IOS Photos – can you paste copied photo

There are a few apps around, although I have yet to find the perfect fit.

Sortshots, http://www.sortshots.com/, is one option. You load the photos from Lightroom onto the iPad with the Itunes file sharing feature, and you can then edit metadata on the ipad offline. The results can be sent back to Lightroom by copying the photos out of the iTunes file sharing feature.

The drawback of this workflow is mainly three things: 1) Cumbersome to manually drag and drop photos between iTunes to sync 2) Not good workflow to get metadata back to e.g. Lightroom, as you need to overwrite the old photos with the new edited ones from iPad (if I understood it correctly) 3) If you want the photos to appear in the photos.app, you need to have the same photos twice on the iPad, eating double disk space.

Since you're able to copy the image, open up the Messages-app, open a new message to your own iMessage-address, and paste, then send. You should be able to save the image to the camera roll from there.

On newer iOS like 10 and higher, the ubiquitous share sheet function lets you move documents around so much easier, that third party apps aren't needed for this basic function anymore.