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This plugin allows you to have Develop snapshots created automatically upon image export.

This plugin works in Lightroom 5, Lightroom 4 and Lightroom 3.

The same download works for both Windows and Mac. See the box to the upper right for the download link link (in orange) and installation instructions.

Creating snapshots on export can be useful so that even if you later make develop/cropping changes to an image — on purpose or by accident — you'll be able to inspect (or even revert to) the as-exported state.

For example, I incorporate this plugin into the Export Preset that I use to generate photos I intend to include on my personal blog. This ensures that I can always return to the settings used to create the images that I show publicly, either to regenerate them, or to use them as a starting point for further adjustments.

Essentially, it's a form of data backup, and like other kinds of backups, it can provide a bit of piece of mind.

Note that this functionality is already included in modern versions of my export plugins (for Flickr, SmugMug, Facebook, Zenfolio, PicasaWeb, ExposureManager, Twitter, Photobucket, and Expono), so you do not need this plugin when exporting via those plugins (though adding this plugin won't hurt anything). This plugin is useful for exports to local disk, or those using any of the many other export plugins available for Lightroom, most of which can be found on Adobe's Lightroom Exchange web site.

Overview

If you're not familiar with Lightroom's Develop snapshots, they're available via a section in the left side of the Develop Module. This screenshot highlights the Snapshots section, with one snapshot named ”Exported for blog 2010-01-24 23:20:13“ already created...

If you don't see the panels in your Develop module, tap the tab key. If you don't see the “Snapshots” section, right-click on any of the section titles and be sure “Snapshots” is enabled.

When you create a Develop snapshot — with a plugin, or by hand by clicking on the “+” in the section header just above the purple arrow in the screenshot above — you are creating a named record of all the various settings used by Lightroom to convert from your original master “negative” image to the version you have in the Develop module now, including any crop, white-balance settings, sharpening and grain, locally-painted corrections, exposure adjustments, etc. etc. etc.

Note that a Develop snapshot does not include Library-module metadata, such as the caption, keywords, a geoencoded location, etc. To save those as well, you'll want to create a virtual copy (which at the moment can not be done by a plugin).

Lower-left corner of
the Export Dialog

Installation

First, download the plugin using the link in the upper-right corner of this page, and unzip it to a location on disk where you'll keep it.

Then follow the normal Lightroom plugin install instructions to install and enable the plugin in your copy of Lightroom.

Then, start an export to bring up the Export Dialog, and note the “Post-Process Actions” section in the lower-right of the dialog, as highlighted by the red arrow in the image at right. “Post-Process Actions” are Adobe's name for what normal users might call “Export Filters”... the most popular of which are likely my Metadata Wrangler (for selectively stripping embedded metadata from exported images, for privacy) and Tim Armes' LR2/Mogrify watermarking-and-more plugin.

Highlight the lower “Snapshot on Export” (the red arrow) and click the “Insert” button (the yellow arrow) to add the plugin to your export. The export dialog will now contain a “Snapshot on Export” section.

Configuring Automatic Snapshots

After installing and enabling the plugin, then adding the plugin's “Post-Process Action” as described above, your export dialog will contain a section like this:

The green arrow highlights where to enter the title you want for automatic snapshots. You can use the many template tokens supported by my plugins to make a snapshot-name pattern for use in computing the title as each snapshot is created, as I did in the screenshot above, but you can also just enter a name, such as “Latest Export”.

If it turns out that there's already a Develop snapshot with that name, it will normally be updated in place (that is, overwritten), but you can have the plugin come up with a unique name if you like; the plugin will append the date and time to the name you've chosen.

When a photo has multiple Develop snapshots, they are listed in alphabetical order (which surprised me; I would have thought they would be listed in chronological order), so the default snapshot-name pattern,

        Export at {yyyy}-{mm}-{dd} {hh}:{min}:{ss}

includes the date and time in such a way that an alphabetical sort is the same as a chronological sort. You're free, of course, to choose any naming pattern you like.

Two Important Warnings

1. Develop snapshots are shared among a master image and all its virtual copies
   (See this presentation if you're not familiar with Lightroom's virtual-copy feature.)

   A great feature of virtual copies is that they are mutually independent, but they do share one common Develop-preset list. It's important to remember this when naming snapshots because unless the name somehow indicates which copy it's from, you have only your memory to rely on... something that is, at least in my case, unreliable.

   Personally, I tend to create a virtual copy when I need two different crops of the same picture for my blog (such as the first two photos on this post about my nephew), or when I want to do some extreme processing (such as this, these, this, or these).

   To ensure that each Develop snapshot is named such that I can tell which copy it belongs to, I enable the copy-name prefix option, as highlighted by the blue arrow in the Export-Dialog screenshot above. “Copy name” is a bit of metadata about each image in Lightroom's library: it's originally empty for master images, and “Copy 1”, “Copy 2”, etc., for virtual images, but you can change any of them as you like (I tend to use short descriptive phrases like “original”, “crop”, “edgy”, “B&W”,....). Prepending the copy name to the Develop snapshot helps one keep things straight.

2. Develop snapshots created automatically are made after an image has exported

   The develop settings used in rendering the images in any one export session are locked in at the moment the export is launched, but develop settings recorded in each snapshot are not locked in for a particular image until after it has actually rendered.

   This means that if you launch a big export with many photos, then continue editing the same photos as the export progresses in the background, develop changes you make to an image before it's exported will be encapsulated in the automatic Develop preset this plugin creates, but will not actually be reflected in the exported copy. So, to avoid this kind of develop-setting skew, avoid editing images as they export.

As Part of an Export Preset

Export Presets are a great way to make common exports easy, allowing you to encapsulate all the settings for a particular need into one simple preset that can be selected in the Export Dialog (see its upper-left area), or launched directly via the File > Export with Preset menu. If you have export presets that you'd like to update to include this snapshot-on-export functionality, follow these steps:

1. Bring up the Export Dialog.

2. Click on the name of the Export Preset in question (in the upper-left of the Export Dialog).

3. Add the plugin's Post-Process Action to the export, as illustrated with the red and yellow arrows earlier in this post.

4. Configure the snapshot-on-export settings as you like.

5. Right-click on the name of the Export Preset, to bring up a context menu, then select “Update with Current Settings”.

6. (Now that the Export Preset has been updated, you can dismiss the Export Dialog.)

Availability

This plugin is distributed as “donationware”. I have chosen to make it available for free — everyone can use it forever, without cost of any kind — but unless registered, its functionality is somewhat reduced after six weeks. Registration is done via PayPal, and if you choose to register, it costs the minimum 1-cent PayPal fee; any amount you'd like to add beyond PayPal's sliding fees as a gift to me is completely optional, and completely appreciated. For details, see my blog post titled Lightroom Plugin Development: Now With Added Encouragement. If you're interested in how I picked up a plugin-development hobby like this, see My Long Path To Lightroom Plugin Development.

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