It’s no secret that Adobe plans to take Lightroom, its professional desktop photo management app, into the mobile realm. The question is when and for how much.
And to that, Adobe is mum for now.
Responding to a flurry of chatter about the upcoming Lightroom Mobile app—inspired by an untimely leak on the company’s own Website—Adobe had this to say: “Last year Adobe did a sneak peak on bringing certain Lightroom capabilities to mobile platforms, however we have not made any formal announcement about official plans and have no further details to discuss about Lightroom at this time.”
Nonethless, a private page on the Adobe website, which was removed after it was brought to the company’s attention, unintentionally revealed additional details about the plans in progress for an iOS version of Lightroom.
As reported by 9 to 5 Mac, not only may a mobile release for Lightroom be imminent, but the company is also planning to charge a $99 subscription fee for it. An enterprising reader was actually able to make the purchase, though the service is not operable.
Photographers have been asking Adobe for a mobile Lightroom app for several years, and at Photoshop World last year, product manager Tom Hogarty demoed such an app on an iPad 2 in one of the show’s famous “sneak peeks.”
A Lightroom Mobile app would let users edit photos taken in various Raw formats and feature cloud-synchronized editing so that edits on the tablet would also appear in the desktop version of the image. While the demo was on an iPad 2, it is unclear which other mobile platforms or devices are being planned.
Adobe will use Lightroom 5 Smart Previews to create a more compact version of a photo and a slate of editing tools can be used on such images with the editing instructions syncing back to the original file.
As Adobe’s John Nack noted on his blog during the show, “the wheels are turning.”
At approximately 18:30, Tom Hogarty discusses tablet editing.
Use your iPhone or iPad for photography? Get pro tips for taking better images at our photography session at Macworld/iWorld in San Francisco March 27-29.
Author: Jackie Dove
Jackie Dove is an insomniac tech writer and editor in northern California. A wildlife advocate, cat fan, and photo app fanatic, her specialties include Mac hardware and software, art, design, photography, video, and a wide range of creative and productivity apps and systems. Jackie now writes for a variety of consumer tech publications.