How to Resize and Share Photos in Adobe Lightroom Mobile

I often get asked about editing and sharing images from mobile devices. Imagine the scenario: you’ve taken a few photos on your phone and you want to send them to friends and family, but attaching more than half a dozen at original size puts your email above a 20MB limit that many email servers enforce.

Why not resize them, with minimal effort and without importing them into Lightroom? That’s how I like to deal with my mobile phone images.

Here it’s possible to resize using Adobe Lightroom Mobile with the following steps. The screenshots below are from Android on a Samsung; the flow is similar on iOS.

1. Open Lightroom and go to Gallery

• Open Lightroom on mobile.
• Choose Gallery at the bottom. That takes you to images that aren’t in Lightroom’s cloud library — just photos already on the device.

2. Pick a photo from your device

• Browse On Device / Gallery and choose the image you want to share.

3. Make your edits

• Make your edits. Here I’m doing a simple crop on this image from Dalkey, south of Dublin, and its 14th-century castle.
• When you’re finished, tap the tick / checkmark to confirm.

4. Share the edited photo

• In the top right of the image, choose the share symbol.

5. Export as a smaller file

• Choose Export as…
• Adjust options such as image size (here I reduced the long side to 1548px), quality, file type, watermark and Content Credentials. Tap the tick in the top right to save the exported file.

6. Find the resized image in Gallery

The final image is saved and will appear in Gallery on Android — ready for email, messaging or social sharing at a much more practical file size.

Related Lightroom tutorials

• Using Smart Collections to find black and white images in Lightroom Classic
• Finding Previous Import in Adobe Lightroom
• Time-saving export shortcuts in Lightroom Classic
• Rename files on export with custom settings
• Finding missing files and Smart Previews in Lightroom