Lightroom Android Mobile to Windows Bridge/ACR workflow?

[Redcrown]

Need help understanding Lightroom Mobile workflow.

My Windows laptop is reaching end-of-life, so I'm considering switching to an Android tablet (Samsung S10 Ultra) and using Lightroom Mobile for my travels. I'm a Bridge+ACR+Photoshop user. I have Windows Lightroom installed, but barely use it. So I installed Lightroom Mobile on my mid-range Samsung phone to test. Confusion set in, and Google/YouTube is not much help.

What is the workflow? I want to shoot all day. Then move raw images from my in-camera 32GB cards to my Terabyte USB hard drive. Then import into Lightroom Mobile. Then do some basic edits. Then come home and move everything to my mega desktop. Then continue editing to finished Tifs/Jpegs using Bridge/ACR/Photoshop.

I moved 1 Canon CR3 file and 1 Sony ARW file to my phone using Samsung Flow to drag and drop from the desktop. The Sony ARW shows up in the Gallery and I can edit it. The Canon CR3 does not. Google confirms that Canon Raw is not supported by Android but there are maybe workarounds.

So any advice, pointers to websites or YouTubes that might explain a workflow?

[Redcrown]

OK, nobody here does Lightroom Mobile on Android. So I wasted considerable time getting self taught. Al least now I know why nobody does it. It really sucks.

First step, I had to install an Android 3rd party file manager to copy from a camera card reader to the Android device. The native Android file manager can't do it. Then another 3rd party app to rename the files on the Android device. Couldn't find a file manager to do both.

Then I had to select the renamed raw files using the 3rd party file manager, and "Share" them with Lightroom. That's how import works. You can't import inside Lightroom. The direct "add" function in Lightroom Mobile won't look anywhere but the Gallery. It seems Lightroom Mobile is focused only on images you take with the device that go straight to Gallery.

But then the kiss-of-death. Lightroom Mobile copies the full sized original raw files to the cloud. It won't use the raw files on the Andriod device like Lightroom Classic does on Windows. I guess a should not have been surprised by that, but I was. Naivety on my part. Not too bad at home with my fast Wifi and gigabit internet, but imagine doing that in a motel in Bum Stop, Montana, or Snowera, Italy. And image doing that on a 2 to 3 week trip, 200+ raw files a day from a 50 megapixel full-frame camera. Probably blow through Adobe's 20 Gig freebe cloud storage pretty quick, while a 128 gig SD card in the Android gets wasted.

I gave up before I tried to figure out how to transfer everything from Android to Windows back home. But I suspect that can't be done. I expected to move the catalog, move the raw files, open the catalog in Lightroom Classic and link it to the raw files. I don't see a Lightroom "catalog" anywhere on Android or in the cloud.

[wcarlew]

I agree that LR on Android is less than optimal, I've been using it on a Samsung S8 tablet and Oneplus 13.  I import the raw files individually via Sony's Creative Cloud (wireless or via usbc cable).  LR Mobile will automatically import them, I do some basic editing and export as a jpg.  I have syncing to the Adobe cloud off at all times. Once finished with the edit I delete the raw to save space.  As you noted there is no catalog to sync with a computer that has LR Classic. Also, the mobile app lacks some of the masking features ( intersect, object selection are 2).
I will replace the tablet eventually with a laptop that can handle LR Classic, but for now this works when I have limited internet or access to LR Classic.