It's been a long time coming, but you can finally import photos directly from your SD card or USB drive into the iOS version of Lightroom. Previously, users had to import images to their camera roll, then copy them over into Lightroom's library. This doubled the amount of storage that the photos occupied, so taking the additional step of going back to your camera roll and deleting the files was an arguably necessary step. The new workflow, revealed today on Adobe's YouTube channel, will let you get to work touching up and recoloring your compositions faster.
When you plug an SD card or drive into your Apple device (via dongle, of course), Lightroom will auto-detect the media. You can choose to import files individually or just dump the whole lot of them into your library. Once they've been transferred to Lightroom's library, the app will ask if you want to delete the source files on your external media. The correct answer is "no," but as an additional safeguard, the photos will also be automatically backed up to Creative Cloud, if you have that feature enabled.
This is just the latest feature Adobe has previewed -- there were several others revealed earlier this month that creatives can look forward to. At Adobe MAX, the company teased integrated streaming, automatically inserting people into photos, animating still images and more. While those updates won't be available for some time, directly importing images to Lightroom will be available by the end of the year.
