UPDATE, July 13, 2016
This workflow has been addressed via Lightroom mobile version 2.4 on iOS as a technology preview. More details here: http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2016/07/lightroom-mobile-july-updates.html
I’m keenly aware that photographers would like to leave their laptops behind and head out on the road with just their DSLR, Camera Connection Kit and an iPad. It’s not just pros on a shoot in the middle of a remote location, it extends all the way to every photography enthusiast who has debated with their spouse on the necessity of bringing a bulky laptop on the family vacation. This is something the Lightroom team wants to tackle with Lightroom mobile and customers can realize the beginning of this in a JPEG-only workflow. But there are a few hurdles we need to address before we can have a robust experience that’s able to include raw files:
- We know our customers often like to shoot in a raw format. That’s a lot of data and the ingest experience on current iPads via a Camera Connection Kit is quite slow.
- The way the Camera Roll works on iOS, an application like Lightroom mobile would need to duplicate the storage required by a photographer’s images then leave customers with an awkward deletion experience on the camera roll to save space.
- The bandwidth required to pass the originals from the iPad through to our servers and back to your desktop would be substantial and slow.
We’ve utilized a Smart Preview solution on the desktop to expedite access to original files on mobile devices but that becomes more difficult going in the other direction due to processing requirements and the fact that customers would expect the original to eventually arrive on their desktop.(And that transfer to the desktop should occur without a kludgey, manual copy and link-to-original workflow from the CF or SD card) We’ll need to address all three of these areas before we can have a suitable field triage workflow. We can tackle the bandwidth requirement with intelligent, downstream use of P2P connections but the first two issues will still remain a challenge.
The team would love to hear your thoughts and expectations in this area.
Regards,
Tom Hogarty