Notes · Publish

From Lightroom Classic to Apple Photos, without the giant exports

We edit in Lightroom Classic. The family looks at photos in Apple Photos — on the TV, the phone, the iPad. Getting one into the other sounds simple until you've done it for a few years.

Why manual exports get out of hand

• Size. Full-size exports from a high-resolution camera are tens of megabytes each. They fill iCloud, and no TV or phone screen needs them.
• Staleness. Re-edit a photo in Lightroom Classic and the copy in Photos is out of date. Export again and you have a duplicate.
• Albums. Your collections in Lightroom Classic don't exist in Photos unless you rebuild them by hand.

What "big enough" means

A 4K TV shows about 8 megapixels; an iPad or a phone even fewer, though you'll zoom in sometimes. A JPEG around 6000 pixels on the long side, quality 90, in the Display P3 colour space (which Apple screens show natively), looks the same as the original on all of them, at a fraction of the size. Video: MP4 with H.264 or HEVC, up to 4K, plays everywhere.

Publish, don't export

Lightroom Classic has a feature built for exactly this: publish services. A publish service remembers what it sent where, marks photos "Modified Photos to Re-Publish" when you edit them, and sends only what changed when you click Publish.

PhotosPublish is a publish service for Apple Photos. Collections and smart collections become albums; a re-edited photo is replaced in place, keeping its albums and Favorite; keywords, titles, captions and Favorite sync both ways. If you already exported by hand, a one-time migration finds those photos and links them instead of duplicating them.