Lightroom recognizes non-destructive crops made on iOS 5 (and keeps the original image).

Last Saturday I took some photos with my new iPhone 4S. I had cropped one of them to edit it in Instagram, mostly to try the editing features of the Photo app. When I got home, I imported the photos to Lightroom. It was a bit of a surprise to find out that iOS not only does non-destructive editing, but it actually passes the changes to Lightroom, allowing you to have the original image intact. Here’s how to do it.

Choose a photo on your iPhone, crop it however you like and save it:

Import the image into Lightroom. The import screen shows a thumbnail of the original, uncropped image.

It gets cropped as soon as the importing is finished.

Choose the crop tool in Lightroom and… Voilà! Here’s the entire image.