Getting to Your iPhoto Images – Snow Leopard Update

A while ago I wrote about Moving Your Images From iPhoto to Lightroom. A reader, Tom, pointed out a neat feature in Snow Leopard that allows you to directly access the contents of your iPhoto Library.

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Lightroom 3 Beta’s Publish Services – Part 2

In Part 1 we examined how to use Publish Services to control target folders on the hard drive using the Hard Drive Publish Connection.

There’s another Publish Service that comes with Lightroom 3 Beta. The Flickr Publish Service allows us to connect Lightroom to a Flickr account (or multiple Flickr accounts) and manage our photostream from within Lightroom. However, there are some pitfalls to watch out for. Remember, this is beta software, so as you come across issues or areas that can be improved please join the conversation over at the Adobe Forums and tell the Lightroom team about it. You can help make this a great release!

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Lightroom 3 Beta’s Publish Services – Part 1

Prior to the release of Lightroom 3 Beta we had the ability to upload our images to various online sites via the Export dialog. Jeffrey Friedl provided several excellent plugins for the Export dialog making it easy to export to these online services. He is hard at work turning those into Publish Services. By the time the final release of Lightroom 3 is ready I’m sure we will have a lot to choose from! For now, let’s take a deeper look into how this new features works!

You can find Publish Services in the left side panel of the Library module. When you first start install Lightroom there are two basic services provided: Hard Drive and Flickr. Hard Drive allows you to create folders to receive images via Publish Services. This can be very useful for adding to a folder that is synched to your iPod/iPhone. Perhaps your screensaver is based on a folder of images. Make this a target and you can easily add and manage that. Or perhaps you are compiling images for a client to view and you first want to collect them in a folder from which you can FTP up to your client viewing portal. Interested? Let’s take a look.

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Lightroom 3 Beta Is Here!

Yes! It’s here! Head on over to Adobe Labs and download the Lightroom 3 Beta! Adobe continues its laudable practice of releasing Lightroom as a public beta to get important feedback from its users! Thanks Adobe!

First, a word of CAUTION. This is a true beta. DO NOT use this in production! Make copies of any images you intend to work on inside the beta. There are still known, and perhaps unknown, issues to be ironed out before Lightroom 3 is ready for production work.

Whew! Now that we have the warnings out of the way let’s dig in and see what’s new!

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Spotlight: Victoria Bampton

It isn’t often that one gets to interact with royalty. Lightroom or otherwise. Victoria Bampton a.k.a. The Lightroom Queen is one of the go to people in the Lightroom Community.

You can find Victoria roaming around over at Lightroom Forums where she is the #1 contributor (well over 6,000 posts at this writing). She is always ready to help fellow Lightroomers in distress with thoughtful and in-depth answers. Over at her site, The Lightroom Queen, you can read Victoria’s blog and download some excellent shortcut references for Lightroom. I keep this list on my desktop for frequent reference!

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Image Sequencing Options

Any well developed and flexible image processing application will allow users to approach a workflow and adapt it to what works best for them. Lightroom is no exception. Many users are well familiar with renaming image files during import and applying a sequence number to each file.

The Import dialog allows us to choose to add a sequence number as part of the renaming process. We choose what number to start the sequence and each subsequent image receive an incremented number.

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Review: LRKeys

Lightroom has its first iPhone application! LRKeys from Baum Computer and Graphics helps you learn the many keyboard shortcuts Lightroom provides in order to make your workflow more efficient.

I had the opportunity to take LRKeys out for a test drive and was pleasantly surprised by its simple and enjoyable approach. It provides a preference pane that allows you to set it in either Windows or Mac mode as well as turn sounds on and off. The sounds are cheers when you answer correctly and groans of disappointment when you get a question wrong.

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