[Music] [Brian Matiash] Hey, there. My name is Brian Matiash, and I am thrilled to present this Adobe MAX virtual session. Now a quick bit about me. I'm a photo educator based in Southern Florida, and I'm also the creator of Lightroom Everywhere, an in-depth course, weekly newsletter, and YouTube channel dedicated to helping Lightroom users like you manage, edit, and share all of your photos across all of your devices. I'm also a member of the SanDisk PRO-TEAM, which is a good thing because this session is all about optimizing your photo storage using SanDisk drives and Lightroom, whether you're using Lightroom Desktop on your computer or Lightroom Mobile on your smartphone or tablet. The beauty of Lightroom is that it's very scalable with storage. So you can import, edit, and share photos from your library from just about anywhere. To start, I'll show you how I use Lightroom Desktop's Local Browse feature to navigate photos stored on my 8 terabyte SanDisk Desk Drive. The massive total storage size and fast USB speeds makes it a breeze to store, browse, and edit photos using Lightroom Desktop. After that, I'm going to move to a more mobile workflow. Oftentimes, we do bring our cameras with us when we travel, and it's really important to have both a local backup as well as a cloud-based backup to ensure redundancy of our image files and to minimize a negative impact, should your SD card get lost, stolen, damaged, or corrupted. Now fortunately, it's really easy to back up your photos while on the go. I'll show you how I back up my SanDisk Extreme 512 gigabyte SD card to my 4 terabyte SanDisk Extreme external SSD, creating an instant local backup followed by importing those images into Lightroom Mobile, which creates a secondary backup in the cloud. And I'm going to do all of that just using my iPhone 15 Pro Max. All right. Let's dive in. And I'm going to start with Lightroom Desktop. All right. So here we have Lightroom Desktop. And right off the bat, I want to show you these two tabs at the top. The first is cloud. This is where you will find all of your cloud synced photos. You can access these photos from any version of Lightroom, whether it's desktop, mobile, or web. But for this session, we're going to be focusing on this Local tab here. And the Local section is where you can navigate to internal and external drives, whether you want to manage, edit, or share those photos. Now here, I've got my SanDisk Desk Drive. It's an 8 terabyte drive, which means I have plenty of storage space for my entire photo library, and it has very fast read and write speed. So it's just an ideal solution, when you're at home, and you just want to access your entire photo library locally. So you can see I have, under Local here, under the Browse tab, my Skynet Desk SSD. This is the drive I just referenced. I'm going to expand it here, and then I'm going to expand the photos subfolder. And so you can see I break down my photos by year, and so I have 2023 and 2024 here. And so I'm going to go ahead and expand 2023 here. And then you can see we have all of these sub folders here, and each of these folders has photos in them. Now depending on how you prefer to have your folders named, you can always just right click over here and go to rename folder. And then I can call this something else like wetlands, just in case you want a more descriptive folder name. Another thing you can do is you can right click on one of these folders here, and select Add as Favorite. By doing that, if you go to the Favorites sub tab here, you'll see there is that folder that we just marked as a favorite. But if you want to remove it from Favorites, just right click and select Remove from Favorites, and it'll be gone. So I have a folder here, as you can see, with a bunch of images. And there is a photo that I want to edit. So to give myself a little bit more screen real estate, I'm going to click on this icon on the top left here. This will hide the Navigator bar. So now we have a little bit more space. And I'm just going to go ahead and scroll down until I find the photo that I want to edit.
And here it is right here. All right. Now I'm going to show you a really quick and easy treatment to make this image look a lot better. So I'm going to double click to open it. I'm also going to click on this icon down here to hide the film strip, to give me a little bit more screen real estate, and now we can get started. As you can see, the image is pretty dark, so I'm going to open up our editing tools over here. And really one of the easiest ways just to get a quick start on an image is by clicking on this Auto button here. So by clicking on it, you can see the instant improvement to the image. It just looks a lot better. The tones look good. The colors look good. It's not stylized. It just looks proper. Now one of the things that always bothered me about this photo is this building in the background. I could crop in, but I actually like this composition. I love the way the bird is positioned over here in the frame, more on the left here. And if I crop in, it'll just lose that. So I want to maintain this resolution and aspect ratio. But I want to get rid of this building. So what I can do is go to the Remove panel here and use the new Generative Remove tool that's in Lightroom. Now by default, you might have these two check boxes disabled, so I recommend turning both of them on. Generative AI will enable the Generative Remove tool. And then Object Aware will allow Lightroom to sample the subject before it actually makes a removal. So what does that mean? Well, I can take a really big brush like this, and just draw around the perimeter of the building and then fill in. And so this is Lightroom saying, "Okay, this is the object that I have detected for removal, which this selection looks great." So I'm going to go ahead and click on Apply.
