Post photos to blog with Lightroom and flickr - a Howto
Check out my mini workflow tutorial to easily post photos to a blog directly from Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. It involves no third party plugins or scripts yet you need to have a flickr account (who doesn’t these days - it’s free but addictive).
Technorati Tags: blogging, Extending flickr, Flickr, Lightroom, Online, photoblog, Photography, web 2.0, Wordpress
On my beloved Powerbook G4 I sometimes download, organize, edit and export my photos with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. On my other machine, a fairly well equipped MacPro, I can use Aperture but I really like the comfort of being able to sit anywhere in the house, the garden, a cafe, the airport, etc. to “view and do something” with recently shot photos with Lightroom.
Don’t get me wrong I really love Aperture from Apple (I am a certified Aperture Pro) but in a way Aperture is a succesful sales incentive for the new Intel based Macs. I get a fairly well performance on my Powerbook G4 with Lightroom, Aperture won’t even install - but that’s a different story.
So far my portable setup was missing a simple and fast workflow for the eventual spontaneous photopost to this blog. I wanted something that would prepare, process, watermark and post to this blog autmatically. Again it was one of flickr’s services that would make it all happen. This is the workflow I applied:
Flickr and Blog this!
If you are using the flickr online photo service you may probably know about the ability to upload images via Email. This is a more or less obviously hidden feature and you will find your individual upload email adress under You / Your account / Email / Your flickr upload email. Our friends at flickr will process the Email like this:
Subject header –> Title
Body of Email –> Photo description
Email Attachment –> Your uploaded photo
Most flickr disciples will probably use this feature to upload images from a cameraphone directly into their flickr account.
I like to host most of my images presented online with flickr, which is exactly compatible with their business model;-) There are many ways to extend flickr, one of them is their blogthis feature. All you have to do is set up your blog options in the flickr account settings - You / Your account / Extending Flickr / Your blogs / edit. All popular weblogs are supported, no matter whether it is a hosted service, like Blogger or LiveJournal, or a self-hosted weblog like Wordpress and Typepad. I use Wordpress for my blog and therefore flickr will automatically use the MetaWeblogAPI and a username and password for posting. Some hosted services may require for custom authorization in order to accept posts from flickr. Once you added your blog(s) to flickr you may choose between five different default layouts as your posting template like i.e. 500 px or 240 px image width, on it’s own line and description text.
If you know a thing or two about HTML and CSS or just want to play around, you can customize the standard templates before saving. There is a comprehensive list of additional tags to add some extra bits to your post.
Setup for flickr is pretty much complete now. Check out and verify the individual blog upload email under You / Your account/ Email / Your blog upload email. We will need it later because that’s the email we’ll be using in order to upload images to flickr for posting on the blog via email.
Other services may offer the same “emailtoblogthis” feature and please feel free to post these in the comments area.
Next we need to create an Export Action and Export Preset for Lightroom. We are doing this because we want Lightroom to process our photo with selected parameters and hand it on to an Email application for the upload to flickr aka post to the blog.
Create Lightroom Export action and Export preset
In version 1.1 Adobe added a feature to Lightroom which lets you define custom export actions after processing rather than the standard “Do nothing”, “Open in Photoshop” or “Open in external editor”. Creating an Export action is a piece of cake. In Lightroom navigate to the File menu and choose “Export” or hit shift+apple+E to open the Export dialogue. Later we will save the settings made here as a new Export preset for easier access so lets choose the right parameters while we’re at it. Choose any destination folder or create a new one called “4blog” for example. Untick the “Put in subfolder” option. Choose the file-name template of your choice, I chose “Date-Filename” and JPEG with quality setting to 50 under “File settings”. Under “Image settings” I chose sRGB as color space and 72 ppi resolution, because we want to display the images in a browser. Activate “Constrain Maximum Size” and enter some proper values like 800px or bigger. I decided not to upload the full sized image but you may decide differently. BTW this setting has no effect on the size of the image posted to the blog. The posting template you defined earlier in flickr defines the size of the photo in your post.
I also ticked “Minimize embedded metadata” but that’s really up to your own decision whether you want to keep all of the metadata or strip it down to the basics. Now we reached the intersting part “Post precessing” because we will create a new Export action right here right now. Choose “Go to Export actions folder now”. The finder will show the “Export actions” folder in the User / User / Library / Application support / Adobe / Lightroom directory. Doubleclick on the highlighted “Export actions”. Hit apple+N to open a new directory window and browse to the applications folder in order to locate the icon for your default mail application. Mine is Mail.app on the Macintosh but it works with other apps as well like Microsoft Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. Create a shortcut of your standard email application and copy or move it to the “Export actions” folder. Mine looks like this now (note that I also have a shortcut for the flickr uploadr and your directory may also contain other shortcuts which won’t apply to this particular workflow).
Close the “Export Actions” folder and return to Lightroom. The “Post-processing” popup menu now features a new entry with your standard mail application. We just created a new Export action. See, I told you - piece of cake !
Activate our new Export action and return to the top of the dialogue in order to save this new Export preset right away for the future. Choose “Save current setting as new preset” from the Preset popup menu and choose an appropriate name, I named mine “For Email2blog”. Lightroom has created a new Export preset which will show under File/Export with preset/Email2blog in this example. We are actually done settiing up Lightroom and could hit “Export” but let’s hit “Cancel” for the sake of this tutorial.
A post to you!
Ok we are all set and will happily choose our first photo to post from the Lightroom Library. No matter whether you will or will not do further “developing” to your photo in the according LR module, once you are ready to post your image just choose File/Export with preset/For Email2blog. Lightroom will process the photo according to the development parameters and the Export presets we saved. Since we defined the standard mail application as our action after processing, Lightroom will call the mail application and open a new Email with the processed photo as an attachment.
Enter your flickrbloguploademail in the To: field and the title of the photo in the subject header. You can add an optional description as emailt text. This text will appear in your actual post as well, according to layout template you chose for your blog. Last but not least hit “Send”.
Checking on things
Leave the industrious flickr gals and guys alone for a couple of minutes as their servers will need some time to pick up the email and process the image plus metadata to your account.
Last but not least we are approaching the moment of truth now when checking whether the post was succesful. If the post will not appear after a maximum of 5 minutes pls doublecheck your blog settings.
Well I guess this tutorial turned out not so mini after all. I really like this slick combo a lot because it serves my original intention quite well. May it be useful to you too.
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