Jul 222010
 

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!

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About the Author:
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Gene is an Adobe Community Professional and and Adobe Certified Expert in Photoshop Lightroom, Photoshop, and InDesign, and an avid Lightroom fan. He belongs to the Professional Photographers of America (PPA) and the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP). Gene also the Co-Founder, Manager and a frequent blogger for the Dallas Fort Worth Adobe User Group (DFWAUG).

In addition to running Lightroom Secrets, Gene also contributes to O'Reilly's media blog, moderates on the Adobe forums, and helps out on lightroomforums.net.

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  • http://twitter.com/barbaricca john beardsworth

    Gene – Publish would handle this well.

  • http://lightroomsecrets.com Gene McCullagh

    Hi John!

    Thanks. You're reading my mind. I have an article already in the works about applying Publish Services for this. I thought I'd start here since both version 3 and version 2 users can follow this method.

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  • http://photoshoplightroombridge.co.uk Marek Mularczyk

    Great post, Gene!

    I will add a link to your post in my blog as I am writing a post about exporting from Lightroom to iPad.

    Thanks a lot for an article! Great! :-)

  • http://photoshoplightroombridge.co.uk Marek Mularczyk

    Great post, Gene!

    I will add a link to your post in my blog as I am writing a post about exporting from Lightroom to iPad.

    Thanks a lot for an article! Great! :-)

  • http://lightroomsecrets.com Gene McCullagh

    Thanks Marek! I look forward to reading it.

  • http://lightroomsecrets.com Gene McCullagh

    Thanks Marek! I look forward to reading it.

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  • Chris

    Thanks Gene, very straight-forward. Had my albums on my iPad in 10 minutes flat. The only down side to this was the settings from Matt but I can worry about the cropping issue another day.

    Tell me, is it possible to grade the images in the folder? For example, if I was showing a client shots from their wedding. Could they score the shots so as to narrow down to the final selection? I can’t get my head around it…

    Thanks again!

  • http://lightroomsecrets.com Gene McCullagh

    Hi Chris!

    I don’t think the native iPad photo app has that capability. There may be an app that uses the stored images and adds additional functionality but I haven’t searched for one. If you find one please post back and let us know. Thanks!