Basic Premise of Publish: Ongoing Relationship

The premise is simple: drag a photo to a special collection in Lightroom, and voila, it's sent to Facebook. From then on, changes that you make to the photo in Lightroom are automatically kept up to date in the copy at Facebook.

Ah, but the devil is in the details...

The biggest detail is that Facebook does not allow images to be updated once you've uploaded them, or, even, allow the plugin to delete and re-upload. This means that if you want to update a photo (say, because you've changed the crop, or adjusted the develop settings), the best you can do is delete the photo on Facebook in your web browser, then upload a new one. But that deletion means that you lose all comments, tags, “likes”, and other Facebook “value add”.

Thankfully, Publish is an extra feature in addition to the “normal” export offered by Lightroom via this plugin (and earlier versions of this plugin). Most users should use the normal export to send images to Facebook.

Because Publish involves setting up an ongoing relationship, it's more complicated than simply firing off an export. The length of this document, which covers only Publish and assumes you're already familiar with normal export, attests to the extra complexity. But once the initial up-front fee has been paid with your time and attention, you'll reap the benefits from then on.

Introduction and Important Definitions

Generally speaking, Publish functionality is provided by a Publish Service Provider. Lightroom comes with a few publish service providers: the built-in “Hard Drive” provider, a bare-bones Flickr plugin and a Behance plugin. You can add additional publish service providers by installing appropriate plugins, such as my fuller-featured Flickr plugin and this Facebook plugin. (I have plenty of other publish plugins available on my Lightroom Goodies page, and there may well be other Publish plugins available on Adobe's Lightroom Exchange site.)

After installing the Facebook plugin, you
can configure your publish service

Before you can use Publish to send images to Facebook, you must first configure the particulars about how the exports are to be done, such as deciding on the size and quality of the exported images, and the details about which account at Facebook they should be sent to. This configuration, which you generally do only once, creates a Publish Service in your Lightroom catalog.

You can have multiple Facebook publish services (all provided by the one plugin), but it makes sense for most people to have only one. However, if you have multiple accounts at Facebook that you'd like to send images to with Publish, you'll need to configure multiple Facebook publish services.

Important details about creating a publish service are covered below, but for the moment, let's wave our hand and say that the publish service has now been set up as you like.

After you've configured a publish service in your Lightroom catalog, it is represented in your Lightroom library as one or more publish collections, each holding the group of photos that are to be sent to a particular album in your Facebook account. Just drag a new photo to it, press the “Publish” button, and the photo is rendered and uploaded to the associated album at Facebook.

Several publish collections in a
Facebook publish service

Just like regular Lightroom collections, a publish collection can be either a regular publish collection that holds whatever photos you manually add to it, or a smart publish collection whose list of photos is computed by some criteria that you set up (e.g. “all five-star photos taken this year”).

A published photo is a photo that's part of a publish collection. At any particular time, a published photo is in one of four publish states:

1. New Photos to Publish — photos that have been added to the publish collection, but have not yet actually been sent to Facebook. They'll be sent to Facebook the next time you launch Publish (via the “Publish” button).

2. Published Photos — photos that have been sent to Facebook and have not been modified in your Lightroom catalog since.

3. Modified Photos to Re-Publish — photos that have been sent to Facebook, but which have been modified in Lightroom since. They will be re-sent to Facebook the next time you launch a Publish action. Facebook does not allow third-party apps to delete photos, so the previously-existing copy at Facebook is left in place, and unless you delete it via Facebook's web page, you'll have two (or more) copies of the image.

4. Deleted Photos to Remove — photos that have ostensibly been removed from the publish collection, but have not yet been “flushed out”. They will be flushed out when you next publish the collection. (Were Facebook to allow third-party apps like this plugin to delete photos, the flushing-out step would include clearing them out at Facebook.) NON_FACEBOOK { photos that have ostensibly been removed from the publish collection, but have not yet been removed from Facebook. (Whether to actually remove a photo from Facebook when it is removed from your publish collection is controlled by publish-service options, discussed below.) }

Segmented grid showing photos in a publish
collection in various states of Publish

When viewing a publish collection in Grid mode, you can see the photos partitioned into their various states in the segmented grid with headers as listed above (and illustrated in the screenshot at right).

