Best way to move photos from Lightroom to iPad for display?

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nightfly

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I do all of my post processing and organization on a Mac running an older version of Lightroom, not the subscription version. I'd like to take a collection of photos and move them over to my iPad for display.

Seems like my options are as follows:

1) Bite the bullet and buy the subscription version of Lightroom and run it on both the Mac and the iPad and synch collection. Pros-easiest, Cons-paying Adobe every month when I'm perfectly happy with Lightroom 4.

2) Export the collection from Lightroom to a folder, import the folder into Photos on the Mac, synch from Photos on Mac to Photo on iPad. Pros-nothing to buy, cons-double up the images on the mac.

Other ideas?
 
LR Mobile is very useful. You can selectively export photos and even edit them on the mobile device.
 
Option 2 is the way I do it. Photos is pretty effortless, sync is fast, and once the photos are there, you can use the share sheet to send them to friends, put them on twitter or facebook or what have you, etc.

Also, you can just export jpegs into Photos, and the size is much smaller than the RAW files you might otherwise be using. My more than 18,000 pictures only amounted to about 100GB. You can reduce that significantly by exporting them at 90%, too.
 
I don't use CC or Lightroom Mobile. I use Lightroom 6.5.1 (latest) on OS X to process my photos.

Some concepts first...

Whenever I process a photo and consider it finished, I export a final, fully-rendered, full-resolution 16-bit-per-component TIFF into an archive folder for storage and future use. I also export a 'framed and matted' web display JPEG for posting to Flickr.com (and thence to everywhere else) and a JPEG optimized for viewing on the iPad.

That means I have four copies of every FINISHED photo to work with (not counting backups):
  • the raw, JPEG, or JPEG+raw original, included in my master LR "In Progress" catalog
  • the full res 16-bit TIFF archive rendering, included in my LR "Completed Work" catalog
  • the web display JPEG, included in my LR "Completed Work" catalog
  • the iPad display JPEG, included in my LR "Completed Work" catalog

Of course, I have only one copy (the original capture) of unprocessed or truly in progress work (again, not counting backups).

I don't see any downside to this. Original exposures in a Lightroom catalog (particularly raw captures) are volatile since what you see is a combination of the original exposure plus Lightroom's parametric edits rendered on the fly at display time. That's an interpretation that can change when Lightroom is updated due to changes in the image processing engine. Finished work should always be exported into an uninterpreted, fully-baked-into-the-pixels rendering that any simple display program can display without risk of altering.

Displaying on the iPad:

There are several different ways you can output finished work and move it for display to the iPad. Your number 2 method is the simplest, but I've not yet used Photos very much on OS X, or iPhoto before it.

  • If you're going to synch from Mac to iPad using iTunes, another way to move them is to export from LR into a folder of finished JPEGs that you set up iTunes to synchronize to the iPad. I have a subfolder of Pictures on the Mac named "iPad Photos" in which I create subfolders named for every photo set, for example: "Friends 2016", "Family 2016", "New York Trip-April 2016", "PESO 2016", etc. When I export a set of photos*from LR, I export them into the appropriate folder for that set. I have iTunes configured to synchronize "iPad Photos" and all its subfolders whenever I sync the iPad (or iPhone).

  • Another way to move photos to the iPad is to create presentations with Keynote on OS X and move the keynote presentation files to iCloud. This way you can open them directly with Keynote on iOS, edit the presentation, auto-run or manually run it, etc. Similar to this is to use Pages for a more "book like" display, which is again editable in Pages on iOS.

  • A third way is to create a slide show in Lightroom of each set of photos and export it as a video, a set of JPEGs, or a PDF book. You can then transfer these to the iPad using iTunes and the method I mentioned above (for videos and JPEG slide shows), with iBooks (for PDFs) or with iCloud into whatever app you want use on iOS that supports the format.

I've used all of these different methodologies for different purposes. My display collection on the iPad/iPhone is now running about 7,000 individual photos in a couple hundred 'albums' (folders), videos, PDF books, Pages, and Keynote presentations.

Of course, when you use either your method #2 or my first method to move individual images and groups of images to the iPad, you can also use Photos on the iPad to organize them into albums there. I'd just rather organize them before I move them ... I find it easier.

enjoy,
G

-- I also use DropBox, etc ... There are a lot of different ways! Each with its advantages and weaknesses ... :)
 
Export from Lightroom to Flickr. Free and effortless. More apps and steps are in between, more tedious it's in longer run.
 
Don't really use Flickr anymore.

Seems like the Airdrop method would fit my workflow best as I'd want them to be on the iPad locally in case there's no Wifi. Don't really want to depend on being connected to Flickr or Dropbox (although could use the download files locally on Dropbox but yet another step).
 
nightfly said:
Don't really use Flickr anymore.

Seems like the Airdrop method would fit my workflow best as I'd want them to be on the iPad locally in case there's no Wifi. Don't really want to depend on being connected to Flickr or Dropbox (although could use the download files locally on Dropbox but yet another step).
Click to expand...

AirDrop works particularly well if you want to do the organizing on the iPad. Since Photos will now do pseudo organization by date markers, it's even reasonably handy with no organizational effort.

I'm just a bit too fussy about keeping my photos organized as presentations...

G
 
I happen to use LR 6CC. There are many ways to to this without using LR CC.

Here's one:
  • Export from LR 4
  • Import into the OS X Photos Ap
  • Create 'Shared Albums' for the photos you want on the iPad
  • Share the albums with yourself
  • Display on iPad
 
Folks who don't use Photos should know that, as long as you have a large enough iCloud subscription, every one of your OSX photos can sync, via the cloud, to your iOS devices. You can just keep thumbnails on the phone or iPad if you need to preserve space, and download the full res pics on demand, or you can just keep everything on there. It's all automatic.

I dump my LR-processed Leica shots into OSX Photos, and within minutes they have propogated over to my phone, where I can show them to people or share them to whatever services I like (flickr and instagram, in my case).

Also, Apple is announcing new software stuff next week, and pro enhancements to the Photos app is rumored to be among the things they'll reveal. I hope this is true.
 
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