Using the Mylio Photos Lightroom plugin

Mylio Photos‘ flexible editing workflow makes it easy to work with a wide variety of photo editing applications. One of the most widely used photo editing apps is Lightroom Classic. For those who want to organize and sync with Mylio Photos and edit with Lightroom, the Mylio Photos Lightroom Plugin makes the process simple.

Import and organize with Mylio Photos

Start by importing your photos into Mylio Photos. Once your photos are added, select your favorites. In this example I’m working with a set of images from a camera club outing to the historic Mission San Diego. I culled my images and used Flags to mark my favorites.

TIP: Add Flags in Mylio Photos using the . keyboard shortcut.

Next, I filtered my folder of images to show only my Flagged images. Click on the Filter Icon in the Navigation Bar, choose Flag, then click on the Flagged icon to show only Flagged photos.

Edit with Lightroom Classic

Select all flagged photos (Cmd+A on macOS or Ctrl+A on Windows), then go to the Photo menu in the top toolbar, mouse over Open With, and choose Lightroom Classic.

This will launch Lightroom’s Import dialog. Choose to Add the photos from their current location, then click Import.

Edit your photos as desired. For this series I photographed several brackets for HDR. I used Lightroom’s HDR merge which created DNG files. These DNGs were automatically added to Mylio Photos because the images in my Lightroom Catalog are in a folder that is also being watched by Mylio Photos.

After merging my brackets I applied several edits.

Using the Mylio Photos Lightroom plugin

While Mylio Photos will show the new DNG files, it will not automatically show edits made in Lightroom. Lightroom’s edits are stored in its proprietary database, which means we’ll need to export a copy of our edited photo for the edit to be visible in Mylio Photos. The Mylio Photos Lightroom Plugin makes this process simple.

If you have Lightroom Classic installed, the Mylio Photos Lightroom Plugin will be automatically installed when you install Mylio Photos. The first time you use it, it will need to be set up using these instructions.

When you’re ready, switch to the Library module in Lightroom Classic, scroll down to the Publish Services. Expand the arrow next to Mylio Photos to reveal the Photostream, then drag your edited image(s) into the Photostream.

Click on the Photostream, and switch to Grid view if necessary, then click the Publish button to send an edited version to Mylio Photos.

TIP: Click G on the keyboard to switch to Grid View in Lightroom Classic

Viewing your Lightroom edits in Mylio Photos

The Mylio Photos Lightroom Plugin automatically creates a Display Copy. A Display copy is a full resolution JPG with a suffix of added to the filename. This suffix tells Mylio Photos to associate the Display Copy with your Original and will stack it in Mylio Photos so that your edits are visible as you scroll, and your original is protected.

You can see which images have Display Copies in Mylio Photos’ Info Panel. In the File Name field, the file name will be listed showing the original file extension, in this case dng. It will also show the jpg Display Copy and a xmp sidecar file to hold essential metadata.

Once the Display Copy is showing in Mylio Photos, the edited version will be synced to all of your Mylio Photo-attached devices and available for browsing and sharing.

The Mylio Photos Lightroom Plugin workflow allows me to make use of Mylio Photos‘ robust organization and syncing capabilities and edit with the familiar and capable tools in Lightroom Classic.

Want to learn more? Check out this complete walk-through video from Rich Harrington.

In the spirit of full disclosure, it is worth noting that I recently joined the Mylio team — they are pretty awesome and I’m impressed by what they have to offer. Feel free to send any questions my way in the comments below!