Adobe announces Lightroom Mobile

Lightroom 5

After the the previous demo and leak we knew Adobe were working on a tablet version of Lightroom that would sync to your desktop catalog. Today Adobe officially announced the availability of Lightroom 5.4 and Lightroom mobile (Lr Mobile) for iPad.

Lr Mobile is available as a free add-on for all Creative Cloud subscribers including the $9.99/month Photoshop option. The leak had Lr Mobile incorrectly listed as an additional $99/year and received a lot of negative comments online.

Version 1 of Lr Mobile has limited but useful features:

* Basic Editing
* Uses Smart Previews
* Syncs Lightroom Collections
* Flag images
* Has offline (airplane) mode option
* Almost instant two-way sync
* Images captured on device can be uploaded/synced to desktop
* 20Gb online storage
* Web access via http://lightroom.adobe.com

The mobile interface is deliberately different to the desktop version of Lightroom. Small touch screens have very different UI to desktop apps with keyboard shortcuts. An iPhone version is also in the works and intended more as a way of managing your mobile photography than Lightroom catalogs.

As a version 1.0 app the features are a bit sparse. However Adobe are keen to point out with Creative Cloud, updates can be pushed out more frequently. More info on Lightroom mobile here: http://www.adobe.com/go/lrmobile