Howto: Smugmug integration with Lightroom

corbosman

edit: This information is now available in the tutorials section of dgrin. A mac tutorial is also available there.
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In the last year Adobe's Lightroom has become a big player in the image management arena. It's not perfect yet, but it's already a tool of the trade for many photographers. One thing ive been looking for is an easy way to upload my images directly from Lightroom to Smugmug. It turns out that this is actually really simple to do, all it takes is a few easy steps.

First of all, we need the help of an extra program. The Smugmug community has created several programs to ease the uploading of photos from your desktop to SmugMug. We're going to use these programs to do this directly from Lightroom. This HowTo will for now only deal with the external program called SendToSmugmug for Windows as an example, but I am fairly certain this thread will soon be expanded to include other upload tools and other operating systems like OSX. You can even try some tools for yourself and see if they work. So, to start of our HowTo, please download and install SendToSmugmug through this link.

Now that the helper program is installed, we're going to go into Lightroom and use the export feature to export photos. To use the export function, you select the images you want to upload to SmugMug, and use the Export option under the File menu.



Select the images in the library and choose the Export function.



Now a screen will come up that allows you to set all the parameters you want for the export. The settings will depend on what you want to do, but here's what I use, but dont click Export yet because we're not done!

• Export location - Any directory on your local harddisk
• File Naming - Filename
• Color space - sRGB
• Resolution - whatever you prefer
• Constraint maximum - unchecked, let SmugMug handle sizes, use maximum size
• Add Watermark - unchecked, let SmugMug handle watermark

And now the important one, in the last section called Post Processing you can tell Lightroom what to do after the export. Pick the option "Go to Export Actions Folder Now". It will open a window to a directory on your harddisk. Then double click the "Export Actions" folder to enter it.

This directory contains all the programs that Lightroom can use as a post-processing tool. It should be empty right now so we'll add SendToSmugmug to it. Instead of copying the file, we'll just make a shortcut to it. Find the SendToSmugmug folder on your harddisk (probably on "C:\Program Files\Send to smugmug"). Right click the icon for SendToSmugmug and choose 'Copy'.






Now go back to the "Export Actions" folder and right click in the folder window and choose "Paste Shortcut". You'll see something like this.





Now head back to Lightroom, cancel the running export if it's still open and do another export of the images you want to upload to SmugMug. The "Post-Processing/After Export" option now has an extra function called "Shortcut to Send to Smugmug". If you don't like this name, rename the shortcut in the "Export Actions" folder.




Make sure all the options are set like you want them, and click "Export". Lightroom will export the files to your local harddisk and then immediately start up the "Send to Smugmug" (STS from now on) application. STS will open up and here you can add these images to an existing album or create a new album from scratch.





Now click "Upload" and the photos will be uploaded. Once this is done click OK and STS will open a browser window pointing to the album that contains these images. That's it! From now on, every time you want to upload images to SmugMug, all you have to do is pick the "Send to smugmug" option from the post-processing part of the export tool in Lightroom, and away you go.

I hope that this small howto will start a thread containing information about other upload tools and their compatibility with Lightroom. It does require some functionality in the upload tool that not all of them currently have, so I hope the authors of these tools will look at this and see if they can support this very useful integration with Lightroom.

Cor

Andy

w00p thanks Cor for the How-To.

Maybe some other apps will be supported, too

Andy

Andy wrote:

Maybe

you never know....

W.W. Webster

Andy wrote:

you never know....

Feeling something coming on?

corbosman

One of the OSX tools may soon support this Lightroom method. I cant do without it anymore, it's so easy to upload images straight from Lightroom now

Cor

caroline

corbosman wrote:

One of the OSX tools may soon support this Lightroom method. I cant do without it anymore, it's so easy to upload images straight from Lightroom now

Cor

Hi Cor, I psted this a couple of days ago on Finishing School
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=621902
so this thread also seems relevant now. My question is this, what other software do you use and is there any other info you can give me re workflow?

Caroline

corbosman

There are probably as many workflows as there are photographers. Everyone likes things slightly different. But you can certainly benefit from what works for others. Im currently in the process of switching my workflow, so i'll just explain what im doing from now on.

I ingest my images from my camera using Downloader Pro. You can do similar things with other tools, but I just like DL pro, so i stick with it. It allows things like camera detection to create a directory structure based on what camera you used. So my wife's images are automatically put in a different directory than mine. It also allows automatic geo tagging if you have a GPS available.

After DL Pro, I use photo mechanic to quickly go through my images and delete all the bad ones. I use PM because it's very fast for raw images, much much faster than for instance Lightroom. I also use PM as a general browsing tool for un-catalogued images.

