Lightroom Mobile allows you to share collections between your computer and your iOS devices. How about computer to computer?

Question

If I edit on my computer, the edit shows up on my iPad and edits I make on my iPad show up on my computer. Do they allow you to share the same between two computers? I have used the work around of exporting as a catalog, but that is a pain and must be done each time I move from one computer to the other. I usually don't know when I am going to be using one or the other. My collections are rather large and it takes a long time to export them as a catalog and more time to transfer them and more time still to import them. I wish they would allow a shared catalog or collection, so multiple computers, such as a desktop and notebook could work seamlessly together on the same images. I would like to be able to edit on one and have the changes reflected on the other. My desktop is far more powerful than my notebook and has 4 times the screen to work on. I prefer to use it for editing, but as a landscape photographer, I travel all over for weeks at a time and so I have plenty of time to work on the road. If they have a way for me to do it back and forth with a computer and an iOS device, I don't see why they can't make it happen for computer to computer. The export collection as a catalog really is not a solution. If they don't allow computer to computer, has anyone tried going from one computer to an iOS device and then to a different computer? In other words, using the iPad as a middle man between desktop and notebook?

Answer 1

This would be great but it isn't possible at the moment. You can't use the iOS device as the middle man as you propose. As soon as you uncouple one desktop you lose the cloud images and it will only sync with one Mac or Windows machine at a time. Undoubtedly this has to do with the use of the lossy dng for the files. On the desktop machine you are going to expect full resolution images which would take exponentially more storage on the cloud servers than the heavily downsized lossy compression dng files that are used now. 30MB raw originals are scaled down to a 1MB smart preview dng which is what is uploaded to the "cloud." On the iPad it doesn't matter much that you get very low resolution and lossy compression as you can still do some minor editing, but on your desktop you don't want to only have files like that. Syncing full res files over the cloud is going to be quite slow and is going to be quite expensive for Adobe, which is likely why we don't have it yet.