iPad Pro only Lightroom workflow

Hello all tech savvy people!

My MacBook Pro has been declared dead and I am trying to only use my iPad Pro 12.9 as my only device. The only bump that I have run into is the photography workflow, everything else is perfect.

I shoot maybe 50-100 shoots a week, sometimes a live aboard and get back with 1000 photos so the process should be fairly streamlined if possible.

Right now what I do is this:

Import RAW images from SD card with SD - lightning adapter into camera roll

Import from camera roll into a new LRmobile collection

Cull and edit

Export back to camera roll

Back up to cloud service

Delete all RAW images except the ones I ended up processing

Back up RAW files

It is the end bit I am having a hard time with.

I want to save the RAW files of my keepers but can not figure out a smooth way.

Anyone has any ideas?

Also any suggestions on external drives (WiFi I guess) that work well with iOS?

Any help is much appreaciated

Lars W

Fiji

I just did my first trip leaving my laptop at home and using an iPad pro instead. I used a Sandisk iXpand flash drive to backup my raw files:

https://www.sandisk.com.au/home/mobile-device-storage/ixpand

Very quick and compact way of backing up.

I initially had some problems backing up from my 256GB iPad Pro to the 128GB iXpand drive and after some correspondence with Sandisk they discovered there was a problem with using a 128GB iXpand drive with the 256GB iPad Pro but they had tested using a 256GB iXpand drive and it worked fine:

Thank you for your patience. We discussed this case with our L3 technicians and found out that we were able to recreate the issue with the 128GB iXpand Drive whereas with the 256GB iXpand Drive there were no issues. Also, we are looking forward to resolve the issue with the iXpand USB 3.0 128GB drive in our future updates.

 

Further, in this case, I would like to offer you a replacement for your product with the iXpand USB 3.0 256GB Drive

 

I got around this problem on my trip by loading from my camera to iPhone 7 to iXpand drive and it worked fine.

When my replacement 256GB iXpand drive arrives I'll test it and let you know how it goes.

Thank you very much for your reply.

I have a 64gb Flashdrive from Ravpower that connects to the iPad, and it works really well. It is a bit small, that is all. There seems to be a small selection of WiFi drives in the TB range but from reading reviews they all appear to be very unreliable.

Imagine the day you can access a external drive connected trough the lightning port in the new iOS files app and not rely on buggy 3rd party software.

Maybe I’ll have to be stuck with cloud based storage for the time being.

I do feel that the iPad has slowly but surely matured a lot recently and is pretty much amazing.

I wish that Lightroom mobile was a bit less focused on the whole sync aspect of the app and shift the focus on people who would like to use the app without the desktop counterpart.

Anyone else have a smooth workflow they would like to share?

Happy diving!

Things just got a lot more interesting!

The latest update to LR mobile blessed us with adding keywords, pausing the sync feature, exporting directly into files, storing the original RAW file on the device and a few more cool things.

One of the big drawbacks are the limit of only exporting 15 photos at a time.

Happy days!