Adobe Lightroom Companion App Photosmith Receives Major Update
Photosmith is a photography app that’s designed to be used in conjunction with popular photo management program Adobe Lightroom. The app, from C Squared Enterprises, syncs flawlessly with Lightroom to make reviewing and sorting photos on the go quick and easy.
We originally reviewed this app in April of last year, and found it to be lacking in a few important features, but the app recently received a major update increasing its functionality and making it the must-have Lightroom companion.
In version 2.0 of this app, the developers completely revamped the interface. I was pleased to find that it’s much quicker to import and edit photos, even those in ultra high resolution. The app was close to sluggish before, but now it’s speedy, which may also be due to the third generation iPad’s improved performance as well.
For those of you unfamiliar with Photosmith, you should know that it’s not a tool for image editing. You can’t adjust exposure, add effects, or manipulate photos. Instead, it’s a photo organization tool that allows you to import photos (RAW or JPEG) directly from your DSLR to your iPad, adding collections, keywords, tagging, filters, and more.
The app syncs up with Lightroom and transfers all of you photo tags to the program when connected to your computer. It used to be a one way transfer, but now the app has two-way transfer functionality between Photosmith and Lightroom. You can import photos from Lightroom to Photosmith for mobile tagging, and with the Photosmith Lightroom Plugin, you can maintain a synchronized collection of photos on both your iPad and your computer.
In the previous version of Photosmith, users were not able to add batch tags to photos, meaning alterations had to be done photo by photo, which was a slow, time consuming process. Batch tagging is a new, much needed feature in Photosmith 2.0, that makes labeling photos much easier.
An Apple Camera Connection Kit used to be necessary to use Photosmith, but thanks to Dropbox support, Eye-Fi support and two-way syncing, that is no longer the case. The developers of Photosmith addressed nearly all of the concerns that I had in my original review, and I’m pleased to say that Photosmith is now an indispensable tool for photographers who use Lightroom.
If you’re a Lightroom user that doesn’t already use Photosmith, I highly recommend checking it out in the App Store. It’s expensive at $19.99, but well worth the cost, especially with all of the newly added features.
