Yesterday, Adobe released a new set of updates across the Lightroom family, and of particular interest is the new version of Lightroom mobile. This release brings one of the most requested features to the software, and finally allows you to directly import images from a memory card into Lightroom without any workarounds. They also added new controls for exporting your images and improved shared albums.

Lightroom iOS Direct Import

Anyone who uses Lightroom on iOS with a separate camera, and not just their iPhone, has probably wanted the ability to directly import into Lightroom without having to go through the camera roll first. It was only with the release of iOS 13 that Apple made this long requested feature actually possible, and in fairness to Adobe, they turned this feature around pretty quickly.

Inserting a memory card while Lightroom is active now asks you if you want to import

You can import the whole card or select individual images to import

iOS 13.2 was required for this to fully work properly, so make sure yo’ve updated in order to enable this new functionality.

This means that with a usb adaptor, or an iOS memory card reader, you can now import your raw or jpeg photos directly into Lightroom on the iPad or iPhone without first having to import them into the camera roll. This save duplication of photos, and also saves considerable time when working with Lightroom on an iPad or iPhone.

Advanced Export

The mobile versions of Lightroom now have a much better export ability. Previously you could only export a jpeg with little or no options, but you can now export images in Tiff, DNG or Jpeg and you also have the ability to add a watermark and control metadata.

Export options for Tiff in Lightroom Mobile

You can now add photos to a shared album from anywhere you can access Lightroom, such as the desktop, the web version, on mobile and so on.

Lightroom Classic, Camera RAW and Other Versions: New Camera Support.

The other versions of Lightroom and Camera RAW have received updates also, but these are mostly bug fixes and new camera support. Here’s a list of the cameras that have been added.