Lightroom Secrets

Creating iPad Albums With Lightroom

The iPad is an excellent tool for showing off your work. Chances are, though, if you are a Lightroom user you don’t want to fiddle with iPhoto just to get your images ready for your iPad and sorted into albums. And if you are a Windows based Lightroom user then iPhoto isn’t an option for you.

Before we look at how to export your images and create iPad albums I suggest you go read Matt Kloskowski’s recent post Presets—Lightroom iPad Export Settings. Matt describes how to prepare your images and offers two very useful export presets. Download these and then return here. Don’t worry. I’ll wait.

Welcome back! Now that you have Matt’s presets installed we can proceed. This is a fairly straight forward workflow that will make organizing your images on your iPad easy (and iPhoto free).

To start, create a directory somewhere to house your albums. In this example I called it iPad Collections. Choose the images for your album and click the Export button.

Choose one of Matt’s preset depending on whether you want to fill the iPad screen or maintain the aspect ratio of your images. In the Export Location section choose Specific Folder for the Export To value. Click the Choose button and find the folder you created above. Now check the Put In Subfolder checkbox and enter the name for your album in the field.

In the File Naming section set up any filename parameters you like. Leave the remainder of the settings in the preset as they are. Press the Export button.

Each album will assume the name of the folder you export the images to.

Don’t worry about the iPod Photo Cache folder. This is created by iTunes when you upload your albums.

Open iTunes and click on your iPad in the list on the left. Go to the Photos tab and choose the original folder you created to house your albums. If you want all of your albums uploaded to your iPad then choose the All folders radio button.

If, however, you want to select which albums get uploaded then choose the Selected folders radio button and in the list that appears below check the albums to upload.

Sync your iPad and you will now see your images sorted into the albums you created via Lightroom

Now it’s easier than even to show off your work and make full use of your iPad as a portfolio display tool!

Related posts:

1. iPad Albums Via Publish Services

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Tags: Export, iPad, iTunes

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 22nd, 2010 at 5:00 am and is filed under Lightroom 3, Tutorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.