Frame.io's latest update could make it a great tool for photographers

Frame.io, Adobe’s collaborative media management tool, has supported image files for a while, but it’s still mostly thought of as something more for videographers than photographers. That’s likely thanks to long-standing integration with video editing software like Premiere Pro, Final Cut, and Avid Media Composer. And while some stills cameras have been able to upload directly to it and Capture One has had limited support for it for a while, most photographers probably would’ve had a hard time fitting it into their workflow.

That may be changing, though. We got to talk with JJ Powel, Product Marketing Manager for Frame.io at Adobe, about the launch of Frame.io 4, and he demoed some features that could make it quite a bit more useful for photographers.

The service is now officially integrated into Lightroom, which makes its Camera To Cloud feature much more useful; if you have a camera that supports Camera To Cloud, you can take pictures and have them automatically sync to Lightroom over Wi-Fi. Some models can even do it when they’re off, meaning you could come home, set your camera down, and have all your photos available the next time you opened Lightroom, assuming they had enough time to sync.

The S5II is one of the new group of cameras that supports Frame.io’s Camera To Cloud feature. Photo: Richard Butler

“That’s really important because it unlocks powerful workflows in Lightroom,” said Powell. “I can do a Raw default and assign any preset. If I’m uploading Raw and JPEG the JPEG will stay untouched. But the Raw asset, I could say ‘import it as black and white or import using one of the adaptive presets or a preset I already set up.'” Of course, like most Lightroom edits, you can always change the profile or any other settings applied on import after the fact.

“Maybe I’m capturing images out of music festival and I’ve got three cameras going and they’re all going to one editor. They can start pushing assets to social really quick. This is the most seamless path from camera to edit,” said Powell.

The system is also relatively smart. If your sync gets interrupted and you want to bring in your photos the old-fashioned way via an SD card or a USB cable, Lightroom will recognize which ones it got from the cloud and will skip transferring them over, avoiding duplicates.

Frame.io 4 could also make sharing photos with clients or co-workers easier for those who choose to use it. The new Collections feature will likely be familiar to anyone who does a lot of work in Lightroom Classic; it lets you tell Frame.io to gather up all the photos in a project that meet specified criteria, where they can further be organized and sorted based on their metadata. As an easy example, at the beginning of a contract, you could share a collection to a client that only includes images you’ve rated 5 stars. Then, as you sort through your photos and rate them, the ones you mark with 5 stars will automatically become available to whoever you’ve shared the collection with.

Frame.io’s collections feature is similar to Lightroom Classic’s Smart Collections, and can easily be shared with others. Image: Adobe

That’s not to say that every photographer should rush out and start using Frame.io. It shines brightest when you’re using both the Lightroom integration and Camera to Cloud, and the latter is only available in select cameras. Nikon announced that it’s bringing it to the Z6III, Z8, and Z9, and Leica is adding it to the SL3, but those additions still only bring the number of supported stills cameras up to 16. The syncing while off feature also isn’t available on all cameras that support Camera to Cloud.

There’s also the matter of cost. Frame.io for Creative Cloud is included with the All Apps subscription, as well as subscriptions to Premiere Pro and After Effects individually. That gives you 100GB of space and support for up to two users and five projects. However, the Photography bundle and standalone Lightroom subscription don’t include that benefit. You could use the Frame.io free tier, which supports Camera to Cloud but only gives you 2GB of space to use it with, but if you want to be able to sync more than a handful of Raws, you’ll likely have to upgrade to the $15 a month Pro account. That’s more than you’ll pay for Lightroom, though it does come with an arguably overkill 2TB of space and other features.

But if the stars align for you – you have a camera that supports Camera to Cloud, you use Lightroom, and you mainly shoot JPEG or have Creative Cloud All Apps – it may be worth giving Frame.io a shot, even if you’ve never considered it before.

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