Got an iPhone (or iPod Touch)? Looking for a quick way to take your favorite photos with you? Follow along with this demo:

Step 1: Choose the photos you want to export. Ideally, put them in a collection so you can update this later. A keyword or folder will work too.

Here, I’ve chosen a collection with 24 photos of my baby daughter.

Step 2: Select all photos (Ctrl-A / Command-A) and go to the Export Dialog (Ctrl-Shift-E / Command-Shift-E). The export dialog should look something like this…

The important things to note here:

• If you have multiple collections to export to your phone, they all have to go in the same root folder. (In my case, I’m using a folder called “iPhone” under my standard “Pictures” folder, but they could really be anywhere.)
• The name of the folder you give underneath that common folder is the name you’ll see in the Photos application on your phone.

The exact settings for JPEG quality, size, etc., are up to you. The phone will do a fine job of scaling the photos. All you’re deciding with the size of the “long edge” setting is how much you can zoom the photo. I don’t tend to do a lot of zooming, so 500 480 pixels (slightly larger than the iPhone screen) seems just fine. (Update, January 15: See comments below. Changing this to 480px since iTunes does that anyway.)

If you want to save yourself some typing and clicking, I’ve included an export template you can use. Right-click on this file: iphone-demo.lrtemplate and save it to your Export Presets folder. If you’re not sure where that is, right-click on any existing template in your Export Dialog and select Show in Finder or Show in Explorer.

Important: When using this template, be sure to change the Folder and Put in Subfolder items in the dialog.

Once you’ve done that, click the Export button, and wait for Lightroom to finish.

Step 3: Set up to sync in iTunes

You only have to do this step once. iTunes will remember these settings, so starting from the second time you do this, you can skip ahead to Step 4.

Plug your iPhone into your computer. Make sure iTunes is running.

Click on your phone’s entry in the panel on the left, then click on the Photos tab, as shown here.

Click “Sync photos from…” and then choose “Choose folder …” in the popup menu, as shown here:

When you are asked to identify a folder, you should choose the same folder you chose in Lightroom in the “Folder:” popup. (In my example, this was ~/Pictures/iPhone.)

Once you do this, you should see the names of all of the folders immediately underneath that folder, and the number of photos in each. If not, you probably found the wrong folder; if so, proceed to …

Step 4: Sync in iTunes

Once you’ve set up the sync (a one-time thing), you can just sync your iPhone the same way you normally do to get new music, videos, etc., onto the phone.

That’s all … hope this was helpful!