Lightroom Mobile

There are benefits to software subscriptions – obviously the initial cash outlay is minimal, and, if the software vendor reinvests the money it receives every month into useful product improvements, the subscriber (I mean “You”) will always work with a state of art software solution.

Of course, the problem with software subscriptions is that once you’ve started using the product you’re at the mercy of the software editor, who can elect to change their terms and conditions and raise their prices as often and as much as they like. There is a price point not to exceed obviously, but the subscriber is captive, and the cost to switch to another product (in hours of training and hours of labor to transfer the images and convert the workflows) far exceeds the few extra dollars that the software editor will be tempted to extract from its subscribers every now and then. So the captive audience elects to remain… captive.

Lightroom for Mobile on CamerAgx.com

https://cameragx.com/2024/12/09/lightroom-for-mobile-premium-is-a-laptop-free-workflow-really-a-possibility/

https://cameragx.com/2024/12/16/lightroom-for-mobile-premium-migrating-images-from-lightroom-6/

https://cameragx.com/2024/12/30/adobe-lightroom-s-trying-to-make-sense-of-it-all/

At the end of last year, after I had published three posts about the Lightroom Mobile Premium, Adobe tested the tolerance to pain of its clients again, and announced a price increase of its Lightroom subscriptions.

Along this post, I will stress multiple times that the information I’m providing has been verified and is believed to be accurate as of the end of March 2025. Some Adobe Lightroom plans or upgrade options have been removed from Adobe’s store front and from the apps themselves during the last three months, and more changes could take place in the future.

The recent changes (and a simplification of the catalog) make very clear that Adobe’s preference is for the photographer to subscribe to the Adobe Lightroom Plan with 1 TB Cloud Storage. Under this plan, the ubiquity of the Lightroom platform is maximized: a photographer can, with the same license, enjoy Lightroom as a light weight application available on smartphones, tablets, PC/Mac and in a Web browser app (all with Cloud storage), or as a heavier PC/Mac conventional application with as much local storage as necessary.

The mobile-only versions of Lightroom increasingly look like minor products packaged to push the photographers to step up to the “real” Lightroom, the one they buy directly from Adobe.

*Lightroom Mobile on the iPhone – “please start deleting unneeded items” – not much of an upgrade path*. *The reality is not that dire – there is an upgrade path – but not through Apple’s App Store.*

High level – the product hierarchy and the upgrade path

Lightroom is available as a mobile app for smartphone or tablet in the two main app stores (Apple and Google’s).

The gateway drug is a free version, which does not process RAW images and does not offer cloud storage. It’s a simple photo editor, and it’s easy to argue that Apple and Google’s native photo apps are at least as good and should be preferred.

Once you enable the Premium features, Lightroom Mobile for smartphone or tablet “with Premium features enabled” makes sense for a relatively light use – with its 100 GB of included cloud storage, you will store something between 10,000 and 15,000 images in Adobe’s library. Mobile Premium supports RAW files, and offers most of the benefits of the Adobe ecosystem, including credits to use Adobe’s AI. A sporadic use from a PC or a Mac is also possible (the cloud hosted library is accessible from a Web version of Lightroom).

If you need more than 100 GB of cloud storage, the only option (in March 2025) is to switch to an Adobe Lightroom Plan purchased through Adobe.com. The Adobe Lightroom Plan (with 1 TB of cloud storage) offers all the benefits of “Mobile with Premium features”, and adds Lightroom for PC/Mac (a lightweight client with Cloud storage) and Lightroom Classic (the fat client with local storage), plus 450 extra Creative Cloud monthly credits for less than $10.00/month (assuming you pay for one year of subscription upfront).

*Lightroom for Web – available to Mobile Premium users – the “upgrade” option brings you to Adobe’s store where you can only subscribe to Adobe’s Lightroom and Photography Plans.*

There is a catch, though. The Lightroom Mobile plan (sold on the app stores of Google and Apple) and Adobe’s Lightroom Plans (available on Adobe’s store front) are two distinct commercial offers made by two totally different organizations.

Lightroom Mobile and Adobe Lightroom are two products of the same family (and the library of images will follow you to Adobe Lightroom), but an upgrade from Lightroom Mobile to an Adobe managed Lightroom subscription is not commercially possible – you have to subscribe to Adobe’s Lightroom Plan as if you were new to Lightroom, and will receive no credit from Adobe if you had prepaid for one year of Mobile Premium on Apple’s or Google’s App Store.

*Las Vegas – Sony WX350 – in full daylight the camera does a nice job*

Will I receive credit for the remaining months of Apple subscription?