And right off the bat, this looks fantastic. The building is gone, and what it replaced it with has been blended beautifully. You do have three variations here, so we can go through. This one actually looks really good too. And so does this, but actually I like this second variation. So I'm going to stick with that one. And then the last thing I want to do is apply just a quick stylization preset. Something to give this image a little bit more character. To do that, I'm just going to click on the Preset browser, which is this icon up here. And then you'll see these three tabs. Yours, Premium, and Recommended. Yours is where you'll find any of the presets that you've imported yourself. But I'm going to go to Premium. These presets are included if you're a paying subscriber to Lightroom. And so because this image was taken in the summer, I'll go to this category here called Season Summer. Expand it, and then I can hover over and find a preset that I like. And actually this SM02 looks really nice. So I can click on this here, and then I have this Amount slider. If I bring it to the left, it basically turns off the preset, and then I can also make it stronger if I want to bring it more towards the right. But right around the middle looks really good. And the last thing I want to do is make the bird a little bit brighter. To do that, I'm going to go to the masking panel here, and I'm going to use one of the adaptive masks called Subject. This will tell Lightroom to identify the subject in the image and make a selection around it. So when I click on this, you can see that it has selected the bird perfectly. Now what I can do is open up the exposure a little bit, maybe add some more highlights. And then if I scroll down to the Effects section, I'm going to add a little bit of texture and clarity. And that's all it takes to apply a really great treatment to this photo. If I hit the Backslash key, that was what we started with. And then with just a few clicks really, we were able to get this image. Now the last thing that I might want to do is export this. I want to save this to my external drive so that I can get it ready to share with friends or family or on social media. Well, to do that, all I need to do is click on this Share button here, and you do have options in terms of these custom settings. You can control the type of image you want to output, but I'm just going to go ahead and select JPEG (Large), which gives me plenty of resolution to share wherever I need to. So I'll click on this here, and now I can export this photo to my SanDisk Desk Drive. To start, I'm going to create a new folder here on the drive by clicking on New Folder. I'll call it Exported Photos, then click Create, and then I'll click on Export. Now when I go to my finder here, you can see there is my Desk SSD. If I go to Exported Photos, there is my exported image that I can share with anyone I want. And so that is how I use Lightroom Desktop with my SanDisk Desk Drive to manage, edit, and share all of my photos locally. And now I want to switch gears to a more mobile workflow. So I'm going to start by showing you how to back up your photos from an SD card to an external drive, and then how to import them into Lightroom Mobile so that they can be backed up to the cloud. Let's first look at the hardware involved to create the forms of redundancy with our backups. So I have my photos here on this SanDisk Extreme Pro SD Card, and I want to create a local backup copy onto this SanDisk external SSD drive. Then I want to get a cloud backup of those photos by using Lightroom Mobile. So I want to get the photos from this drive onto my iPhone 15 Pro Max into the Lightroom mobile app, which will then back them up to the cloud. To do that, I'm going to use this hub over here because it has an SD card slot. It also has a few USB ports, and it connects to the iPhone 15 Pro Max using USB-C. Now if you just want to copy your photos from your SD card to the iPhone, you can bypass these and just use a SanDisk external SD card reader, which will allow you to copy the photos to your iPhone. By doing that, you can get them into Lightroom Mobile and then sync them to the cloud. But again, I want to have a local backup copy to this external SanDisk drive, which is what we're going to do first. Now before we dive in, I want to make a point because I'm using an iPhone 15 Pro Max. But this workflow should work the same if you're using an Android phone, for example, so long as the phone has the capability to detect an SD card and an SSD drive. By doing that, you should be able to use whatever native file browser that the phone has to copy the photos from the SD card to the drive. And so I'm going to show you how to do that using iOS. All right. So let's start with creating the local backup copy. To do that, I'm going to launch the Apple Files app, which is right here on the home screen. And the first thing I want you to see is that we have the external SSD drive, which is called Skynet Mobile, and the SD card, which is Untitled. And so I want to copy photos from Untitled to Skynet Mobile. And so I'm going to show you how I do this. Now right off the bat, there are many different ways that you can approach this. This is just how I've found it works for me. So I'll start by going to Untitled here. And then with my Sony camera, the way that it formats the SD card is it puts the photos under DCIM. And then you can see here, there are three folders indicating the dates that I have photos from. So I'm going to focus on the July 19, 2024 folder. And so I know that I want to back up these photos from July 19, 2024. So this is how I'll do it. I'm going to back out here, and I'm going to go to the external SSD drive, and I'm going to create a folder by tapping on the Ellipsis on the top right, and tapping on new folder, and I'm going to call this Photo Backup, and then tap Done. Within here, I'm just going to create another folder, and I'll call this 20240719. And this was around Chicago, I took these photos. So I'm going to type Around Chicago, and tap Done. So now this is the destination folder. Okay. So let's go back to the SD card.
