From Lightroom To iPad
— Take Two —

Introduction

Three months ago in “How To Best Export Lightroom Images to an iPad, iPhone, Etc.” I wrote about my old workflow in getting my portfolio photos from Adobe Lightroom to an iPad. The setup and flow was much more complex than one might think it needed to be, mostly due to limitations and bugs with iTunes, but also due to some limitations in the Lightroom plugins I was using. I was happy to have eked out the best quality iTunes allowed, but the whole process felt horribly clunky.

Portfolio on my iPad
in this case, with the Photo Manager Pro app

I've now solved many of the problems I ran into then, in part by making major updates to the plugins I use in Lightroom, and also by abandoning Apple's “Photos” app in favor of a third-party photo-viewing iPad app.

The overall workflow is now smoother and faster in most every respect.

In this post I'll talk about Lightroom setup, photo selection and processing, and exporting photos to the iPad. I'll frame the presentation in the context of the app I use on my iPad, but the bulk of the discussion is relevant for any Lightroom-to-device workflow.

1. Initial Lightroom Setup
2. Album Setup
3. Image Selection and Preparation
4. Getting Images to the Device
5. Publishing From Multiple Computers

By the way, the example photo in the mock-up above is from this post on a festival rite at the Heian Shrine in Kyoto, Japan.

Initial Lightroom Setup

Setting up Lightroom first involves installing these plugins:

• Collection Publisher — controls the overall workflow, and allows arrangement of photos into albums for the target device.

• Crop-for-iPad — (optional) allows for device-specific crops to be applied on the fly during export, for selected images that don't have the same aspect ratio as the target device's screen, but would look better when filling it.

• Metadata Wrangler — (optional) allows you to strip selected metadata from the exported copies, either to save space or to preserve privacy.

• Geoencoding Support — (optional, not needed for Lr4+) if you want to be able to geoencode images, and the target device can display the geoencoded location (and you want to be able to do that).

Once installed, perform the initial setup of the Collection Publisher publish service. There are a bazillion sections to configure, but most are straightforward and unsurprising, so this will go quickly...

The second section, “Publish Tree”, indicates where image copies intended for the target device will be kept on your local system. (Personally, I use a Dropbox folder, for reasons that I discuss below.)

The next six sections of the dialog are standard for most any Lightroom export; I'll quickly go over the settings I use...

Because I might have two renditions of the same image (e.g. color and black & white versions), I want to make sure they're differentiated, so my standard file-naming rule for all my Lightroom exports is one that combines the file name and the copy name:

The output should be an sRGB JPEG of fairly nice quality, but due to memory and processing concerns on the target device, should not be too high. (If you're not familiar with exactly what this means, you'll find this useful: “An Analysis of Lightroom JPEG Export Quality Settings”.)

In choosing the pixel size of the exported image, take into account the maximum size that the target device (or the target app on the target device) can handle natively. Choosing a size larger than that just wastes memory and processing power as the app will have to downsize images on the fly or upon load, and choosing a size smaller means that you can't zoom up as much as is supported.

At the moment I've got my rule set up for “long edge to 2,000 pixels” because it should be reasonable for most apps while I test; later once I've settled on an app and know its specs, it'll be a simple matter to update this setting appropriately and republish my portfolio.

I leave sharpening at “standard for screen”...

I don't have Lightroom remove any image metadata, and I don't do any watermarking...

... but a bit below, I'll pick and choose what metadata I want to retain and remove.

The next sections come from some of the plugins installed in Lightroom, and added to the export via the section in the lower left of the Publishing Manager:

In Lr3 I include the geoencoding “Shadow Injector”, though this is no longer required for Lightroom 4:

Then in this next monster section courtesy of my Metadata Wrangler plugin, to reduce space I strip all but explicitly-desired metadata. I leave in basics of the exposure, the geoencoding stuff, copyright, and the like...

Then I have the “crop-for-iPad” plugin settings...

As each image is exported, this section defines whether an on-the-fly device-specific crop will be done to the exported copy, and if so, what kind, and from what part of the image.

The first area of this section indicates the target aspect ratio (the width/height ratio of the target device). The plugin includes data on a number of devices from Apple, Amazon, Blackberry, HP, HTC, Motorola, Samsung, and more, but you can also choose “custom” and enter your own width and height.