No, Adobe typically does not offer a direct credit for the remaining months of your Apple App Store subscription if you switch to an Adobe Lightroom plan. When you switch to a different plan through Adobe, you will likely need to cancel your Apple subscription, and the billing on Apple’s platform will continue until the next renewal date.

Apple doesn’t usually allow third-party services like Adobe to manage credits or refunds for their App Store subscriptions. You might want to check with Apple Support to see if they can offer any credit for the unused months of your subscription, but that would be separate from Adobe’s policies.

To avoid being double-charged, it’s essential to cancel your Apple subscription before subscribing to an Adobe plan. [from a ChatGPT dialog on March 26, 2025]

*Las Vegas – night shot with a Sony WX350. This is the last evolution of the Exmor 18Mpix sensor.*

The two tables below summarize the different ways to subscribe to Lightroom, as of March 2025.

Lightroom for Mobile – purchased through an App Store:

Using the Apple App Store as a reference – Lightroom’s offerings on the Google Play App Store are roughly similar.

	Adobe Lightroom for iPhone	Adobe Lightroom for iPad	Adobe Lightroom for iPhone with Premium Features enabled	Adobe Lightroom for iPad with Premium Features enabled
	iOS	iPadOS	iOS	iPadOS
	Available through Apple Store	Available through Apple Store	Licensed through Apple Store	Licensed trough Apple Store
Annual Cost (US$)	free in Apple Store	free in Apple Store	49.99	49.99
Included Adobe Creative Cloud storage	No	No	100 GB	100 GB
Storage upgrade tiers			No direct upgrade option	No direct upgrade option
RAW Files Supported	No	No	Yes	Yes
AI enchancer	No	No	Yes	Yes
AI Generative Credits included			50 /month	50 /month
Lightroom Web	No	No	Included	Included
Lightroom for PC/Mac	No	No	No	No
Lightroom Classic	No	No	No	No
Photoshop	No	No	No	No

*Las Vegas – Sony WX350 – the limits of the 2/3in sensor are very visible in night shots.*

Subscribing to Adobe Lightroom through the Adobe.com storefront

	Adobe Lightroom Plan	Adobe Photography Plan
Annual Cost (if paid upfront)	$ 119.88	$ 239.88
Included Adobe Creative Cloud storage	1 TB	1 TB
Storage update tiers	1 TB	1 TB
Annual cost of storage tier	$119.99	$119.99
How to procure	Adobe.com	Adobe.com
RAW Files Supported	Yes	Yes
AI enchancer	Yes	Yes
AI Generative Credits included	500/month	500/month
Lightroom Mobile Premium for iOS	Included	Included
Lightroom Mobile Premium for iPadOS	Included	Included
Lightroom Web	Included	Included
Lightroom for PC/Mac	Included	Included
Lightroom Classic	Included	Included
Adobe Porfolio	Included	Included
Photoshop for iPad	No	Included
Photoshop for Web	No	Included
Photoshop for PC/Mac	No	Included

Alternatives?

For those who don’t want to pay the “Adobe Tax”, and prefer products distributed under an Open Source license or following a conventional perpetual licensing model, there are quite a few options, some free, some cheap. Some of those products even offer a mobile version and integrated cloud storage. A selection, listed in alphabetical order: Capture One, Darktable, On1 Photo Raw, Raw Therapy, Skylum Luminar. I’ve not tested them but there are interesting reviews in Youtube. One of them below.

More about alternatives to Lightroom:

Why Las Vegas? Because in Las Vegas, the Casino always wins.

Las Vegas in 2015 – Sony Cybershot WX350 – I returned the camera after one week – even if it was equipped with the best 2/3in sensor on the market at the time, I did not like the image quality and the ergonomics.

In a previous post, I was debating whether it made sense for me to adopt Lightroom for Mobile and rebuild my workflow and photo cataloging process with it – and the answer was mostly Yes. I had concerns about the inability to perform bulk tagging over an album. I have not found a perfect solution – tags can be copied and pasted from one picture to another one, but as far as I can see, you have to paste the tags on every picture individually. Not ideal.

Step #1 : select the folder or the collection to migrate in Lightroom 6

The big unknown was whether I should also migrate my old Lightroom libraries to Adobe Cloud as well. I checked – I have 30,000 photos on my network storage (a mix of proprietary RAW files from Nikon, DNG files and JPEGs). But they only consume 300 GB on the NAS (that’s an average of 10MBytes per picture if you do the math), and it’s likely that nearly half of those images are duplicates (images were generally copied from the memory cards and saved as Nikon proprietary RAW files, then converted to Adobe’s DNG format and saved again). And I tend to keep every image, good or bad, when most pictures should have been culled a long time ago. So, maybe less than 100 GB of keepers. Adobe Cloud storage fees will not send me to the poor house.

