Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Adobe Lightroom Q&A => Topic started by: Josh-H on September 01, 2010, 07:16:44 am
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I was seriously dubious and doubtful about the viability and usefulness of the new publishing services in Lightroom 3.0 / 3.2 -but I have to say, after playing around with the Facebook publishing service and 'publish to disk' services that I am very impressed. 'One-click' web publishing really is a joy. On top of that... the ability the manage what content is online from within LR is a pleasure - especially without having to spawn off a new copy to do so.
Kudos to Adobe for seeing the market and need for this.
One suggested improvement - I would really like the ability to be able to apply a 'droplet' to a file before it is published from within the publish services (Like I can on export). As an example: If I want to publish a file to Facebook that has a lot of green in it - typically the file would be greatly helped by a +10 saturation in PS to compensate for conversion from pro photo to srgb. If I could apply this as a droplet as part of the publish feature it would be great.
I can see Publish services becoming a major part of the Library module - and not just for annoyances such as Face Book. The potential for managing what content is sent to what client is huge.
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I wholeheartedly concur - Publish is a killer feature of LR3 for me, along with lens calibration and improved IQ. It doesn't get nearly the publicity it deserves. Here what I do with it for those who haven't taken a closer look at it:
I have 7 Publish services:
- Online service for Flickr. I've set it up to automatically resize and apply a watermark. Flickr automatically parses the photo name and caption if present, as well as geotagging. It even fetches comments others have made on your published photos from Flickr.
- HDD for my own site and my mother's, resizes and adds watermark, puts them to proper folder structure
- HDD for my site's thumbnails
- HDD for streaming photos to PS3 for viewing them on a projector, large size
- HDD for my portable devices, small size
So you can see why I love Publish - earlier I had to run all of those separately as export runs.
Love the ability to have multiple different ways to format the output, from sizing to filenaming. I have setup smart publish folders which pick images from my collection based on keywords. I'm thinking of trying FTP publishing for my site now that I know they are reliable, but I don't think the output folder options are sophisticated enough for my needs. I have thumbnails in a child directory under each country folder, and it looks like I can't have nested publish folders with different output options.
Feature request: a button to Publish All, which would run every single publishing service without having to do them all one-by-one. There's also a bug with Flickr service: it doesn't always delete photos from Flickr which I have deleted from my local Flickr Publish service and/or publishes photos twice if I re-publish it. Josh's idea of droplets or PS-like actions on publish is a good one as well, if it allows for various global editing tasks specific to the needs of a particular destination.
Oh and a bonus feature request for native support for geotagging via GPS, Google Earth or at least entering coordinates!
My man gripe is that you can't change the HDD publish folder after setting it up, which I'm sure will be changed soon. I wonder what happens when I need to move content around or move to another computer...
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I too have been playing with publish services and also see the benefit this offers. I've been searching for a web site template that is integrated with publish services where I can manage images within LR but have them display on a website when published. Has a third party created a plug-in to do this?
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I guess it depends on your template ;)
I mean… I use SmugMug, and you can tweak/tailor your galleries (lo, the entire site, if you want to get down and dirty), and so it does _exactly_ this, with LR 3.2. It's the bomb diggety.
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Thanks for the recommendation CatOne. I always thought Smugmug was similar to Flickr. I'm going to test out this service and I expect to get very dirty in the process.
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Can someone enlighten me as to what is the difference/advantage of Publish vs. Export presets?
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Can someone enlighten me as to what is the difference/advantage of Publish vs. Export presets?
HUGE :P That's exactly the question I had before trying them out. The main difference is that it takes care of managing your site or Flickr account. You can set all your photos tagged "Flickr" * to be Published to Flickr. Then when you click on Publish it will send them automatically to Flickr, applying the Title and Caption field (if set). Then the magic part: if you make any changes to the photo or its metadata, and click on Publish again, it will update that photo for you on Flickr.
LR will also notice when you add a new photo with Flickr tag, or make any changes to existing photos, and mark them as "new photos to publish" or "modified photos to republish," and these will be done in a batch when you click on Publish.
So there's no more need to figure out which photos you have changed, when you last updated your Flickr/website, or play with messy presets, it's all done automatically by LR. I thought it was easy just to use my export reset to send all new photos to my site, but it's much easier just to tag them with "site" and click on Publish. It'll also republish them with one click if I ever choose to go for bigger photos (ie. when people's monitors start being more than 700 or so pixels high), or make any other changes to export settings, such as watermark, or make global changes to the photos.
* you can set this to any keyword, of course, or any other filters that can be set with smart collections. For example, I have set the photos going to my website as "keyword has [country] in it," "keyword starts with Harri" and "Copy Name is not thumbnail" - this way it groups all my photos from the Netherlands in one folder, Finland in another, etc., includes only photos which I have tagged as going to my site, and excludes square thumbnails which I have in my collection as virtual copies.