You can add and remove photos from a normal publish collection as you like (and they are automatically added and removed from smart publish collections as per the criteria that you've set up), but nothing is actually done with them until you launch Publish, via the “Publish” button. The Publish button appears in the lower left of Lightroom, in place of the “Export” button, when viewing a publish collection, as in the screenshot at right.

There's also a “Publish” button in the upper right of the segmented grid.

When you actually launch a Publish action, Lightroom fires up an export under the hood, and photos are rendered as per the various settings configured when the publish service was created (the details of which follow in the next section of this document). As each photo is uploaded to Facebook, it's moved to the “Published Photos” section. You can click on each segmented-grid section's header to expand and collapse it; if they're all collapsed you can watch their photo counts, shown at the right side of each segmented-grid header, update in real time.

Creating a Facebook Publish Service

Let's look in detail at configuring a publish service to export to your Facebook account. Make sure that the Facebook plugin is installed and enabled, then click on the “Set Up...” of the Facebook header in Library's list of publish services.

This brings up the Lightroom Publishing Manager, a dialog that looks like a cross between the normal export dialog and the Plugin Manager...

Items show up in the list of Publish Services (highlighted in the upper left) when their plugin is installed and enabled in the Plugin Manager. Old Lr1 or Lr2 plugins won't provide this new feature, of course, but most of my “export to...” plugins, including Facebook, do.

If any of the plugins you have installed provide export filters, they are listed in the middle-lower-left section of the Publishing Manager, just as they are in the normal export dialog. Lightroom does not come with any export filters built in, but they can add powerful features to your exports — both normal and publish — so it behooves you to know what's out there. Popular ones include my Metadata Wrangler for controlling exactly what metadata is included in exported copies, my geoencoding support shadow injecter for ensuring that the geoencoded location is properly included, and Tim Armes' LR/Mogrify plugin for advanced watermarking and image borders.

The main panel of the Publishing Manager shows the export/service settings for the Publish Service that's about to be created (an export-to-Facebook service in the example above). Like the normal export dialog, it has numerous sections; let's look at them in detail....

Naming your Publish Service

The first section allows you to give your export service a name, so you can keep them straight if you have more than one.

If you have only one Facebook account, you probably want to leave it at its default of “jf Facebook”. It looks ugly in this dialog, but when left at its default it won't even be shown in the list of publish service in Library, as seen in the screenshots above. If you set your own name, such as “My Facebook Stuff”, it shows up in the Library list as “jf Facebook: My Facebook Stuff”. So if you need just one Facebook publish service, it's cleanest all around to just leave the name at its default. You can always change it later.

However, if you have multiple accounts, you'll want to name them, e.g. “Facebook Work” for one and “Facebook Play” for another.

Which Facebook Account?

The next section is where you authenticate to your Facebook account.(Before starting the authentication, be sure that you are logged in to Facebook in your system-default web browser, to the Facebook account that you want to use with this Publish service.)

After authenticating at Facebook, you'll be directed to a page on my site with a simple note and a box of gibberish:

Select the gibberish (as shown selected in blue above) and copy to your system clipboard (Control-C on Windows, Command-C on a Mac), and return to Lightroom and paste it (Control-V or Command-V) into the dialog:

You'll then be authenticated within the publish service being made.

Once the publish service has been created, you can not change the associated account for the publish service, and this section becomes deactivated during a publish-service edit. (You can make another publish service for use with a different Facebook account, or even for use with the same Facebook account but with different export options.)

Export Location

The next section is also available only at publish-service create time: setting the export location:

Most people leave the export-location setting at the default of “Temporary folder”, but you might set it to some specific named folder if you want to keep a local copy of all the images that have been published to Facebook. Again, Lightroom does not allow this setting to be changed once the publish service has been created.

Various Standard Lightroom Export Settings...

