Import iCloud Photo Stream into Lightroom

[designdog]

Hi.

Like many here, I am always getting the latest LR plugins, etc. Recently OnOne updated their "Perfect" Suite, and I upgraded my apps. One of the apps in this suite is a stand alone browser, called Perfect PhotoSuite 9. Nice for browsing files, etc -  pretty much what I use LR for before doing most of my editing in Photoshop.

Well, one unheralded and perhaps largely unnoticed feature of the standalone browser is that it provides a direct import for my iPhone, from iCloud PhotoStream. It just shows up as another  folder, and all the photos in your PhotoStream are accessible! The obvious question is: why can't I do this with Lightroom, or Bridge? (Or, for that matter, CaptureOne or DXO Optics Pro? Or PhotoMechanic or ACDSEE?)

Any thoughts?

[Ian Lyons]

Adobe has their own Cloud service and applications. Therefore, I wouldn't expect that they'd show much, if any, interest in supporting a service provided by a competitor. When you subscribe to the Adobe Creative Cloud service then you can use Adobe's free iPhone/iPad application (Download Lightroom mobile | Adobe Lightroom mobile ) to sync photos taken your iPhone/iPad to your desktop version of Lr via the Adobe Creative Cloud.

[keram18]

Do you have to pay the monthly fee to get your iPhone photos to sync to the desktop LR? I'm switching from Aperture to LR and that's one thing I'm not sure will be similar in LR. I'd love for my iPhone pictures automatically sync to my LR, but I only have the desktop version and no subscription since I'm not great with PS yet.

[designdog]

That is all great, but what about photos I take with my iPhone?

[Ian Lyons]

You don't need a cloud account or any third party software or plugins.

Just plug your iPhone into the computer>Launch Lightroom> choose Import Photos and Video from the File menu. Your iPhone will be listed under devices on top left of import window. Select the iPhone and the content window will populate with the photos captured by iPhone. Along the top of the import window yo'll see import options > choose Copy. The panels on right expand to show the structure of hard disk(s). On right side panels pick a location to copy the photos to then hit Import button on bottom right corner.

[Jao vdL]

designdog wrote:

That is all great, but what about photos I take with my iPhone?

If you open the Lightroom mobile app on your iPhone, it will sync all images you took with your iPhone. They will then show up on your Lightroom install on your computer. You do need a Creative Cloud account to do this. You can also just use Apple's Photos app to get the images to your computer, select Reveal in Finder (or whatever they call it nowadays, it is in the contextual menu when you click a photo) from Photos and import them into Lightroom from there.

Apple doesn't document how to access the iCloud photo stream and actually makes it almost impossible to do so so Adobe or any other software house simply can't easily access the stream even if they want to tap into it. Apple's iCloud Photo Stream is very much a closed architecture.

[Guest]

Why try to view iCloud photos on PC with  FonePaw iPhone Data Recovery? I use this tool and all photos are displayed on the program which save me lot of times and energy.

When I log in my iCloud account on this program, all photos are displayed automatically. Then I choose the photos needed after previewing, and go to "Recover" to save all photos on my PC.

There are 3 steps to go:

1. Log in iCloud account with FonePaw iPhone Data Recovery.

2. Download iCloud backup files.

3. Preview and save photos from iCloud backups.