Problem: You’re getting ready for a big trip and plan to do a lot of photography, but are nervous about making sure your images are backed up every day. But you’d also like avoid taking a laptop and external drive along on the trip.
Solution: Use Lightroom Mobile on an iPad to back up your dailies to the Adobe Cloud at the end of each day. Now you can rest assured that if your camera is stolen or damaged, or your SSD card goes belly up, you’ve at least got everything you shot prior to the Really Bad Day stored safely away.
On paper, it sounds great, and the process mostly works, but there are a bunch of caveats to be aware of, and I strongly recommend that you practice the workflow carefully before starting your trip.
What You’ll Need
First things first: There are several things you’ll need sorted out before this is going to work well:
A High-Quality SD Card Reader (Don’t Cheap Out!)
I actually tried this workflow a couple of years ago, on a trip to Hawaii, and it was an exercise in frustration. The import process kept glitching and crashing out after every 10 images or so, and I had to continuously reset and start over. It was incredibly frustrating, but I made the mistake of thinking the problem was that Lightroom Mobile was young and buggy.
Fast-forward a few years to 2026, and I tried the process again, only to hit the same limitations. How could they possibly not have fixed it in all this time? It was then that the light went on - maybe this was a hardware issue? The USB-C SD card reader I was using was something I had purchased on Amazon a while back. It looked cool, but apparently the internals weren’t. Only then did I do some searching for “Most reliable USB-C card reader for iPad.” Unsurprisingly, a lot of people pointed to this “all business” one from Apple. I ordered one, tried the experiment again, and Lo and behold, I was able to import 150 sample images in a single move, flawlessly. The problem was that I had been using cheap hardware all along.
I’m sure lots of brands are just as reliable - I’m just saying: This is not a place to cheap out - the headache isn’t worth it.
Caveat: My new Apple USB card reader doesn’t include a MicroSD slot, which the old buggy one did. So while it works great for my camera images, it didn’t work for my drone shots, since the drone uses MicroSD. If you have a drone, be sure to take an adapter along, or be prepared to connect the drone itself to the iPad to do separate imports.
An Adobe Cloud Account with Lots of Free Space
It should go without saying that you’ll need plenty of empty space in your Adobe account to upload into. The 20GB plan isn’t going to cut it. I’ve been on the 1TB plan for years, and it’s still got 25% free space, so I knew I’d be good. Take stock of which plan you’re on and estimate how much space you’ll need - the last thing you need is to be fiddling with those plans in the middle of your holiday.
Upload Bandwidth
This one you can’t really control, but it’s critical, and it could bite you - uploading lots of images takes time and bandwidth. If you’re moving around between hotels and AirBnBs in various countries, upload speeds are all over the map. If you end up staying three nights in a place with very limited upload speeds, you may not have enough time to upload everything before moving to the next location. And if that happens, you can end up with a backlog of images that were not successfully uploaded. This isn’t just hypothetical- internet is a super variable thing out in the real world, especially if you like to travel off the beaten path.
It’s not the end of the world - you don’t have to upload your images every day. Just be aware that this can throw a wrench in your plans, and connects directly to the next topic.
An iPad with Lots of Free Space
But wait - aren’t we uploading directly to the Adobe Cloud? Why do we care about how much space is on the iPad? To understand why this important, you need to understand what happens internally during the upload process (and what doesn’t happen).
Let’s say you shoot 20GBs of images in one day. That’s a lot, but not insane. On limited upload speeds, it could take hours to get those images into the cloud. The workflow looks like this:
SD Card -> [iPad internal storage] -> Adobe Cloud
When you initially transfer from the card, a hidden queue is created on the iPad’s internal drive. As each image is uploaded, a Smart Preview is created and the image is deleted from the queue. You have no access to or control over this queue - the images are internally “pinned” until they’ve been uploaded successfully (this prevents you from accidentally deleting something that hasn’t yet been uploaded).
I put “iPad internal storage” in brackets above because you don’t “put” images there - they go there automatically. It’s part of the transfer process but you don’t control it.
Not cache! One of the settings in Lightroom Mobile is for “Cache Size Limit.” That is configurable, and may be useful for the “Editing on the Plane” section below, but you should understand that the queued uploads are not stored in cache - that’s not what cache means (by definition, a system must never be harmed by deleting cache, while deleting non-imported images would be considered harmful). If you get in a situation where pinned images are taking up space and uploads are going slow, emptying your Lightroom cache is not going to get rid of them! Your only solution is to get yourself onto faster internet.
LR Mobile’s cache manager may help when editing your photos on the plane on the way home, but it’s not related to the upload queue. Note the “FREE” section here - this is your handiest indicator of how much space is unused on this iPad.
All of that is a long way of saying that for this process to work, the free space available on your iPad can be a critical bottleneck, and there are only two ways to improve the situation: 1) Delete a bunch of apps and data from the iPad, or 2) Get a bigger iPad.
