Today, Adobe has announced Lightroom for Apple TV. Featuring integration with Adobe's cloud services, it makes for a fun and interesting way to browse and show off your photos.
I love my Apple TV, and I love browsing photos; it's great to sit on the couch and click over to show off my images to friends, but of course, all my professional photos live in Lightroom, while my Apple TV only syncs up photos from iCloud. I've enjoyed the recent advent of Lightroom mobile; it allows me to work a bit more on the go, and it keeps my updated portfolio with me, even if I haven't updated my website yet. Lightroom for Apple TV gains this same capability: any photos that have been synchronized with Lightroom mobile or uploaded through Lightroom on the web will be viewable in the app, which can be used in single viewing or slideshow mode.
The app also allows you to zoom in on photos. I could see this being a great way to display photos in a studio, or it could even be a neat trick for wedding photographers, who could set up a TV at the reception and have a slideshow of a few shots from the ceremony. Do note that you'll need a fourth generation Apple TV to take advantage of the app, which is free. To find out more, check out Adobe's official blog entry!
Slideshow only? Be awesome if you could at least rate photos.
Agree, the new Apple TV remote lets you swipe, so left/right to change images, up/down to pick or reject. Would be slick.
EXACTLY. Adobe is jacking around with Apple TV apps when Lightroom itself moves like a sloth. Our rental fees at work...
Right, custom keyboard shortcuts are too hard, but a marginally useful, at best, Apple TV app is no sweat.
I wrote the following in Adobe's blog announcing this:
This is useful for displaying a collection if one uses an Apple TV. I find greater utility in the ability to view collections (and now even import raw files) on my iPad Pro. But all of this, while a great step forward, only highlights for me one significant deficit in Adobe's mobile strategy.
I do my editing on a Mac Pro. My catalog resides there, and my raw files reside on Pegasus RAID drives. When I am traveling, I have no access to my files, not even my Creative Cloud synchronized collections, on my laptop. The only option is to copy and take the catalog with me. So, if Adobe really wants to do something impressive, allow me to access those collections on my MacBook Pro.
Why not allow a second computer to connect to those collections for culling and initial edits? Or better yet, give the same feature to laptops you just gave to iPads. Allow me to import my raw files into Lightroom on my laptop and have them sync back to my desktop, which is my primary editing machine. Of course, I understand the latter is probably more complex engineering. But at minimum, let me see my collections on ALL my devices (iPhones, iPads, MacBook Pros).
It's just another step for Lightroom to be a redundant Adobe brand. And to address your point of a mobile/desktop workflow, although deprecated, they could still learn quite a bit from Aperture's file management that allowed one to easily export, import and sync libraries. I think Capture One may be your path forward for that type of control.
I think your problem is one of bandwidth. If you want your ipad/laptop/mobile device to sync both ways with raw to your home/desktop, you are talking about a LOT of GB. The mobile sync takes medium res jpegs and syncs them in the cloud, so we are talking maybe 500k an image vs 50mb.
I wish you could set it up so EVERY image in your catalog syncs instead of having to manually add them to a specific collection. That part bugs me.