And this is again the folder that I want to back up. The way that I do that is I tap on the ellipsis on the top right again, and I tap on Select, and I start by just tapping on one of the photos. You can see it has a check mark next to it. And then on the top left, we now have the ability to tap on select all. So now all of the photos here are selected. I'll tap on the ellipsis on the bottom right over here, and I'll tap on Copy 231 Items. Now those are in the clipboard. I'll navigate back to my external SanDisk drive. I'll go into Photo Backup, and then I'm going to go here into the folder I created. And then I'm going to tap and hold until this fly-out menu appears, and I'm going to tap on Paste. And now you can see that we are starting to create a local copy from the SD card to the external drive. Now of course, the amount of time that this takes will vary based on the card that you're using, the drive that you're using, and the way that they're all connected together. And just like that, we now have a local backup copy from our SanDisk SD card to our SanDisk external SSD drive. Now I want to get another copy to the cloud. And I'm going to use Lightroom Mobile to do that. And basically, what we'll do is we're going to import the photos that we just backed up to that external SSD drive. We'll import them into Lightroom, and then Lightroom will automatically start backing those up to the cloud. Let me show you how that works. All right, so to start, we're going to tap on Lightroom to launch it. And again, the first thing that I want to do is import the photos into Lightroom so that they'll back up to the Adobe Creative Cloud. Now there are two ways that I can do that because I still have the SD card connected, and I have the external SSD drive. And so the Import button is located on the bottom right. You see that little blue pill to the right, there's a camera icon. And then to the left, that is an add photos icon. So I'm going to tap on that there. And if I want to import from the SD card, I would tap on the bottom here on the Connected Camera/Card. Now the reason why I like this is because it actually breaks down all of the photos by date. So if I wanted to import all of the photos from July 19, which is what we just backed up to the external SSD drive, I can just tap on that, and Lightroom will automatically import those photos. I also want to show you really quickly if you want to import from your external drive, you would tap on Files over here, and then you would back out, you would navigate to the external drive. There is that Photo Backups folder, and then this is the folder that contains the photos we just backed up. So you can tap on this over here to select a single photo, and then tap on Select All on the bottom left over there, and that would import them. But again, I prefer importing from the SD card. I just like the user interface better for that, so I'm going to tap over here, tap on Connected Camera/Card. Let's scroll all the way down until we see July 19, which is here. I'm going to tap on that. You can see that only the photos from that day are selected. If we go to July 20, you'll see that those images are not selected. Now the next thing that we need to do is tell Lightroom where we want to import these photos. So I'm going to tap on All Photos here. I'm going to tap on Existing Album. You can see that I have all of my photos in my Cloud Library broken down by year, so I'm going to tap on 2024. Those photos were taken in July. And now I'm going to tap on the plus icon here to create a new album. I'll call this 20240719-Around...
Chicago, and then tap on OK. We've now created the album. I'm going to tap on Done, and now all I need to do is tap on Import. And just like that, we have now created a secondary cloud-based backup using Lightroom Mobile. I'm going to tap on OK over here, close out of the import screen, and you can see that we have imported 231 photos. If I tap on the cloud icon on the top here, you'll see the status of the imported photos being uploaded to the cloud. Now if I tap on all photos over here, I can scroll down here, tap on 2024, July, and you can see that the photos are being added to this album as they get uploaded to the Adobe Creative Cloud. And the cool thing is that I can edit photos while the cloud backup is taking place. So I can go ahead here and tap on a photo, and tap on Auto. And then I'll tap on the Preset Browser here to apply a black and white preset. And I think this one here looks really good. I'll tap on the thumbnail again to increase the strength of it, and tap the check mark to commit it. So that is how you can optimize your photo storage, whether you're using Lightroom Desktop or Mobile. In the desktop case, I use the SanDisk Desk Drive to manage all of my photos locally. And then in the mobile workflow, I use the combination of SanDisk SD cards and an external SSD drive to ensure that I have both local and cloud-based backups using Lightroom Mobile. I want to thank my friends at Adobe and SanDisk for this opportunity. And of course, I want to thank you for watching. I hope you enjoyed it. [Music]