When I travel, I like to share photos from my trip on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Typically I will share one or two photos per day, depending on how much down-time I have and also whether or not I have Internet or data on my phone. But here’s the thing: I am usually creating more than one or two photos per day that I would like to share!

Because I am an avid Lightroom user, my solution has been to start using Lightroom Mobile as “storage” for the overflow photos that I don’t get around to sharing during my trip, so that I can post them later on. The basics are pretty simple: I create a “share” collection, sync it with my iPhone, and then access the photos later to share online. Here’s a more detailed description on how I set this up on my computer and iPhone:

Note: This process requires Lightroom CC.

1. Activate Sync with Lightroom Mobile

In Lightroom, make sure that your catalog is set up with Lightroom Mobile. You can do this in the Preferences setting under “Lightroom Mobile”. Then, hover over the name-plate in the top-left and click when you see the white upside-down arrow. Make sure that “Sync with Lightroom Mobile” is active.

2. Create a Collection in Lightroom

To set up a folder for sharing, create a new collection in Lightroom to store your photos. At the time of writing this article I am traveling, and so I synced Lightroom on my laptop with Lightroom Mobile to collect and share select photos from my trip. For this collection, I named it “Share” and added some of my favorite images from my trip thus far.

3. Sync the Collection

Next, make sure that the collection is synced with Lightroom Mobile. You can either do this while creating the collection, or you can click on the little sync-icon to the left of the collection name in the Collections panel.

4. Enable for Offline Use

Now, download the Lightroom app to your phone (iOS or Android) and sign-in to your Creative Cloud account. After the collection has synced, you may want to enable the offline editing feature. This way you can process the photos on your phone with or without an Internet connection. Plus, it will speed things up for you when you decide to share the image down the road.

5. Process a Photo

Now, you can use Lightroom on your phone to process a photo to prep it for sharing. Sometimes I will do a little pre-editing to my images ahead of time on my computer, but I will usually make more edits on my phone, and also crop the photo to my liking. Because I am usually sharing my photos on Instagram, I almost always crop the photo to a square (1:1) before posting it.

6. Share Online

Now, you can send the photo to your application of choice to share online. I prefer to use Instagram as my main method of sharing, but you can send the photo to many other apps, as well as save a copy to your phone’s camera roll.

  1. First, click on the icon on the top right of the phone screen.
  2. Next, select “Open In”. (I prefer this method to the “Share” option, especially because Instagram is not included in that menu.)
  3. Choose the app where you would like to share your image.

Note: If you prefer to save a copy to your phone (instead of sharing directly from the Lightroom app), go to Share > Save Image.