One of the best photographic tips I ever received was also one of the most simple. It was from an article on workflow, and discussed a method for naming files. It may not seem like a big deal, but that one thing that took me about 30 seconds to implement has saved me hours and hours.
One of the simple features that I love in Lightroom 3 that I think has the potential to create MUCH more time for professional and amateur photographers is the built in Publish Services. While there are several third-party plug ins, the standard plug ins for Facebook, Flickr, and SmugMug are amazing.
So here's how I do it...
1. Create a Smart Gallery: If you don't already have a category for your gallery, right click on the the SmugMug Publish Service button to create one. Then, right-click on the category and select "Create New Smart Gallery."
2. Define which photos will be included. There are several ways to do this using Color Labels, Pick Flags, Keywords, and Star Ratings. Right now I use a combination of Pick Flags and Keywords. So if I want to publish photos in a folder to the Alaska gallery on SmugMug, I make sure the photos have a Pick Flag, and contain both Alaska and SmugMug in the keywords. When I set up the Smart Gallery, I make sure these are the criteria for included photos.
3, Select all the appropriate settings for your new SmugMug gallery and click ok.
3. The photos will magically appear in the SmugMug Smart Gallery. Now just right click the folder and select "Publish Now." The pictures are automatically uploaded to the SmugMug gallery.
The great thing about this process for me is that I use my SmugMug account to link to forums and blogs, and because Lightroom 3 keeps track of any changes I make to my photos, it will tell me if one of the photos in the Smart Galleries has been edited and needs to be re-published. All I do is click Publish again, and it not only updates on SmugMug, but everywhere else that links to SmugMug, including my blog and forums in which I participate.
I also love the way I can see my SmugMug folder hierarchy in Lightroom and make changes to SmugMug galleries directly from the software.
The same type of process is available for Flickr and SmugMug, although I haven't found a way to make the default "Photostream" folder "Smart" in the Flickr service.
The process isn't perfect, but maybe you will find a portion of it helpful.
1 comment:
Do you know, how to mark few photos as published or skip these photos for publish. I have few thousands of them already on smugmung but not through lightroom services.
Post a Comment