Lightroom Mobile, iPad and RAW

Suppose you have shot some photos in RAW, that you uploaded to your iPad through the camera connection kit. Lightroom Mobile can import images from the Camera Roll, but not RAW images. Even Adobe says so in their Lightroom blog. But now it turns out this isn’t true…

If you ask Lightroom Mobile to import the images from the Camera Roll, it simply will not show the RAW images at all. That confirms it cannot be done, so it seems. But here’s the trick. Make an edit on the RAW file in Apple Photos. Any edit will do. Now try to import the image again in Lightroom Mobile.

The RAW image will now show, and import perfectly. And it will sync perfectly with Lightroom desktop through the cloud! Edits in Lightroom Mobile will sync too (the edit you made in Apple Photos won’t carry over, that’s why any edit will do). 

So there you have it: full RAW support in Lightroom Mobile on the iPad, that even Adobe doesn’t know (or doesn’t want to tell you).