The “Crop Control” area is where you indicate, with keywords and a default, whether a crop should be taken for each image, and if so, from what part of the image. You can set things to your taste, but as illustrated above, if a photo has the keyword “iPadNoCrop”, no crop is taken. If it has the keyword “iPadCropRight”, a device-best-fitting crop is taken from the right. And so on. If none of the keywords match, I've chosen to have it take a crop from the center.

As illustrated at right, I've made a “Keyword Set” for use in the Library's “Keywording” panel that makes it easy for me to apply these. (The “PORTFOLIO” and “AnthonyBest” keywords are used in my workflow to indicate which photos to send to the iPad in the first place, as we'll see later in this post.)

You can guess from the “iPhoneCropLeft” keyword that I have a matching set of keywords for the copies I send to my phone, via another publish service set up almost identically to the one we're setting up now, but because the iPhone's screen had a different aspect ratio, it may need different crops, and so that publish service uses a different set of keywords, and, of course, a different target folder.

When using these kinds of keywords, it's cleaner to keep them internal to your Lightroom setup, so don't forget to edit each keyword (by selecting “Edit” from the keyword's context menu in the Keyword List panel) to deselect “Include on Export”.

A note about the crop: the crop done by the plugin is lossless (does not reduce the quality at all) because the plugin uses the Independent JPEG Group's most-excellent “jpegtran” program. The alternative is to convert the JPEG to pure image data, perform the crop, then reconvert back to a JPEG, all of which necessarily reduces the quality. So, it's gratifying that there's a lossless solution available, but one technical side effect of how bits are fiddled under the hood is that a “bottom” or “right” crop might actually be shifted as many as 15 pixels away from the bottom edge or the right edge.

Now we're back with additional sections from the overall Collection Publisher publish service. I want the images to be regenerated (republished) if I change certain things...

This next section on image renaming is the most complex of the entire setup:

Lightroom's built-in file renaming seen earlier isn't powerful enough to do what I want, so I use this optional processing in the Collection Publisher to achieve my goals, which for my general portfolio images are:

1. An overall sort based on aspect ratio, such that all Landscape-oriented (wider than tall) photos are grouped together, and all Portrait-oriented photos (taller than wide) are grouped. I want this so that someone flipping through my photos won't have to keep flopping the device around to adjust for each photo's orientation.... they'll merely have to rotate the device once when passing from one orientation to the other.

2. Within each group, I want images to be random. I don't want photos from one shoot or one season to get clumped: even spectacular photos can get monotonous if all of the same ilk.

The file-renaming rules in this section are the standard template tokens that my plugins use for all kinds of things, and in this case I use the sequence:

{AspectRatio=X,Y,Z}{UUID:Length=5}__{FILENAME}

The first token, {AspectRatio=X,Y,Z}, starts off the filename with an “X”, “Y”, or “Z” depending on whether the image is portrait, square, or landscape, respectively. Being at the start of the image filename, this groups files by aspect ratio.

The next token, {UUID:Length=5}, essentially becomes five random characters. This causes a sort based on filename to be random within each group, yet maintains the overall grouping.

Then there are two underscores, and finally the filename computed by the Lightroom-standard file-naming section we saw earlier. I add this just so that I can maintain the ability to know which image it is just by looking at the filename.

The end result of this are filenames that don't look pretty,

XF4DC1__JF7_100620.jpg
XF889C__JF7_101972.jpg
XFB839__JF7_103866.jpg
XFFB90__JF7_080212.jpg
Y4E322__JF7_077785.jpg
Z00903__JF7_078691.jpg
Z016C6__JF7_099880.jpg
Z02EB6__JF7_083189.jpg
Z039A4__JF7_040249.jpg

but they sort as I like: images are grouped by aspect ratio, and random within each group. If the display app allows sorting by image date as well, I can toggle between a random and a chronological display.

So, that's it for the publish-service settings.

Album Setup

After saving the initial publish-service settings, I'm left with a publish service with one default collection named “at root”. I don't need it, so I delete it.

