Adobe released Lightroom mobile for Android phones last night, after releasing the Apple iPhone / iPad version nine months ago. The app is free from your Google Play app store, but using it requires a Creative Cloud subscription. You can now:
- Sync collections of photos from your desktop Lightroom catalog to the Lightroom mobile app.
- Import phone camera photos from your Gallery into Lightroom mobile and have them automatically sync back to your Lightroom desktop catalog.
- Perform rating, flagging and basic Develop work in Lightroom mobile and have this work sync back to your Lightroom desktop catalog.
- Share photos directly from Lightroom mobile.
While I don’t have Android-specific tutorials, the following videos will show you the basics of using Lightroom mobile and syncing to and from Lightroom on your Desktop:
Introduction of Lightroom mobile (initially for the iPad with Lightroom 5.4)
For best quality, hit Play, then click on the Youtube sprocket wheel in the bottom right and choose 720/HD.
This seems brilliant, but I have to buy (i.e. get cloud subscription for) Photoshop in order to use it. Tough luck for any Lightroom-only customer. Since Photoshop is very much more expensive than Lightroom this is a poor deal – unless you want Photoshop, in which caseof course it is priced very competitively.
JPL
Personally I think it’s a good deal for many people, JPL, even if one doesn’t use Photoshop. Otherwise it costs $150 to initially buy Lightroom, and then $80 for every upgrade. The subscription is only a little bit more than this, but includes Lightroom Mobile and Web, as well as some cloud storage. Certainly if one doesn’t care about regularly upgrading Lightroom and isn’t interested in mobile capabilities, the stand-alone program makes more sense.