Publish Services Gets Some Attention in Beta 2

Since Publish Services debuted in Lightroom 3 Beta 1, Adobe has adjusted some of the issues identified in the first beta. For a full description of what Publish services can do I refer you to my two previous articles Lightroom 3 Beta’s Publish Services – Part 1 and Lightroom 3 Beta’s Publish Services – Part 2.

The two biggest (and welcome) adjustments deal with how the Flickr Publish Service works. Previously, users who only had a free Flickr account had problems if a published image was deleted from the photostream in Lightroom or modified in any way, Lightroom couldn’t deal with the changing the image up on Flickr or removing the images from the Re-Publish or Deleted sections.

Now deleted images are removed from Flickr. More importantly, modified images are change on Flickr. However, because of Flickr’s restrictions, this ability comes with a price. When you republish the image to a free Flickr account you will see this dialog:

If you have accumulated a lot of comments or ratings you may not want to do this. The other alternative is to upgrade your Flickr account to a Pro account. Pro accounts will let you modify the image without losing the ratings and comments.

A smaller addition appears in the comments panel. In the upper left corner you will see a small circular arrow icon.

Clicking this will update the comment stream for the image without having to press the publish button. It’s much quicker!

Publish Services is an intriguing addition to Lightroom and could prove to be a launching point for a whole new set of possibilities for dealing with other services. I can’t wait to see how this feature develops!

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