September 23, 2022

Pixel 6 camera - lightroom mobile

Getting this on the phone is trivial, go to the google store (I refuse to call it the "play" store and download it.

Once it was on my phone, I launch it and it asks for my adobe account and password. I do have one since I am paying for the subscription photography package. Once I give it this, I can launch the camera and it captures a DNG raw file by default. So far so good.

On my windows PC where I run lightroom classic, I need to install Lightroom. These days, plain "lightroom" is the cloud based mobile thing.

My package include 1T of cloud storage, so this might work out well. Or does it? Lightroom tells me I have xxx used of 20G available, so there seems to be some double talk here.

I launch it for the first time, dismiss several windows that are trying to be helpful, and I see 9 images. The first one is the image I just took with my phone (amazing!). No effort at all required on my part. The other 8 images are "starter" images for me to play with and ultimately discard.

There is a "File -- Export" option. It brings up a dialog, then a second "chooser" that allows me to decide where to save the image to. I select P:/images and let it invent the file name.

Sure enough, after I do this, on my linux machine I see: 

/home/tom/images/LRM_20220923_195609.jpg
This is a 3056x4064 pixel file (I told it to export full size).

Pretty smooth for setting up something of this sort.

Get these into Lightroom Classic

I am not enthused about plain Lightroom at all (aka Lightroom mobile). I use it only as a method to bounce raw files from my phone to my desktop via the cloud. So once I have exported the images to /home/tom/images, what next?

Launch LrC (lightroom classic). Make a folder (lets say 2023/2023_granite). Using LrC to make the folder ensures that lightroom will be aware of it. Say what you will, but LrC is slow. Such is the nature of things that need permission from the network to operate I guess

The do (on the linux system) something like: 

cd /u1/Camera/lightroom/2023/2023_granite
mv /home/tom/images/*.dng .
Now, back in Lightroom Classic, click on "import" at the lower left. Navigate to P:lightroom/2023/2023_gramite and do the import.

And there you go. If you are like me, you probably want to rename all these images. Use Ctrl-A to select all, then F2 to get the rename dialog.

Cloud plans

I just want to figure out the 20G versus 1T thing.

Apparently I have the "creative cloud photography plan" for $9.99 per month. It gives me lightroom (both), photoshop, and 20G of cloud storage. They don't show this on all of their current marketing literature. They do offer two other plans:

So if I do want 1T of cloud, I would have to start paying an extra $10 per month. Perhaps I am "grandfathered" in to the 20G plan at $9.99 per month.

Get photos into the phone gallery

This is impossible apparently, or at least hard.

I just was on a trip and shot 7 photos. They are nowhere to be found on my phone. When I get home and launch plain lightroom (not classic). There they are! But what I would like to do is to put them into an Instagram post or something. Apparently this is all but impossible. The Adobe lightroom mobile thing is some kind of closed system, or something. Pretty stupid, and frustrating.

Unless there is some trick (isn't there always a "trick") I will need to be sure and use the regular Android camera app if I have any intention of putting images on instagram or facebook.

What this underscores for me is the necessity of having a "real camera" along with my phone. Use the phone for "throw away" images, such as what you might put on facebook, and the real camera for things you want to use on the web and such.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Cell Phones / tom@mmto.org