Today, for World Photography Day, Adobe is announcing that Lightroom will have direct integration with Frame.io, making it much easier to send files to your photo clients. What’s more, it can all be done automatically. When you pair your camera to a Frame.io project, then connect it to Lightroom. From there, your images will appear in Lightroom. Sure, this is a useful feature. But it’s also ultimately the same as wireless tethering — and it’s going to need a lot of battery life. Adobe’s Forums show that brands like Getty have been widely trying to adopt a workflow like this.
The demo we’ve seen shows off this feature to work with Lightroom, but it didn’t show us anything with Lightroom Classic. If it isn’t available already, we’re sure it’s bound to come someday. As it is, a bunch of Fujifilm cameras and a few Panasonic Lumix cameras have the Frame.IO capabilities. One of those cameras is the Panasonic S5 II — which a low-key sleeper beast of a camera these days for a great price.
If you’re an Adobe user, this is a nice extra benefit. Frame.IO is free for up to two projects and 2GB of storage. But after that, it scales up to $15/month per user with 2TB of storage. That’s a lot of storage, though if it isn’t cleared out often, it can be eaten up.
At the moment, Frame.IO has integrations with Creative Cloud and Final Cut Pro. There is even Capture One Pro integration for people who have moved away from Adobe due to all of the AI issues. As a quick aside, our paid-membership users get a 20% discount on Capture One for only $25 a year.
We hope this means that more camera brands start actually integrating these features. From what we know, Sony, Nikon, and Canon have yet to get fuller integration into the system. Some brands have workarounds with their apps and such.
Frame.Io is a great tool for photographers working out in the field who have tight deadlines. It’s incredible for journalists, promotional photographers, commercial photographers, agencies, etc.
But at the same time, I think we also need to all agree that the industry is probably about to get even more toxic on deadlines and demanding that things get done now. And it’s going to be up to photographers to collectively put up work/life balance boundaries. In the retouching world, lots of things need to be done now and immediately. There often isn’t a lot of wiggle room for people to have breaks — especially if you’re freelancing.
Because so many brands are trying to get on to using Frame.io, we should expect to see even more support for it to come in the future with camera brand announcements. Perhaps this will determine whether or not someone upgrades to a camera. It’s really nice to have Fujifilm GFX series cameras have Frame.IO integration. Even the X100Vi has it.