Once you’ve added some photos to Lightroom, you can start browsing and ranking them. Being able to do this on your mobile device means you’re not tied to your computer. You can use an odd few minutes here and there to clear a backlog, and you have the photos to hand if you meet up with an old friend or potential client.
There are three primary view modes:
- The Organize view displays a list of the collections.
- The Grid view allows you to browse thumbnails of the photos and select which to view at a larger size.
- The Loupe view shows the photos individually. At the top of the screen, tap on the central pop-up to choose between Rate & Review, Info, Edit and Activity views. We’ll come back to these views in the next few posts.
The first view you see is the Organize view. At the top of the Organize view is the Lightroom Photos collection. This includes all of the photos in Lightroom mobile, whether you’ve added them directly or synced them from the desktop. Listed below are any collections of photos you’ve created. Collections are a way of grouping photos.
Collections allow you to:
- Easily find specific photos again later.
- Group similar photos, such as the best photos of your child, dog, vacation, etc.
- Group photos for a specific purpose, such as photos to be printed, shared via social media, used in a book, etc.
- Group photos that require additional work back on your desktop computer, such as HDR or panorama merge or retouching.
- Download groups of photos for offline use.
In the Organize view, you can:
- View a list of collections, as well as the number of photos and flagged/rejected photos in each collection.
- Change the order of the collections by tapping the pop-up menu at the top of the screen.
- Import Date sorts by the date/time that new photos were added to a collection.
- Title sorts by the collection name.
- Photo Count sorts by the number of photos in each collection.
- Status sorts the collections depending on whether they’re available for offline use or not.
- Create new collections.
- Rename collections.
- Delete collections from the cloud.
- The collection isn’t deleted from the desktop catalog (if it’s already been synced), but it’s removed from the cloud and mobile devices.
- If you accidentally remove a collection from the mobile device, you have to go back to the desktop to click the Sync checkbox again.
- Mark collections for offline use by tapping the … icon to display the collection menu, then selecting Enable Offline Editing. This is useful if you know you’ll want to view/edit the photos while you’re offline later, or if a slow internet connection is causing slow browsing. To clear this offline cache, disable offline editing then select Clear Cache in the same menu.
Next week, we’ll take a closer look at the Grid view.
If you’re keen to get started in the meantime, you can download the full set of infographics right now. They’re yours to download absolutely FREE when you sign up for my monthly Lightroom newsletter using the form below. (Don’t worry, I won’t share your email address with anyone else. You can read previous issues of the newsletter here.)
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