By far the most popular goodies for Adobe Lightroom that I've published are my export plugins, for Zenfolio, SmugMug, Flickr, Picasa Web, and Facebook. I don't use any of these services to host my own photos (I generally publish what I want here on my blog and in my photostreams), but I do use a unique aspect of Zenfolio – their hierarchical gallery system – as a cheap and convenient way to back up my photos. It also allows my wife convenient access to all my photos without her having to learn Lightroom.

As I describe on My Photo and Blog-Writing Workflow, I keep all my photos on my local machine in a set of folders with a date-based hierarchical structure. For example, the photos I took the other day that ended up in the preschool-gymnastics post “Jumping”, Revisited reside on my hard disk in a folder named:

     C:\photo\2008\10\02-Jumping\

with the leaf folder name “02-Jumping” consisting of the day of the month (the photos were taken on October 2nd) and the event name.

Here's how it appears in Lightroom, and, after backing up to Zenfolio with the method described below, how they appear in my Zenfolio account:

In Lightroom...		At Zenfolio...

I'll say up front that it's not a perfect backup system because I shoot in raw format and Zenfolio does not accept raw-format files, so I'm limited to backing up full-sized high-quality JPGs. This would not be sufficient if it were my only method to backup my photos, but hey, since it's free, it's nice as an added backup. (Zenfolio actually does accept TIFF files, so if I didn't mind the 20× increase in upload time, I'd consider that.)

Once it's set up, it's very easy to invoke a backup, but first I'll show the setup.

First, I create an export preset that encompasses what kind of export I want....

That shows full-size JPGs at a fairly high quality, but the most important aspects are in the Zenfolio: Upload Destination section. The hub of this export as a backup system is the “auto dest” (automatic destination) preset, which I created via the button highlighted by the red arrow.

The automatic destination preset dialog in my Zenfolio plugin looks like this:

The most important aspect here is how the target album is derived from each photo, and that's given in the center Gallery Name Template section:

      Archive > {Path:After=photo\}

This is a template as described on Preset Templates in My Lightroom Plugins, and, for example, takes an image lying in:

     C:\photo\2008\10\02-Jumping\

and turns it into a Zenfolio gallery named “02-Jumping” in the “10” group, itself in the “2008” group, itself in the base “Archive” group. The folder/group hierarchy for each photo depends on the location on my local hard disk for each source image, and will be created by my plugin as needed.

By the way, I understand that the template I use above might be a bit difficult to understand without brushing up on the docs, so I'll point out that it's similar to the easy-to-understand template shown in the dialog snippet at right, which you can see produces the same result as above for this example.

The two differ when an image lies in a folder whose path does not match the year/month/date-event appropriate for the date the photo was taken, such as the daily photos I take of the bentos that Fumie makes for Anthony. (I no longer post them daily, but I still take them, and accumulate them in one big “BENTO” folder.)

Once the auto-destination preset has been created, I return to the Export dialog and select it as the destination. As the green arrows highlight in the earlier dialog screenshot, the export is set to process only images that have not been exported to Zenfolio, or ones that have changed since they were last exported to Zenfolio. Thus, I can invoke this export on my entire library, and any images that has been added or modified will be archived. These particular selections are perhaps not appropriate for someone who wishes to use Zenfolio both for image presentation and archiving, but they are perfect for this scenario.

As the blue arrow highlights, I have the plugin keep the list of images within a gallery sorted.

As the yellow arrow highlights, I also use my Metadata Wrangler export filter to eliminate some of the bulkier useless items from the rendered image files, such as the embedded thumbnail that Zenfolio won't be using anyway.

Okay, so once the export dialog settings have been adjusted as I like, I encapsulate it all in a new Lightroom Export Preset that I name “Archive @ Zenfolio”. That's the setup, and it's done just once.

I actually perform a backup on a daily basis, after importing images to Lightroom, or editing images. It's as simple as selecting the photos, and invoking the preset....

Lightroom then generates the images, and the plugin starts uploading them to Zenfolio. I often invoke this on a large batch of images just before I go to bed, but if I stick around, I'll be kept informed of the progress with the ETA that my plugins calculate and display, as shown at right.

As I noted earlier, it's not a perfect backup system, but perhaps this post has offered some interesting ideas.

By the way, I should note that Zenfolio has provided me with a free pro account, because of my Lightroom plugin work. For that matter, SmugMug and Flickr have as well. Either could certainly be used for archiving as well, if you didn't mind the lack of hierarchical albums. In fact, if you go with SmugMug and subscribe to their per-month per-megabyte storage service SmugVault, you can archive your original raw files.