I then create a smart publish collection for each album I want on my iPad, which in my case at the moment is just one for general nice pics (“Portfolio”), one for pics of my kid (“Anthony”), and one filled with shots of the Japanese archery event I photographed last month (“通し矢”). The create dialog for each looks like:

Each is set so that it's its own album in the export folder hierarchy, and each is populated via keyword matching. In the example, any image with “PORTFOLIO” as a keyword is included in the “Portfolio” collection, which becomes the “Portfolio” folder on local disk, and eventually on the target device.

And that's it for setup.

Image Selection and Preparation

The most difficult part of this entire process is selecting images to include in my portfolio, or, putting it more accurately, picking images not to include, since the gut instinct is to share everything. The few that make the cut are directed to each album by assigning the relevant keywords that I used in the various publish-service smart collections.

Crop Preview Tool

As I add each photo, I need to decide whether to have it appear on the target device with a full-screen crop, and if so, which crop. On a Mac, my crop-for-iPad plugin features a handy tool, shown at right, via the “File > Plugin Extras > Preview Crop” menu. It allows one to cycle through the possible crops for a given device, and optionally apply the keywords required to achieve the crop.

A few notes about the crop-preview tool:

• It works on OSX only.

  In order to build it, I take advantage of some undocumented side effects I discovered in Lightroom's plugin infrastructure, but they don't happen to work on Windows. It's neither something good about OSX nor bad about Windows, just the way the luck fell.

• Clicking on the image cycles through the three crops (top/middle/bottom in the example).

  I'd like to have made it so that you click where you want the image or the crop, but I couldn't figure out a way to make it work. Lightroom's plugin infrastructure is pretty limited in all areas, but particularly with UI-related things.

• You can configure the color and opacity of the mask (shown blue in the example), as well as the color of the border (shown yellow). I normally use a black mask, to mimic the black surround of the iPad.

• It's super convenient when the crop-preview command is mapped to a keyboard shortcut. Choose “Keyboard” in “System Preferences”, then add an Application Shortcut with a Menu Title of three spaces followed by “Preview Crop”. (The leading three spaces are required for it to work because Lightroom adds them to get an indented presentation in the Plugin-Extras menu.)

  I leave “Application” set at “All Applications” because I swap often between Lr3 and Lr4 (and for some things I'm still testing even with Lr2).

Getting Images to the Device

Any time I make a change to the service (add or remove photos, or edit photos or their intended device-specific crops), I need to republish to local disk, then get the resulting images to the iPad.

The former is easy, and it the same for any publish service: select the collections and hit the “Publish” button.

Getting the images to the device is a separate step, and depends strongly on the device and the app used on the device. For Apple's “Photos” app that I gave up on, you'd just publish to the same folder that iTunes syncs photos from, and you're done. But for all the esoteric troubles mentioned in my earlier writeup, I don't use the “Photos” app any more.

If the app supports FTP, as Photo Manager Pro does, you can use the handy FTP client built into the Collection Publisher, near the bottom of the Publishing Manager:

This allows a full sync... send new or changed photos, and delete ones that are on the device but no longer in the publish tree. Prior to building this, a full sync was a nightmare because I couldn't find anything to do it in one shot. Now it's a breeze.

Another photo-viewer app that supports FTP is WidePhotoViewer, but there's a bug in Lightroom that stops this plugin from syncing to it properly. The developer is looking into a workaround for me.

If you're an app developer and you add FTP sync to your photo-display app, drop me a note and I'll include a mention of it here.

Some apps allow Dropbox integration, and in that case you can just set your publish root to a Dropbox folder, then access it from the app.

Publishing From Multiple Computers

At the moment, my photo archive is split among three different Lightroom catalogs (photos older than about a year in a Lightroom catalog on my desktop, with recent images in a Lightroom 3 catalog on my laptop, and the most-recent images in a Lightroom 4 catalog on my laptop), and I'd like to be able to publish portfolio pictures from any of them to a common hierarchy.

Dropbox is perfect for this. It syncs a folder tree back and forth among multiple computers so changes in one are reflected in all the others. So I can add and remove photos on the desktop, publish them there, then do the same on my laptop and in the end I have all the photos for the iPad on both machines. Then from either I can do the FTP sync to the target app, and only the changes are sent over. It's a smooth workflow.