After ive weeded out the bad ones, I drag the folder into Lightroom. This then becomes my main catalogue (even though LR has a long way to go before it can be considered a true professional DAM tool imho, especially if you're used to Portfolio like I am) and I do simple keywording inside LR. Where LR shines is in its ability to do very easy and quick adjustments to your images without damaging the original! At this point Im done for 99% of my images, until I have a client or other goal for the image.

Once I want to use an image for something, i either directly use the LR image, or I have LR send the image into Photoshop CS3. Whats nice about the combination of LR and CS3 is that LR will store your CS3 created image as a version of your original, stacking them together inside LR. This makes it very easy to keep different versions of the same image together (something I sorely miss in Portfolio btw).

After im done with CS3 (if I use it at all, which is almost never because LR can do most of the modifications you'd want already), I use the export feature of LR to create whatever output version I want. Tiff files for magazines, JPGs for SmugMug or my own website, you name it. I often also create some form of identification so I can keep track of what I used for what purpose. In Portfolio this is easy, but im still struggling with that a bit in LR. Still learning all the possibilities, but for now i'll be using the Collections option probably.

As you can see, I still use a lot of tools. In my case, DL Pro, PM, LR and CS3. I can probably drop DL Pro easily because PM can do most of that, but im not ready for that yet And if you want you can even use LR all by itself, because LR can do all of that too. I still use the other tools because they're better or faster, but as soon as LR becomes on par with those tools they'll be dropping like flies. (at the moment I also still use Portfolio, in parallel with LR, but I wouldnt recommend that to anyone).

By hooking LR directly into SmugMug ive managed to get rid of another manual step, optimizing my workflow enough to really make a difference for me. It's the little things that count, and eventually add up.

Cor

caroline

corbosman wrote:

There are probably as many workflows as there are photographers. Everyone likes things slightly different. But you can certainly benefit from what works for others. Im currently in the process of switching my workflow, so i'll just explain what im doing from now on.

I ingest my images from my camera using Downloader Pro. You can do similar things with other tools, but I just like DL pro, so i stick with it. It allows things like camera detection to create a directory structure based on what camera you used. So my wife's images are automatically put in a different directory than mine. It also allows automatic geo tagging if you have a GPS available.

After DL Pro, I use photo mechanic to quickly go through my images and delete all the bad ones. I use PM because it's very fast for raw images, much much faster than for instance Lightroom. I also use PM as a general browsing tool for un-catalogued images.

After ive weeded out the bad ones, I drag the folder into Lightroom. This then becomes my main catalogue (even though LR has a long way to go before it can be considered a true professional DAM tool imho, especially if you're used to Portfolio like I am) and I do simple keywording inside LR. Where LR shines is in its ability to do very easy and quick adjustments to your images without damaging the original! At this point Im done for 99% of my images, until I have a client or other goal for the image.

Once I want to use an image for something, i either directly use the LR image, or I have LR send the image into Photoshop CS3. Whats nice about the combination of LR and CS3 is that LR will store your CS3 created image as a version of your original, stacking them together inside LR. This makes it very easy to keep different versions of the same image together (something I sorely miss in Portfolio btw).

After im done with CS3 (if I use it at all, which is almost never because LR can do most of the modifications you'd want already), I use the export feature of LR to create whatever output version I want. Tiff files for magazines, JPGs for SmugMug or my own website, you name it. I often also create some form of identification so I can keep track of what I used for what purpose. In Portfolio this is easy, but im still struggling with that a bit in LR. Still learning all the possibilities, but for now i'll be using the Collections option probably.

As you can see, I still use a lot of tools. In my case, DL Pro, PM, LR and CS3. I can probably drop DL Pro easily because PM can do most of that, but im not ready for that yet And if you want you can even use LR all by itself, because LR can do all of that too. I still use the other tools because they're better or faster, but as soon as LR becomes on par with those tools they'll be dropping like flies. (at the moment I also still use Portfolio, in parallel with LR, but I wouldnt recommend that to anyone).

By hooking LR directly into SmugMug ive managed to get rid of another manual step, optimizing my workflow enough to really make a difference for me. It's the little things that count, and eventually add up.

Cor

Thanks Cor, very helpful indeed - I don't really have a workflow and i know I need to get things sorted soon

Cheers

corbosman

Btw, ive seen on the Lightroom forum that you can also hook LR directory into email using a small third party application, making it very easy to email someone (an editor, friend, collegue, whatever) images from your LR library.

Cor

sellis

Awesone tutorial, THANK YOU! Anything that cuts down the steps from camera to Smugmug is great.

Kudos.

Sam

BTW, awesome underwater work!

teamracephotos

Thanks
Very Cool... Thanks