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Lightroom Mobile Revisited Share This on LinkedIn   Share This on Google   Tweet This   Forward This

5 May 2014

One of the questions we had after working with Lightroom mobile, Lightroom Web View and the new Lightroom was how permanent the public URLs to shared Collections would be.

We suspected they were not permanent (well, just look at them). We hypothesized that they would remain active as long as the Collection itself was synced. Once you no longer synced the Collection it would disappear from Lightroom mobile and its Web View URL would disappear with it.

That's easy enough to test. So we did.

PRELIMINARY CHECK | Back to Contents

The first thing we did, though, was see if our San Francisco Collection was still active. That's the album we made public for our original review.

Yes, it was. Which is what we would have expected because we hadn't unsynced the Collection since making the album public.

SYNCING A NEW COLLECTION | Back to Contents

Next, we created a new Smart Collection for image we had shot at Fort Mason on Jan. 30.

That wasn't such a great idea because we had moved those images to a different folder on our hard disk. Lightroom, consequently, couldn't find them. But Lightroom can't sync a Smart Collection anyway.

So we clicked the sync icon, got the error message that Lightroom can't find the originals and used the prompt to look for them. We pointed Lightroom to where they were and by finding nearby images as well, we quickly fixed that problem.

With the images in our Smart Collection selected, we just created a Collection for the selection which we were able to sync.

WEB VIEW | Back to Contents

Then we launched our browser to visit Lightroom Web View where our new Collection was ready to view.

Web View. Our new album is Fort Mason.

Fort Mason. It's all there.

Private. But we have to make it public.

Public. Then we get the URL.

We made it public and copied the URL: https://lightroom.adobe.com/shares/7825b2b6bfda474b83e48072b1d3f073. Nothing about that looks permanent, does it?

LIGHTROOM MOBILE | Back to Contents

Oddly enough, the new Collection did not show up in Lightroom mobile. We quit the app and relaunched it and still no. When we accessed an existing Collection in Lightroom mobile we saw some activity in Lightroom mobile.

Not on our network, though.

What we saw were the spinning 'wait' icon and the three progressive dots in Lightroom mobile. But our network modem was idle. When we took the screen shot, we saw some activity but that was the iPad sending our screen shot to iCloud.

Where Is It?. Note the 'wait' icon in the top left.

So we took a break to let Lightroom mobile catch up. But it never did. Our new Collection still wasn't listed.

It turns out there's a little trick to updating the album display in Lightroom mobile. You have to sign out.

Once we signed back in, we saw our new album.

UNSYNCING | Back to Contents

So the next step in our test was to unsync the Collection in Lightroom. We didn't delete the Collection, just unclicked the sync icon.

Would the public URL still display our album?

In a word, no. When we revisited the Web View URL for the Fort Mason Collection, we got a missing page error.

Missing Page. The URLs are temporary.

We returned to desktop Lightroom and re-synced our Fort Mason Collection. Then we tried the old URL again. The page was still missing.

When you re-sync a Collection, it is private, not public. So you have to make it public again -- and that generates a new URL.

CONCLUSION | Back to Contents

So, as we suspected, the Web View URL for a synced Collection lasts only as long as the Collection is synced.

Even if you re-sync a Collection you once made public, it is private until you make it public again. But Web View generates a new URL so the original URL is useless.

That's not unreasonable behavior. But beware that Collections you share this way are only available while the Collection remains synced. So it's probably not a good way to share images permanently.


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