How to Boost Your Mobile Photography Workflow

Since we last visited this topic a year ago, phone cameras have become even better, and more options have become available for shooting with them. We’ll take you through some of the biggest changes and give you tips on new ways to capture, process, and store your images and videos.

Capture: Should You Rely on Your Phone’s Camera App?

Of course, standalone apps often have their own version of these features. So, for example, if you have a phone without a built-in night mode, using an app like A Better Camera will equip you with one.

The wide-angle camera on the Huawei Mate 20 Pro makes a big difference when it comes to taking in the broad expanse of outdoor scenes like this wave in the Valley of Fire State Park.

Capture: Should You Shoot RAW or JPEG?

Conventional wisdom dictates that for best results, shooting in RAW format (which means DNG for just about all phone cameras) and performing custom post-processing is the way to go. For standalone cameras that rely on single-capture images, that’s basically still the case. However, phone cameras have thrown us a curve ball, with sophisticated computational imaging that combines multiple captures to create a better image.

As an extreme example, Google’s Night Sight and Huawei’s Night Mode take many captures over the period of a few seconds to create an impressive final image even in low light. There isn’t any way to replicate that effect by shooting a RAW image and post-processing. (Of course, you could try and shoot a burst of images, and do all the AI-based alignment and color matching they do after the fact, but it might take you most of the day.) Even fairly standard captures in good light benefit from the built-in multi-capture technology loosely described as HDR.

Conveniently, most camera apps turn off RAW when you switch to their specialized modes that require multi-capture processing, as those modes usually only output JPEGs. So I typically leave my camera apps set to capture RAW (or both RAW and JPEG if that is supported) to make the most of times when I’m just shooting a conventional image. For quick sharing, that’s overkill; all you need is the JPEG, of course.

This image from a slot canyon in the Valley of Fire conveys scale but isn’t much good as a portrait.

With a simple tap of the Zoom icon, the 3x Zoom camera on the Huawei Mate 20 Pro turns the scene into an environmental portrait.

Processing Images on the Go

Even with a wide-angle camera, sometimes Panorama mode is needed. Flagship phones now do an excellent job of automatically capturing and stitching scenes.

Syncing Photos to the Cloud

It’s easy to forget how many images start to pile up on your phone, and how upset you’d be if they were all suddenly lost or deleted. Fortunately, it’s almost as easy to back them up to your favorite cloud service. Google Photos is by far the most popular, with unlimited free storage of images and videos in reasonable quality. Photos are down-sampled to 12MP if needed, and are re-compressed to save space. Videos are down-sampled to 1080p if needed.

With Google Photos, like iCloud, Amazon Photos, Adobe Cloud, and others, you can of course store original images as long as you pay for the storage space — which averages about $100 per year per terabyte. Amazon Photos also offers unlimited photo storage for Prime members. In my case, I have all my phones set to backup in original quality to Google Photos. Since I’m just using it for my phone photos (and not my main image archive) I can get by with a relatively small and inexpensive amount of storage. Plus, my Pixel photos don’t count against the total.

In addition to taking competent images under a variety of conditions, Google’s Pixel 3 comes with unlimited photo storage.

Creating a Smart Local Photo Archive

While it is unlikely that any of the major cloud vendors will disappear anytime soon, plenty of photo sharing sites have — sometimes taking user content with them. Personally, I’m more comfortable always having my own backups of my images. I’ve written about how I do that for my main photo archive, which mostly starts when an SD card is unloaded. But for mobile, manually transferring images is unnecessarily painful.

Fortunately, there are a few ways to have automated backup to your local archive. Lightroom users have this capability already built in. If you turn on automatic import of images on your phone, they will be pulled into Lightroom Mobile and synced to your desktop catalog (once you enable syncing, of course).

Synology Moments will recognize and tag common objects but you can see from these examples that it isn’t perfect

While I do use Lightroom, I don’t want to rely entirely on it snaring every single image, so I use two other systems to create copies of my phone photos. The first is a Cloud Sync task on one of our Synology NAS units that pulls all of my Google Photo contents down from the cloud and stores them in my main local photo library (which I think periodically resync with Lightroom Classic). That’s fairly easy to set up as long as you tell Google Photos that you want your photos to be a folder within your Google Drive. You can then tell Cloud Sync to pull that folder and put it somewhere local. Remember, though, that if you set it up as a two-way sync, images you delete from Photos will also be deleted from your local machine.

[Image Credit: David Cardinal]