Advice needed: Lightroom mobile and traveling workflow

[Guest]

Hi,

I am looking for advice for hardware and doable option.

I have my light room setup on my computer at home, most editing/panorama etc is done there.

While traveling, I would like to be able to store my photos out of the SD card and start my lightroom workflow (keywords selection etc).

A windows tablet would:

1 - be over expensive for what I need it for.

2- force me to create a new lightroom catalog and merge them

3- allow me to do the metadata.

4- be very slow to display anything and hard to read the tiny little font of the metadata.

An Android tablet would

1- better price/performance/portability for the job

2- no need to deal with merging catalog

3- cannot add metadata to the photos -> useless

I was hoping to for an:

- 8-10 inch device, good battery, keyboard a plus, around 200$ (I was looking at nvidia shield as it's high perf for the price)

- a system to copy the SD to an sdd (cheapest way + ssd price) (was looking at WD passport or ravpower solution)

Any advice on those equipment?

Also:

I know lightroom mobile make a copy of the imported file to the SD card, but can it make this copy to an external HDD.

For raw imported on lightroom mobile, does the app upload the full file to the cloud and sync the smart preview (as it does for desktop->mobile) or does it try to sync the whole big huge file for ever over the internet?

Does the sync work over private network as Dropbox does?

Probably some easy questions, to me they are logical feature to have, but I can only find very old post from the first release of lightroom mobile on apple. And I havent really used lightroom mobile.

Thanks in advance.

PS: at the moment I have a cheap Chinese tablet (chuwi hi8pro) that I removed windows from it because it was impossible to use with those low spec, and android is OK but I haven't tried lightroom mobile on it (also it's very old android 4.4).

I have used lightroom mobile on my phone only, still havent sync it to the desktop.

[selondon]

Hi,

Can't help on the hardware front unfortunately.

When photos are imported into Lightroom Mobile it will sync the Full Resolution up to the Cloud (you can set 3G or Wifi) then will sync the Full Res again down to Lightroom Desktop when logged in.

Once up in the Cloud, the files on your Mobile Device I believe will be optimised to reduce the space they take up.

On Apple iOS at least the photos are locked in the app. I don't know if on Android you can access the file system but assume it is like iOS. Thus they won't copy to an external disk as it doesn't really work like the Desktop version.

Also it can't sync over a local network.

This has been requested though. For other requests and more info go to the two Lightroom Mobile forums (the user to user one like this and the photoshop family one that is read by Adobe).

[Guest]

Hum That's the thing, The wifi is available once I am back home so when I have access to the desktop.
I am not going to sync Gigs of photos over Data, or over convenience store wifi!

At least JPG would take less space and so I can understand that system, but for RAW no way! And I am lucky I don't live in a country where internet bandwidth is limited and expensive, still upload speed is fairly slow.

So I am better off looking at getting a small notebook and find a way to effectively merge the travel catalog and the main one, that way I don't need to use internet when I can use usb3, and I can do the keywords and metadata.

And I checked, it is possible to access the lightroom version of the photos on Android.

Thanks for your answer