Lightroom CC and the iPad Air
With my iPad Air i wanted to try out, how weel the tablet does on image processing with Lightroom CC.
Introduction
The iPad Air is powerful enough to process your raw files an this tablet. In particular the display size make it more useful compared to a mobile phone. I you are a subscriber of the photography plan you might as well give Lightroom CC on the iPad a try, that is preparing the processing on the iPad and later on finalize the processing on a desktop pcc after the images are synched on the Creative cloud to Lightroom Classic.
But there still remain two limitations that is the data connection on the mobile side and the data volume and on the other hand that the photography plan only offers 20 GB of cloud space.
Lightroom CC
Lightroom CC or better Lightroom Creative Cloud (i would prefer it if Adobe kept their original name Lightroom Mobile for the app) is of course available for iPadOS and meanwhile you can directly import your images into Lightroom CC without the loop way over the photos folder.
One can select the images to import and you can choose an enlarged display to judge sharpness and so on of the images ready to import.
Meanwhile the image processing ooportunities in Lightroom CC were improved a lot so at least you can do first processing on the go like on a vacation or on a trip. The main disadvantage is the display which is not calibrated.
But with this you have the basics for a mobile processing.
Memory requirements
Importing images will reduce the free memory on the iPad. For a test i imported 11 images form my Lumix G9 and the reduced free memory is noticeable, in this case arround 260MB.
Left this is local memory before the import, in the middle after import and on the right side the local memory after syncing the images to the cloud. Lightroom CC then works with previews, small DNG files.
Almost the same if we take a look on the available cloud memory.
After starting Lightroom Classic CC on a desktop PC the raw files are downloaded to the folder defined in the preferences. But the memory usage is almost the same as with the raw files so 20GB cloud space could be not enough.
Restrictions
Lightroom CC works without any lags on the iPad Air, but there are 2 problems which i don’t like. First of all for the export of my images i use a logo in a PNG file with a transparent background. Lightroom CC only can do textual watermarks.
And there is a bug, because added keywords are not snyced to Lightroom Classic. There is no problem with keyword syncing on another mobile device like a mobile phone or even on the website.
Conclusion
Image processing with Lightroom CC on a iPad were improved much, but you have to accept some limitations. One main restirctions is the available cloud space. Here Adobe should integrate other cloud providers, because for example i got 1 TB of cloud space with the Office 365. For the next vacation i probably stick to just saving my images to another external drive with the RAVPower File hub which worked extremly well.
ciao tuxoche
