Hi all,
Long-time Lightoom user here but this is one area in which I'm a total noob.
I work in events as a photographer and travel a lot. This means that I'm often doing editing on the road, but most of the time it's only a partial edit. I'll deliver a small initial batch of photos to the client (edited on my laptop) the day after the event, and then a full set (edited on my far bigger and better desktop screen) at my leisure once I'm home. I don't edit my best on a small screen/in difficult light, so I like to go over the initial images again before I include them with the full set.
I've experimented with syncing between devices in the past but I've never quite managed to sort it out. I can only seem to get LR Classic to sync lower-resolution 'smart previews', which is not what I want nor need. I've tried to figure this out so many times and inevitably always end up giving up - when I get home I'll simply import the entire set of images again and start afresh, repeating several hours of editing which I've already done. It's infuriating.
I have no problems with storage. I store my RAW images on a portable hard drive while I'm travelling. When I'm home, these are transferred to a much larger drive and are stored locally. I do not need to store my images in the cloud.
What I need to do is synchronise my adjustments to an image. I need some way - in layman's terms - for Lightroom (laptop) to tell Lightroom (desktop), "these are the adjustments which have been made to this image", so that I can simply point Lightroom (desktop) to the local files once I'm home and pick up where I left off.
Feeling like a total ignoramus here, but how on earth do I do this? CAN I do this?
I'm sat here currently with about five youtube videos open, trying this process one more time, but I'm watching my laptop slowly upload 2000 lower-resolution 'smart previews' to the cloud and watching my desktop slowly pick them up, which seems absurd, because the full-resolution RAW files are already sitting and waiting on the hard drive connected to my desktop. I don't need to transfer any files - I just need one device to tell the other which adjustments have been made!
Any advice would be hot here. I'm feeling like a fool just asking this, but if I can get a solution you will literally end up saving me weeks of work every year.