Every year, when Apple releases a new phone, it’s faster, lighter, has better battery life, and the ergonomics change just subtly enough so that at least a new case is in order. We all know the drill of “announcing iPhone 62!” I’ve never paid much attention to the phone’s details year to year as it generally just works. All my apps load and seem reasonably fast, so it’s never been necessary to actually spec the phone to see if it’s worth the upgrade. I give Apple major kudos here. 

This year, I appreciated the 5X optical zoom added to the iPhone 16 camera, but it wasn’t enough to get me to upgrade. I generally upgrade every three years for the model with the least storage. I mean, who puts more than 256 gigs on their phone? That’s a lot of pictures, movies, and other self-created content. I don’t even know how to use a terabyte on my phone!

Until now.

I’ve recently started bringing an SLR camera on trips. It’s big, bulky, and has all the problems people complain about SLR cameras. That being said, it can take some really fantastic photos with incredible resolution that look great in large format. iPhone photos are picture-rich and pixel-poor. Phones are great for taking pictures to share online. Still, they show their weakness in large format and print (unless you’re Apple with a photo that goes on a billboard next to the freeway, noting “shot with an iPhone“). 

My problem with the SLR camera is that it takes a long time to process the photos. I need to get home, load the photos on my PC, do my edits, and publish. With a busy life, sometimes that can take weeks. Sometimes, I want to quickly send one or two pictures to people close to me to share the moments. I could undoubtedly send iPhone pictures, but I’d rather do the incremental work to send a great photo from the SLR camera.

Enter Lightroom Mobile’s coming-of-age!

I’ve always appreciated Adobe products. They are the gold standard when it comes to anything creative. The transition from desktop apps to Creative Cloud has been outstanding, but it hasn’t been without its bumps.

Many know and love the existing Lightroom Classic app. The transition didn’t seem smooth when Adobe introduced Lightroom Cloud and the various mobile apps. Most of us didn’t want to upload all of our photos to the Adobe cloud. I eventually came to a place where I would still use Lightroom Classic, upload the images I tried to edit to the Adobe Cloud, and then remove them when I was done.

Meet the game changer: an SD card reader!

On this trip, I wanted to back up and work on my photos. The rental bike had far less storage space than at home, so the laptop couldn’t come with me. I did some research and found an SD card reader for the iPhone. I can then upload my photos to iCloud or Adobe Cloud. loading my photos on the phone meant that I had a backup with either cloud. Adobe cloud meant I could edit photos quickly. I wholeheartedly recommend: make sure you get a card reader that can pass through power. you will want to charge and download at the same time.

No hotel was going to let me upload gigabytes of photos overnight, so using the phone’s internal storage was all I was able to achieve on the road. However, this little card reader has changed how I see my phone.

As mentioned above, I never really pushed my phone all that hard. I run one app at a time and have a few listening for Bluetooth commands in the background. Most of the 250 GB lay fallow. 

However, I’m pushing 30 to 50 gigs of photographs per night into the phone on this trip. This iPhone 13 is somewhat keeping up, but I can feel the phone working as it gets demonstrably warm. To stress test it, I imported 100 GB of photos into the phone, which took about 90 minutes. with each press of the shutter recording 50 MB of data, the totals add up quickly The phone is definitely power-hungry. This is my third charge on my off day, and it’s not even 9 o’clock.

Adobe has brought most of the capabilities from Lightroom Classic into the cloud version—with a few new extras not available in Classic. Adobe is trialing a new feature that automatically senses things in your photograph and suggests filters to optimize the photographer‘s workflow. I found that it did reasonably well in getting the basics in early testing. However, I still want to dial in many aspects of my finished product. The automatic selection in photographs is pretty awesome in addition to the generative remove. 

Lightroom Mobile also supports resizing photos suitable for email, blogs, and texting, reducing the amount of storage for messaging apps (as every message with a photo is either stored locally or within iCloud).

I’m still holding my iPhone 13 – but now that I can be 75% productive with Lightroom, it’s worth looking at the CPU and storage options available in the fall. I may spring for the terabyte dash. Oh, who are we kidding? It will probably take one or two phone upgrades to get there.

If you’ve read this far, leave me a comment. How much storage do you have on your phone? Have you ever felt the limits of the CPU before?