Publishing workflow problems - design flaw or user ignorance?

[Damon Lynch]

Hi everyone,

I have a problem with the publishing workflow in Lightroom. I find it takes me far too many mouse clicks and actions to achieve what I want to do. That suggests two possibilities: either I'm stupid and/or ignorant about how it's supposed to be done (entirely possible), or something isn't quite right in Lightroom.

This is a typical scenario:

• I have 20 images I want to output in two different sizes to the hard drive. The images are in a couple of different subfolders, found in the "Folders" hierarchy in the left panel of course.
• I have several hard drive publish services set up to meet various needs, e.g unsharpened TIFF, web size jpeg, full-resolution jpeg etc. In this scenario, I want only the last two.
• Currently, the only way I can figure out how to tell Lightroom that I want the images published is to select the images in one subfolder, and then drag them across to each of the two different publishing services. That means I need to scroll down the left hand panel, locate the first publishing service I'm interested in, and drag the images into it. I then need to do the same thing for the second publishing service. Mysteriously, sometimes I need to do it twice, because they don't get added the first time. Weird.
• Because I want to publish images from another subfolder, I need to scroll the left-hand pane back up to the subfolders, and repeat the same steps.

This is what I wish I could do:

• First select the images, and then use a keyboard shortcut to tell Lightroom to add the images to the publishing service the keyboard shortcut is mapped to. This will of course require user definable shortcuts. But from my perspective, it's so much easier and quicker this way!

Thoughts? Suggestions? Thanks in advance.

[Tony Jay]

Damon, why not try using smart collections.
Either, use a colour label or a control keyword as the selection criteria.
If needed dates could also be part of the criteria.
This way any image flagged appropriately automatically shows up in the smart collection.
All the the appropriate images will be grouped and easily dealt with from there.

Let us know how you go.

Tony Jay

[johnbeardy]

It may help if you say why you have chosen to use publish rather than export for this.

[Damon Lynch]

Publish is useful because when I re-edit files for any reason (metadata, image editing etc.), it keeps track of when I need to output them again. That's one less thing to think about. In any case I'm not aware how a keyboard shortcut can be applied to an export preset.

[afx]

Smart collections are only useful if you find a common ground.

But instead of navigating to the output several times, a quick collection could be used and then using the publish or export services. Slightly faster, but sill a PITA compared to keyboard triggered batch queues for output.

cheers
afx

[johnbeardy]

Ok, then a couple of tricks. Assign one of the published collections to be the "target collection". That means when you select images and hit B, they get added to it and not to the Quick Collection. Second, take up the smart collection suggestion so that in your second publish service there's a smart collection that automatically picks up items added to the corresponding collection in the first publish service.

John

[Damon Lynch]

Ok, then a couple of tricks. Assign one of the published collection to be the "target collection". That means when you select images and hit B, they get added to it and not to the Quick Collection. Second, take up the smart collection suggestion so that in your second publish service there's a smart collection that automatically picks up items added to the corresponding collection in the first publish service.

Thanks! That works for me.