A simple hack to use Lightroom CC offline

After spending 6 weeks in the van traveling around the southwest and shooting a bunch of “decent” photos (by my standards) I recently decided to give Adobe Lightroom another go. I’ve tried it before but got really annoyed at the CC download/sync mac app that digs itself into my mac and seems impossible to fully uninstall. But I sold part of my soul and gave into Adobe’s $10/month Lightroom CC subscription. Got everything setup, mac app, cloud account, iPhone app etc. Took a couple shots with the iPhone app and was taken aback by how nice they turned out. They even outperformed my little Sony NEX mirrorless in certain light conditions… so I started just using the iPhone LR CC app and everything was great until I left WiFi… then the Cloud aspect of LR CC drove a dagger into my productivity.
I searched around and it doesn’t look like the Mac LR CC app can directly import from the iPhone LR CC app. (You can import regular iPhone camera app photos into Mac LR CC using the import tool). This makes sense, having some iPhone app dev experience — iPhone app data isn’t accessible from third party apps from a security perspective. BUT then I sold another part of my soul and fired up iTunes and low and behold, there is a way of getting the full DNGs off the iPhone and into LR CC on my Mac. Here’s how:

1. Shoot a photo on your iPhone using the LR CC iPhone app. (turn off sync for now to replicate offline; I know you’re online because you’re reading this Medium post…)
2. Plug your iPhone into your MacBook.
3. Fire up iTunes. (Make sure your laptop is in a cool environment to avoid overheating and get those fingers ready to accept a dozen popups. Grab a beer or 2…)
4. Click on the little phone icon and then click “File Sharing” in the left toolbar
5. Scroll down the Lightroom CC app in the list of apps that support file sharing.
6. You should see a folder named something like “4a1….7b7596f”
7. Drag and drop that folder onto your desktop. (It’s probably many GBs if you have more than 2 photos in the iPhone LR CC app)
8. Wait for that to download completely.
9. Then navigate to Desktop/4a1….7b7596f/Originals/2017/<year-month>/<year-month-day> AND VOILA your DNG files should be there!
10. Note: the previews of these files are all black on my computer, don’t worry they open up fine when imported into Mac LR CC.
11. Open up Mac LR CC and click Import. Then navigate to same folder and import all the photos you want.
12. Edit away using Mac LR CC!!!

A couple things to note:

1. You will need to down the 4a1….7b7596f folder every time, I don’t see a way of opening it within the iTunes File Sharing interface and only grabbing the photos you want. This could be really painful if your iPhone LR CC library is 10GB+
2. When you do go back online, the files you’ve copied over will unfortunately duplicate, it doesn’t look like LR CC cloud is smart enough to realize those are the same files but I guess it’s safer (if were to edit in the iPhone app and then edit the copied file on your mac, it wouldn’t have a history of how to resolve those edits).

If you found this helpful, give it a 👏🏼 and follow the adventure!

— Sante