Step 2 – select the pictures and right click to export them (here as jpegs).

Originally, I thought I would simply be copying my old Lightroom 6 catalog file to the Adobe Cloud, and that Adobe would do the rest. It’s simply not the case.

Firstly, not everything is migrated: the history of the edits, the folder structure, the books, slideshows, and smart collections and a few other things don’t make the trip to the cloud (I assume they remain available on Lightroom Classic if you keep licensing it after the migration to Lightroom, but I could not validate this statement for the reason exposed in my second point). For all practical purposes, it looks like Adobe Lightroom Classic and Lightroom (in the Cloud) are two significantly different products – and that a lot is lost during the migration.

Secondly, Lightroom catalogs and files can’t be uploaded to the cloud by Lightroom 6. The migration to Adobe’s cloud can only be performed from a recent version of Lightroom Classic, and upgrading from LR6 to LR Classic is a necessary first step. You can get a 7 day trial version of Classic, so it’s not directly about money. The problem is that Classic only runs on a recent PC or Mac (Windows 10 or better, MacOS 13.1 or better) – and my Mac is an antique by their standards – it won’t run LR Classic. There are other constraints I did not even explore like finding more local storage for the Lightroom cache (with Lightroom, images are stored permanently and at full size in the cloud and replicated to a cache on the PC or the Mac only when they are needed), because I was not going to upgrade to a new Mac just to be able to migrate my Lightroom catalogs.

Thirdly, if it sounds clear as mud to you, you’ll be comforted in knowing you’re not alone – from Adobe’s Community Support:

So, considering all of the above, I decided NOT to migrate my Lightroom catalog to Adobe’s cloud. Instead I’ll export already developed JPEGS from Lightroom 6 to Lightroom Mobile, collection by collection.

I don’t think I’ll miss much. Because so much is lost during the catalog migration, just exporting the Jpegs is going to be almost as good. I’ve been using Lightroom Mobile for a while now, and anything I’ve shot in the last 24 months and that I may need to edit again has already been uploaded to Adobe’s cloud. Anything older than two years was culled and processed in Lightroom 6 a few days after it was shot, and it’s unlikely I’ll need to go back to the original RAW or DNG files and process them again. Keeping the good pictures as JPEGs in Lightroom Mobile makes me laptop free, with images always accessible, easy to consume and share. And if I ever need to re-process a 15 year old RAW file, my Lightroom Folders and Albums are mimicking the folder structure I have on the NAS, and finding the image I need will be easy.

Step #3 – in Lightroom Mobile, create a folder and and album, and press the Add Image icon (bottom right)

Step #3 (continued) – Add photos from Files (because they’re saved on an external volume)

Step 3 (continued) – Select the folder where the photos to be imported are located.

Step #3 (continued) – Select the images to import

One thing I took great care of testing was how the metadata associated with each picture was migrated to Lightroom Mobile.

I exported the images as JPEGs, and they reflect the last changes made to the image in Lightroom 6 – if the original image was cropped, its sliders moved left and right, I won’t know it because the log of the edits is not incorporated in the JPEG that Lightroom generates. In other words, the images will be exported in their most recent state without their history, and no roll back of the settings will be possible.

On the other hand, anything else is incorporated into the JPEG image – the metadata recorded originally by the camera or the film scanner, of course, but also the title, captions, keywords and even the flags and the stars added by the photographer and associated with the image in Lightroom’s catalog.

Importing the JPEGs to Lightroom Mobile (or Web) is a breeze – connect the media containing the files to the iPad or to a desktop/laptop (using the Web version on Lightroom in that case), create a folder and an album in Lightroom, and upload the pictures.

The Metadata is preserved during the transfer

Experience has taught me that no technical solution is perfect, or eternal. I’ve seen Apple iPhoto and Aperture being abandoned, Lightroom migrating from a perpetual license to a subscription model, and multiple online image storing and sharing services fall into irrelevance or disappear.

At this moment, Lightroom for Mobile with Premium features meets my needs, and I expect it will remain the case in the next few years. Eventually with an upgrade to 1TB of storage. The product is already mature, and it allows me to be laptop free – at least when it comes to photography. I expect Adobe to keep on working on their product. They’ve already started adding AI powered features to make photo editing or masking easier. I simply hope they will also find the time to address some of the little issues that irritate me.

In the rolling grasslands East of Calgary, Alberta – Fujifilm X-100 – June 2016.

More about the migration from Lightroom Classic (with local storage) to Lightroom (with cloud storage).

From the horse’s mouth: https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-cc/using/migrate-to-lightroom-cc.html

CamerAgX – a new life for old gear

An update on Adobe Lightroom licensing

Lightroom for Mobile Premium: migrating images from Lightroom 6