After images move from the queue to the cloud, you get the space back, but if you hit the limits of your iPad’s available storage, you’re going to start getting frustrating “Out of space” errors during import. This is an area where you really want to pay attention before you leave home - make sure you’ve got at least as much free space as you intend to upload on your heaviest shooting days, either by deleting stuff or buying an iPad with more internal storage space (and no, attaching an external SSD to the iPad won’t help you here, because you can’t control where the upload queue lives).
Recommended Workflow
So there a bunch of variables here, some of which you can control, others you cannot:
How much you shoot each day
How much space is free in Adobe Cloud
How much space is free on the iPad
What is your current upload speed
Because you can’t purge the queue and must always wait for images to upload successfully, Adobe recommends working in bursts, especially if you’re on a slow connection:
Upload, say, 50 images
Wait for them to complete sync’ing to Cloud
Do the next 50
Repeat
Unfortunately, that becomes a tedious job of babysitting the process, but it does prevent the possibility of getting stuck with a full queue and no space.
I ended up being forced to use this process a few times. I did eventually get everything uploaded on the last day, but it wasn’t exactly a plug-and-play process. With more storage on the iPad and faster internet in the last AirBnB, it could have been.
Notes and Options
The “Files” Question
This one is a personal choice. In the workflow above, you have 2x storage - images live on the SD card, and in the Adobe Cloud. I feel good about that, but other users want even more certainty, and introduce a third storage layer, putting images into the Apple Files app first. So for them, the workflow is this:
SD Card -> Files App -> [iPad internal storage] -> Adobe Cloud
I’ve personally never seen a single failure from Adobe Cloud in seven years of using it heavily, so I just don’t feel the need for that kind of redundancy, but if you do, go for it. Just remember to clean up the extra data when you get home.
Don’t Delete from Lightroom Cloud Until You Get Home
One of the advantages of this workflow is that you can start working on your images while you’re on the trip, without having to wait to get home. For me, that always involves heavy culling and deletion.
But in this workflow, there’s something to be aware of - if an original is still on the SD Card, but you’ve deleted it from Lightroom cloud, then when you go to import the next day, Lightroom will think that’s a new image and will want to re-import it. The solution is to go ahead and Reject those images in LR Mobile, but don’t do the batch deleting until you get home. Leave the rejected image in your Library so the importer doesn’t think the one on the card is a new image.
Editing on the Plane - What’s in Cache?
I had a 10.5 hour flight home yesterday, and was eager to dive in from some deeper editing, but found some weird/unexpected behavior. While this fully works with Apple Photos, it works a bit strangely with Lightroom. Some actions, like masking, need server-side backing and won’t work without a connection. No surprises there. But the weird thing is that I found that for some of my images from this trip, I could modify develop settings on the plane without internet, and for others I could not. Then it dawned on me - remember that Cache Size setting in the screenshot above? Some edits are only possible without internet if they’re still in the cache. The others only have the Smart Preview, and some edits are not possible. So if this is one of your goals and you’ve got the space, it might makes sense to turn that cache size up before your trip begins, so all of the recents are in cache.
However, just being able to go through and Reject images (basic culling) was good enough for me on the plane, and was a huge time saver later.
Everything Lands
It felt amazing to come home, boot up the computer, and see everything land in place, including edits and culling decisions I’d done in the field or in the air. Nothing lost, and peace of mind the entire time, but it definitely had been a somewhat fiddly process at times.
If you’re a Lightroom Classic user, you’ll probably want to go through the extra steps of moving images from LR Cloud to your local workflow, if you don’t have it set up to happen automatically. I strongly prefer Lightroom over LR Classic. Because Lightroom is “cloud first”, all of the recents images landed exactly where I wanted them to. To me, the traveling and multiple devices situation here is exactly the sort of reason why everything in our lives has moved to the cloud - it just works.
Long story short, it’s all doable, and it felt great to not have the weight and risk of a laptop and SSD drive along for the trip, but there were definitely some bald patches in the process. Practice and prepare!
Scot, I’ve been doing something sort of similar during recent travels. I import files using the iPad version of Photoshop, and since my iPad automatically syncs to my Apple iCloud account the files are automatically duplicated there. When I’m feeling particularly paranoid I also update to a bare SSD with a USB-C cable adapter. (And my camera has two card slots that hold duplicate versions of the image files.) So, all told, I might end up with 4 copies of all of my files without too much ado.)
I do very little on-the-road editing, since I find it pretty cumbersome using the iPad version of Photoshop on my iPad Pro. I do some culling perhaps, but beyond that most of the serious work waits for when I get home.
Quick follow-up, after writing all of that. I used to carry a Macbook Air as my on-the-road device, but swapped it out for the iPad a few yeas back. I quickly came to like the iPad quite a bit for many purposes, especially since I added Apples expensive keyboard that converts into a cover.
But it turns out that the weight savings aren’t quite as big as we might expect, at least if you use that Apple keyboard. I’d describe my iPad setup as “smaller but not a lot lighter.” I’m actually considering going back to the small screen of the Macbook Air in the future, since it will actually run my normal post-processing apps, just like my big photo machine at home.