Lightroom - Managing Your Web Presence

One new feature that has appeared in Lightroom is it's ability to publish to the web via Facebook, Flickr and SmugMug. There is a plugin for Zenfolio and I'm sure there will be more support for other systems as time goes along.

With this feature Lightroom becomes your portal (window) on to these sites. Previously we talked about 'collections' which are logical folders that hold icons that point to you photographs. Collections can be based around a “Star Rating System” or any number of other attibutes that you assign to your photographs. Collections allow you another way to manage your photographs. Your window into Facebook, Flickr, etc. is just another collection. When you drag and drop a photograph to the Flickr collection, for example, it is ready to post with the click of a button.

Another neat thing is that any comments made about your photograph on Flickr show up in the Flickr collection associated with that particular photograph. You can communicate back to the commentor on Flickr right from Lightroom. Now not only is Lightroom a great tool to manage your photographs locally but it manages your web presence on any of the above mentioned sites.

The local Flickr collection in Lightroom is a group in Flickr. So I created a “Junior Olympics” collection in Lightroom and as I place photographs into that collection it is published as a “Junior Olympics” group on Flicr.

Any modifications you do to any of your photographs that are in the Flickr collection (any of the systems) will be reflected on the site too.  So if you change the name of a photograph or modify it in any way, it will be set to republish.

As an example of how this interaction occurs the associated photograph in this blog shows a snap shot of two photographs on a Flickr account in Lightroom that I created years ago. at http://www.Flickr.com/tejmpi. Both of these photographs are up there in the Junior Olympics group.

Setting up Lightroom for one of these sites is quite easy. Right click on the collection (The above mentioned sites are in the system by default, all but the Zenfolio plugin) and you'll see the setup button. Fill in the attributes that you want Lightroom to do when publishing, such as size, copyright, etc. and then login (a button on the setup page... assuming here you've created an account first). Answer a few questions from your site to make sure you are who you say you are and you are done.

Explore this feature, it really is neat.  

Now we need a plugin for 'SquareSpace'!