time to fix it.