KLCC Twin Towers, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
One of the new features that came along with Lightroom 3 was the Publishing Services panel in the Library module. Essentially, it allows for a direct connection between images in your Lightroom catalog and various photo-sharign and social media websites, as well as local hard drives. When Lightroom 3 was first released, your local hard drive and Flcikr were the only two included options but the recent update to Lightroom 3.2 adds Facebook and SmugMug to that list.
Publishing Services is found in the Library module, towards the left of the window. You can see in the screenshot below that there are currently four options. To start, you need to set them up by authorizing the application to share data back and forth between it and Lightroom. It’s a pretty self-explanatory process and dialog boxes open to guide you through it step by step.
Four options so far.
Once you’ve authorized the application, you’ll want to create a publish connection. This is a series of settings that will be applied to any photographs you send to the website. Common options include resizing, watermarks, which album or set to upload to, image title and so forth. Set these up for each publishing service you want to connect to. If you click on the + icon in the panel, you’ll have the option to edit the various settings anytime you want.
Each publishing services destination allows you to choose between creating a folder/collection/photoset/gallery (respectively for each service) or a smart folder/collection/photoset/gallery. What’s the difference between a collection and a smart collection (folder/photoset/gallery)? Simply put, a smart collection is a collection that is based upon user-defined metadata and will automatically include all photos that match the criteria. For example, you may set a smart collection to be all flagged photos or all of a certain label color. At the moment, publishing to harddrive also allows a folder set which is a group of publish collections and SmugMug allows a Category which is a group of SmugMug collections. I’m not a SmugMug user so I’m not too familiar with how that works however.
To add photos to any of the publish collections, simply drag them from the grid view (G) in the library module to the relevant publish service. As you can see below, you’ll end with with a display showing New Photos to Publish, Modified Photos to Republish and Published Photos. New Photos are images that haven’t been exported yet, Modified are photos that have been changed in Lightroom since the last export and Published are the ones still in the same state. There’s also a Delete category should you choose to delete any. All you need to do to publish, republish or delete is click the Publish button in the upper right corner of the display window. The two way connection means that photographs you republish with changes will be reflected with those changes on the website. It’s important to note that it doesn’t mean you’ll get multiple versions of the photograph online.
Publish window.
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