The next sections are all the same as in the standard Lightroom export dialog...

In the “Image Sizing” section, it's recommended that you leave it set to “Resize to fit Long Edge, 2048 pixels”, as that will give you the maximum size allowed by Facebook.

Export Filters

The next sections are for export filters you have installed and enabled, if any. Here's an example illustrating what some sections from Metadata Wrangler, Run Any Command, and LR/Mogrify might look like...

The blue rectangle marks Lightroom's controls for adjusting the order that the filters are applied, and for removing them altogether.

Each section can be opened to reveal the filter's particular settings, of course, but the filter details are not relevant to this overview about Publish, except to note that like the standard Lightroom settings (image size, etc.), changing these filter settings after a publish service has been established affects only images uploaded after the change.

Facebook Albums

Now we begin the Facebook-specific sections. The first allows you to pick which existing albums at Facebook you would like to appear in this particular publish service...

For each album at Facebook, you can choose a normal collection, a smart collection, both, or neither.

Creating a Normal Publish Collection

The publish-collection version of a Facebook album starts out empty, which is perfectly fine if the album at Facebook is actually empty, or if you don't mind that the publish-service manifestation of the Facebook album shows only images you add from here on in.

Facebook does not allow images to be updated, so it really doesn't make a lot of sense to bother with this.

But if you would like to try, enable the

option, and the plugin will try to match up images currently in the newly-created normal (non-smart) albums at Facebook with images in your catalog that you had uploaded to Facebook with this plugin, or with previous versions of this plugin.

Defining a Smart Publish Collection's Rules

If you ask the plugin to create a smart publish collection, it does so with a dummy rule that matches no photos. Once it's been created and the publish-service dialog is dismissed, choose "Edit Smart Album" from the collection name context menu to replace the dummy rule with whatever rule or rules you want.

Deleting a Publish Collection

You can remove a publish collection from your publish service via the “Delete” item in the publish-connection name's context menu. Doing so does not remove the album or its photos from Facebook: for such a major operation, please visit Facebook directly.

Facebook Metadata Options

The next section configures various Facebook-related metadata options, just as in a “normal” Facebook export.

Phew !

Finally, you can press the “Save” button to create the publish service and the publish collections you selected.

Making Changes to an Existing Facebook Publish Service

You can edit the publish-service settings via the “Edit Settings...” item in the publish-service name's context menu. You can change all settings except the account at Facebook and the export location, but there's a catch: if the change relates to something about how each image is exported and uploaded (such as the size or image quality, metadata settings, etc.) and you want those changes to be reflected in photos already at Facebook, it won't happen magically: you'll have to republish them all.

Republishing can take a long time if you've got a lot of photos, and not all changes necessarily need to be reflected in every photo, so it is not done automatically.

If you want to republish all or some previously-published photos, select them in their various publish collections and invoke the context menu's “Mark to Republish” item.

Adding Another Facebook Publish Service

If you have another Facebook account you'd like to publish to, or you'd like to publish with different settings (e.g. your first Facebook publish service had full size exports, but you'd like to be able to upload to some collections with smaller sizes), choose

from the existing publish service's title context menu (where “Set Up...” had been before the first one was created.)

Issues to Watch Out For

The following issues are inherent shortcomings in Lightroom's initial version of Publish, and apply to all publish services:

• There's no way to tell which publish collections have photos awaiting action except by visiting each publish collection in turn and viewing the grid to see whether the “Publish” button is enabled or disabled.

• There's no way to invoke publish on all your publish services in one go; the best you can do is address each publish service in turn, selecting all its published collections and then invoking Publish on them.

• The photo-thumbnail “Go to Collection” context menu item does not list any kind of smart collection that the photo may be part of, including smart publish collections.

• The use of undo with publish-related operations is likely to not work and perhaps even corrupt the publish parts of your catalog. Take care.

• You can't import smart-collection settings to a publish smart collection; doing so creates a corrupt smart collection.

• I have not tested export-to-catalog yet, but I would expect that Publish information does not go along with the images.