Monday, January 21, 2008

Photo workflow

At some level I would like to think that it's not just me that have been facing the issues with maintaining publication of family photos to share with family and friends.

If you have been there you probably know the issue where you get several photos during a month and either have to do incremental uploads to some web publishing sites during the month or at the end of the month go through the process of selecting photos, scaling them for web publication and uploading.

I use Adobe lightroom for processing photos and managing my "library" of family photos. For that purpose it's great. Lots of visibility and easy to find your photos. However I was still facing the scaling, exporting (from lightroom), selection of files and then finally upload and sending out emails.

Recently I found a new extension for Lightroom. It's the Lightroom export sdk which basically is a software development kit for lightrooms export. It's ok if you don't do software development and wouldn't know where to start with it.

Included in the sdk which you can download from Adobe labs is a sample for ftp export and flickr export.

I experimented with the flickr export which included setting up a flickr account and kindly asking for permission to use their API. You can setup all the flickr stuff using flickr services in the explore menu (when using the flickr plugin it's sort of easy since you are helped through the process).

Now my process for uploading family photos is as easy as selecting the photos in lightroom and select export. Of course in the export dialog I have to select flickr as the destination but it is so much easier than it has ever been before :-)

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