Got an iPhone (or iPod Touch)? Looking for a quick way to take your favorite photos with you? Follow along with this demo:
Step 1: Choose the photos you want to export. Ideally, put them in a collection so you can update this later. A keyword or folder will work too.
Here, I’ve chosen a collection with 24 photos of my baby daughter.
Step 2: Select all photos (Ctrl-A / Command-A) and go to the Export Dialog (Ctrl-Shift-E / Command-Shift-E). The export dialog should look something like this…
The important things to note here:
- If you have multiple collections to export to your phone, they all have to go in the same root folder. (In my case, I’m using a folder called “iPhone” under my standard “Pictures” folder, but they could really be anywhere.)
- The name of the folder you give underneath that common folder is the name you’ll see in the Photos application on your phone.
The exact settings for JPEG quality, size, etc., are up to you. The phone will do a fine job of scaling the photos. All you’re deciding with the size of the “long edge” setting is how much you can zoom the photo. I don’t tend to do a lot of zooming, so 500 480 pixels (slightly larger than the iPhone screen) seems just fine. (Update, January 15: See comments below. Changing this to 480px since iTunes does that anyway.)
If you want to save yourself some typing and clicking, I’ve included an export template you can use. Right-click on this file: iphone-demo.lrtemplate and save it to your Export Presets folder. If you’re not sure where that is, right-click on any existing template in your Export Dialog and select Show in Finder or Show in Explorer.
Important: When using this template, be sure to change the Folder and Put in Subfolder items in the dialog.
Once you’ve done that, click the Export button, and wait for Lightroom to finish.
Step 3: Set up to sync in iTunes
You only have to do this step once. iTunes will remember these settings, so starting from the second time you do this, you can skip ahead to Step 4.
Plug your iPhone into your computer. Make sure iTunes is running.
Click on your phone’s entry in the panel on the left, then click on the Photos tab, as shown here.
Click “Sync photos from…” and then choose “Choose folder …” in the popup menu, as shown here:
When you are asked to identify a folder, you should choose the same folder you chose in Lightroom in the “Folder:” popup. (In my example, this was ~/Pictures/iPhone.)
Once you do this, you should see the names of all of the folders immediately underneath that folder, and the number of photos in each. If not, you probably found the wrong folder; if so, proceed to …
Step 4: Sync in iTunes
Once you’ve set up the sync (a one-time thing), you can just sync your iPhone the same way you normally do to get new music, videos, etc., onto the phone.
That’s all … hope this was helpful!
Great! I do this myself. The iphone is a kickn’ portfolio in one’s pocket.
I agree … I’m surprised at how often I use it.
I would like to be able to do some zooming, but unfortunately no matter how large your photos are, iTunes will downsize them to fit the iPhone’s screen (which is 480 px).
Dorin, thanks for the update. I’ve changed the template to have Lightroom resize to 480 pixels instead of 500.
Interesting. I don’t put any photos on my iPhone.
Instead, I put my “exports” on flickr, and then use the application formerly known as Exposure (now DarkSlide) to view them. My only complaint is that I need network access to look at photos, but I don’t have to think about keeping my phone synced.
Nice article. I recently switched to Lr2 from Aperture as i’ve just downsized to FourThirds Panasonic GF1 and was getting annoyed at having to pre-convert the RAWs before I could even import them to the Aperture library. (It doesn’t even recognise the Adobe DNG conversions!)
Previously I had been storing photos in Aperture, but once “developed” I was then converting them to JPG, exporting to desktop, importing to iPhoto, and then syncing to iPhone. A w k w a r d. The new extra RAW conversion issue sent me over the edge (and back to Lr). I think because I was now looking at the whole “workflow” anew I felt that there must be an easier way; hence my google search leading me here. The whole management of two separate libraries in two separate apps was becoming ridiculously confusing. Confusion over. I’ve used your export template and am saving the iPhone exports within the Lr2 library and am fully controlling the subfolders from within Lr. Syncing to that master iPhone folder from iTunes is a breeze. Why I hadn’t thought of doing it that way previously I don’t know! I’ve totally abandoned iPhoto now as I was simply using it for iPhone image storage and for exporting to Flickr/Facebook. No need, Lr2 can do it all.
My photo life simplified massively in one fell swoop and it all started with your post. Many thanks.