Adobe Working on Lightroom App for Apple’s iPad

[UPDATE (May 2013) – The release of a Lightroom iPad app came much closer to reality today!]

[UPDATE (April 2014) – The new Lightroom Mobile app for iPad is out today!]

The buzz is building that Adobe is hard at work on a new version of Lightroom custom-built for Apple’s iPad… In his blog review of the iPad Camera Connection Kit in late April, Adobe’s Terry White dropped the following hint:

I know what you’re thinking: Wouldn’t it be cool if we had Lightroom for the iPad? All I can say on that one is…… ;)

Then a week ago, Photoshop’s Principal Product Manager John Nack penned a post entitled, “Of Lightroom, iPads, and muffins,” where he talked about “building a great iPad app for mobile photo review, editing, and sharing” – and welcomed feedback on photography workflow apps generally, either LR or non-LR.

Finally this week Terry White echoed similar sentiments, asking, “what people might want in an Lightroom-type app for the iPad?” He goes on to outline a couple different options for how to adapt Lightroom and its five modules to work best on the iPad, and again requests reader input and comments. But he finishes with the following caveat:

By the way, there are no promises here. There are lots of technical limitations to overcome and even then if such an app were to be built, it would still have to be approved by Apple. So keep that in mind. For those of you thinking, “how hard can it be?” you might want to take a look at this post.

So it’s clear now there is definitely work going on to build a version of Lightroom for the iPad – but the question remains as to if and how it can be done, and what it would cost… If you have thoughts on the matter or ideas on how you’d like the potential product to work, please feel free to share them by commenting on one of the two Adobe posts mentioned above, either via John Nack or Terry White.