We live in an era where access to information in data libraries isn’t just easily available online, it’s also packaged quite neatly into apps for your smartphones. Every company and its subsidiary is out to get you to download their app. They don’t just do this in order to give you a more personalized experience; it’s also to get as much information out of you as possible while you use these apps. And I suppose we’ve all become so conditioned to this ideology by now that we hardly give it a second thought. Apps used to just be for applications to run on your phone, but not anymore. We have apps for every company whose websites we used to frequent often to obtain information of various kinds. Be they news sites, social media sites, bank websites, or government websites – they’ve all got their own apps across multiple smartphone OS platforms. So it really does make you wonder when a company that has had an established and functional smartphone (and desktop) app for a very long time, now decides to make all those app features available via a website. Adobe’s Lightroom for the Web has been around for some years now. Does it really do anything different compared to the existing desktop and smartphone apps that Lightroom offers?
Spoiler Alert
It’s not free. Yeah, just because it’s available via a browser doesn’t mean Adobe is going to give you editing tools for free like Snapseed does. I know some of you out there may have had a hint of hope that Adobe finally released a free, albeit curtailed, version of Lightroom for you. Nope, unfortunately not. If anything, they’re increasing their plan prices, something I ranted about not so long ago.
Seasoned Lightroom users know their flavours by now. Adobe segregates its Lightroom tool into two main types – Lightroom Classic (formerly just Lightroom) and Lightroom, both of which are paid. The former is true to its origins, being a pure desktop-based software. All the files you edit via this software, unless synced to your account, reside on your desktop (or attached) hard drive. It is what most professional photographers using Adobe’s Creative Suite use for their primary photography editing needs.
Lightroom (non classic), on the other hand, is an app and web-based, and stores your files on your cloud storage plan. It’s simplified to make it easier for non-professional photographers to perform even powerful edits to their photos, before they find themselves posted on social media channels. To be fair, it does a great job for even pros who find themselves requiring an edit out in the field when they don’t have a laptop or desktop at hand. Sync the photograph from your camera to your smartphone in a second, open up the Lightroom app, and edit away.
Who Would Use Lightroom on the Web?
The good news here is that I can’t see any features present in Lightroom’s app versions being left out of Lightroom for the Web. This can only be a good thing for people who, for whatever reason, decide to edit photos on their browser. I mean, just writing that last sentence made me pause and think – who actually would want to edit their photos on a browser? I can think of at least three kinds of people who might want to:
- People who don’t want to download an app – I know there are tons of folks out there, myself included, who have major issues with not just want information smartphone apps require, but also the data they may or may not send back to servers based on usage of the app (or otherwise). Just take a look at the screenshot below showing the information accessed by Adobe Lightroom on Android. Folks who aren’t techies might not really want to share all of this. Having the edits done on a browser, whether on a desktop, laptop, or smartphone, would mean all this information needn’t necessarily be accessed.
- Photographers who might need to edit on a desktop that doesn’t belong to them, where they can’t download an app. If you’re someone who’s covering an event at a venue where you can’t bring your own devices, but still need to send off a frame or two to your editor urgently, you could log in to Lightroom on the Web and edit these images on a browser, then delete the files off the computer after sending them. You might rightly have concerns over downloading an app and using your Adobe credentials on such computers. There may even be times when permissions applied on such computers don’t allow you to download such apps anyway. Yes, their phone apps could be available, but it’s so much nicer to edit on a larger screen
- Someone who has the apps on their system, but finds that the app is crashing for whatever reason, and really urgently needs to edit their photos, would have a use for this browser-based editing solution.
- Anyone who decides to pigeonhole themselves into using a desktop or laptop that runs a nonmainstream OS (are Linux-based machines still around in 2025?)
What’s Different in Adobe Lightroom for the Web?
If you look at the image comparison tool above, you’ll see that not only do your edits from other Lightroom (nonclassic) versions sync to the web version, but that the web layout itself is pretty much the same as the app version. This is supremely important for Lightroom users as it means they don’t need to familiarise themselves trying to learn a new interface. Also, they can speed up their edits because they know exactly where the sliders they need would be.
This might not be a deal breaker, but when you’re viewing a single image in Lightroom for the web, you can’t see the Photos panel on the left. It’s not like it’s collapsed; you have no option to view it here, unlike in the Lightroom apps, where it’s available to view.
The default image export options in browser-based Lightroom are slightly different. One unique option that I saw was the ability to upload the edited image to your Google Photos account. I even saw an option that said “Expand in Photoshop.” Clicking on this opened the image in a watered-down version of Photoshop on the same browser in a new tab.
Exporting the same edited image in Lightroom for the Web using the quick Export JPG Small option produced a smaller-sized file compared to the same option used in my Mac Lightroom desktop app. That’s because the web browser exported the file at 72dpi by default, while the file from the desktop app came in at 240dpi.
What’s The Same?
Pretty much all the editing tools, keyboard shortcuts, and the overall look and feel, for the most part. You also get to see your synced Lightroom presets, but for some reason, I couldn’t see all of mine in some categories. Also, hovering over the preset won’t show you a preview of how the image would look if you used it; you have to click on the preset name to apply it and see the results.
Just don’t forget one thing – it’s a browser, not an app. Edits don’t happen in real time as you move sliders, you need to wait a second or two for the image to refresh with the edit applied.
When Should You Not Use Lightroom For The Web
My Android smartphone’s Lightroom app comes with a very handy feature. I can restrict full preview downloads of my Lightroom cloud images when I’m not on a Wifi connection. This is extremely handy to prevent the app from eating up data from my monthly limited bandwidth. The browser-based Lightroom has no such feature as far as I could see. In such a scenario, I would suggest going with the smartphone app instead of logging in to Lightroom on your smartphone’s browser. Of course, if your phone is connected to a Wifi connection, it also makes more sense to download the app for a more seamless browsing and editing experience. I’d stick to using Lightroom for the web only on a desktop browser.
Overall Thoughts
This is one of those nice-to-have solutions for me, but it’s not something that I’d lose sleep over if Adobe decided to pull the plug on this project tomorrow. I am far more comfortable using Lightroom’s apps when I need to edit a file on a smartphone
The lead photo in this article is a screenshot of the home page for Adobe Lightroom for the Web