Hi friends!!! I’m excited to be here today to share a quick tip if you’re a Lightroom user.
I have been syncing my phone photos to my desktop using Dropbox uploads for years until I hit a big snag last week. For some reason my Dropbox photos would not sync. A lot of my photos were suddenly gone from Dropbox. Thankfully, they were still on my phone, but I had to find another way to sync them to my hard drive.
I went searching for a solution and found that I could use Lightroom to automatically sync my phone photos to my desktop!!!
I’m going to share with you the steps I followed to set this system up.
First of all, you do have to have an active Creative Cloud subscription. With this subscription, you’ll need to install Lightroom Classic on your desktop (or laptop) and Lightroom Mobile CC on your phone. Now these two systems will work together to keep your photos synced.
Next, open the Lightroom app on your phone and tap the gear icon in the upper right hand corner to open the settings.
From here, tap “Import” and turn on “Auto Add from Camera Roll”. This brings all the photos your take on your phone into Lightroom’s catalog.
Now, on your desktop open Lightroom Classic and hover over the identity plate in the upper left hand corner (there is a little triangle beside where your name appears). Your program may also have a Lightroom logo there. Click the triangle and then click the “start” link.
To find your synced photos first go to the Library module and look in the Catalog panel on the left. Click on “All Synced Photos”.
Anything that you’ve imported into your Lightroom app will sync here.
If this if your first time setting this up, the initial syncing process will take a while if you have a lot of photos on your phone. (I let it run overnight.)
During this syncing process, Lightroom actually downloads your mobile photos onto your hard drive. You can change the location that the files download to. To do this open your Preferences dialog by going to Edit>Preferences. Go to the Lightroom Sync tab and check the box next to “Specify Location for Lightroom’s Synced Images”. Click the button next to the box that says “Choose” and navigate to the location on your computer where you would like to store your downloaded photos. You can also check “Use Subfolders Formatted by Capture Date”.
When I click on this folder, I can automatically see my synced photos and any edits that I make to those photos in the Lightroom app automatically show up. I love that!!
I am excited about using this system to keep my phone photos synced to my hard drive and keep all of my photos organized!!
If you’re looking for a new or better system of photo organization and synchronization between your phone photos and hard drive, I suggest you give this a try!
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