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I have downloaded
http://www.photographers-toolbox.com/products/ftppublisher.php
for publishing to my website, it seems to work, though I am only just starting to use it.
My question is
when you have all these publish services set up, can you easily transfer them between catalogs, if so how?
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No, not easily. You're generally better off
not using a single catalogue and not fragmenting control of your pictures.
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No, not easily. You're generally better off not using a single catalogue and not fragmenting control of your pictures.
John
I am confused with your second sentence do you mean that you are 'better off using a single catalogue' ie no 'not'?
Regards
Nigel
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John
I am confused with your second sentence do you mean that you are 'better off using a single catalogue' ie no 'not'?
Regards
Nigel
I'm not surprised you're confused :-[ Yes, I meant 'better off using a single catalogue'.
John
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I didn't think there was.
I tend to have a catalog per year, as I have a slowish PC. Maybe time for a rethink on the way I use the catalog, and on buying a new PC>
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You'd be surprised at some of the dumb advice out there!
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The other reason I have tended to keep pre-2009 images in a seperate catalog is that since last year I have used the heirarchy for keywords and prior to that I didn't, and if I put them into one I am sure they will be all over the place.
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Could you please be a little more specific about how you " add a new photo with Flickr tag, or make any changes to existing photos, and mark them as "new photos to publish" or "modified photos to republish," and these will be done in a batch when you click on Publish." Not sure what you mean by "tag" and marking "new photos to publish". Sounds like something I would like to set up, but I don't grasp how you are doing all this.
Jonathan
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Could you please be a little more specific about how you " add a new photo with Flickr tag, or make any changes to existing photos, and mark them as "new photos to publish" or "modified photos to republish," and these will be done in a batch when you click on Publish." Not sure what you mean by "tag" and marking "new photos to publish". Sounds like something I would like to set up, but I don't grasp how you are doing all this.
Well, let's see...
1) You create a Smart Collection within your publish service and have it look for images with the tag 'Flickr'. Any images with that tag will automatically be added to the collection. Alternately you can use a standard collection and just add images manually.
2) One of the differences between 'publish' and 'export' is that having images in a publish service sets up a dynamic link between LR and the publish service (Flickr in this case). Therefore, LR knows which images have been published and which haven't, and if you make any changes (develop, metadata, keywords, etc.) to an image, LR knows that it's been changed and marks it to republish. You can also right-click on an image within the collection and select 'mark to republish'.
Once you have images in your publish service you can either right-click on the collection and select 'Publish', or click the 'Publish' button at the TR of the Lightroom window.
Mike.
P.S. Speaking for myself, I had a lot of problems with LR 3's publish to Flickr service. It would upload changed images as new images instead of overwriting existing ones, and would 'spontaneously' choose images to republish even though I hadn't changed anything. I finally went with Jeffrey Friedl's Flickr plugin for LR3 (http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/flickr) and it works great for me. It's donationware, but worth it for me.
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I'm in LR now and do see that within the Publish Service (Flickr) I can create a "Smart Photoset" which seems to be the same as a Smart Collection. Is that what you meant in 1)? Then, how do I add the Flickr tag to photos? I don't see Flickr tags in the list of rules to select for the Smart Photoset.
Thanks again
Jonathan
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I'm in LR now and do see that within the Publish Service (Flickr) I can create a "Smart Photoset" which seems to be the same as a Smart Collection. Is that what you meant in 1)? Then, how do I add the Flickr tag to photos? I don't see Flickr tags in the list of rules to select for the Smart Photoset.
Thanks again
Jonathan
Yes, Create Smart Photoset is the option you want to use. It's not an option in the rules, but you can use keywords (tags) to get the same result.
Create rule Keywords contains flickr in the Publish Smart Photoset. Add keyword tag "flickr" to any photos you want to go on Flickr using the Library module. You'll see all images tagged flickr automatically added to the Smart Photoset. Click on Publish, and the photos are uploaded to Flickr. That's it!
The uploader uses the Title and Caption metadata fields if you've set those, and adds keyword tags to Flickr.
You can also create multiple Smart Photosets, which show up as Sets in Flickr. For example, I have a separate folder for France, Ireland, Slovakia, etc.
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Thank you for explaining. Now I understand and will certainly use it from now on. It sounds like a really great way to handle uploads and another smart Smart Collection method of organization and efficiency.
Jonathan
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It seems you can't do that with Smugmug. That's a shame as the idea of a keyword automating the publish sounded cool. However, as Smugmug uses a hierarchal folder structure I can see why not...how would Smugmug know where to place it it?