Importing from Lightroom CC: the OAuth-powered shortcut

Most photographers we talk to do their image work in Lightroom — Classic for catalog management, CC for the cloud sync. The Fotofolio integration is for the CC side. It connects to your Adobe ID via OAuth and lets you browse your synced catalog from inside Fotofolio.

What it does

• Connect once. One Adobe OAuth dance and we hold an encrypted refresh token so subsequent visits don't re-auth.
• Browse your catalog. Albums, collections, and individual assets show up in a Fotofolio panel. Thumbnails come from Adobe's CDN — fast.
• Import. Pick the photos you want. We download Adobe's 2048-pixel rendition, push it to S3 under your owner prefix, and generate the WebP variants (thumb / medium / large) that the rest of Fotofolio uses.
• Pick the destination album — existing or new.

Setup

1. Fotofolio dashboard → My Studio → Edit images → Lightroom.
2. Click Connect Adobe. Adobe's OAuth screen opens.
3. Sign in with the Adobe ID that owns the Lightroom catalog you care about.
4. Grant the requested scopes: openid + lightroom_partner_api. We don't ask for anything beyond what we need to read your catalog.
5. You land back on Fotofolio with your account name shown — ready to browse.

Why CC and not Classic

Lightroom Classic lives entirely on your hard drive — there's no public API for it. To integrate with Classic we'd need to ship a desktop helper that reads the catalog file locally. That's the same shape as the Watch Folder helper, but more brittle (Adobe doesn't commit to the Classic catalog schema). For now, if you live in Classic only, the workflow is: export from Classic to a folder our Watch Folder helper watches, and that folder auto-uploads to your Fotofolio album.

Which rendition we pull

Adobe's API offers several rendition sizes. We default to 2048 on the long edge, which:

• Looks identical to your edit on retina laptop + 4K monitor displays.
• Is small enough to be fast (a few hundred KB per image rather than tens of MB).
• Matches what most photographers ship as a portfolio rendition anyway.

If you specifically need to import the original (e.g. for a print delivery), use the Watch Folder route — Lightroom Classic exports the original, the folder picks it up.

Token refresh + revocation

Adobe's access tokens expire every few hours. We refresh them automatically near expiry using your refresh token. The refresh token itself is encrypted at rest in our DB (AES-256, key in env var).

If you ever want to revoke the connection: Fotofolio dashboard → Lightroom → Disconnect. We delete our copy of your tokens and also revoke them with Adobe so they stop working everywhere. You can re-connect any time.

Gotchas

• Lightroom for mobile counts. If you shoot to a CC-synced Lightroom on phone, those photos show up in the catalog you can browse.
• Smart previews aren't the same as renditions. If a photo is "smart preview only" in your catalog, the 2048 rendition might be lower-quality. Browse and import after a sync, not during one.
• One Adobe ID at a time. Multi-account users: disconnect, reconnect with the other ID. We're considering supporting multiple connections per user but no real customer has asked yet.