Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2

Saving copies of your photos to your computer is indeed very helpful, but that is usually not the final destination you have in mind. Perhaps you are planning to upload them to a photo-sharing site, FTP them to your web server, or have them printed by a lab? What if you could add a better watermark, add a border, save out metadata as a text file or have more control over exactly what metadata is kept in your exported copies? All of these things (and more) are possible to do right out of Lightroom with the help of a few export plug-ins.

A new addition to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 is the Plug-in Manager. This is simply a new interface for working with your export plug-ins.

You can access the Plug-in Manager two ways—from the File > Plug-in Manager menu or from the Export dialog itself.

Aside from helping you manage your plug-ins the Plug-in Manager even has a button which will link you to the Adobe Lightroom Exchange, which is a one-stop shop for finding (and downloading) the current crop of available plug-ins. Plug-ins are all created by third-party developers and new ones are added frequently, so check back from time to time to see what becomes available.

Some of my favorite export plug-ins are:

• LR2/Mogrify, great for adding a custom watermark and borders to exported photos (among many other things).
• Export-to-Flickr, does what it says.
• Jeffrey’s Metadata Wrangler, gives you greater control over the metadata added to exported copies.

There are many others, and more are sure to be added in the future. One of the most amazing things about these plug-ins is that they are either free or very low cost. Once you add these time savers to your workflow you won’t believe your good fortune, so be sure to thank the developers for their efforts!

OK, now that you’ve found a few plug-ins to try you may be wondering about how to get them into Lightroom? A fair question. Here’s how:

Step 1.

Download the plug-in files from the Lightroom Exchange. Export plug-ins have a .lrplugin file extension. Some plug-ins may come packaged in a zip file, so you will need to unzip those before Lightroom will recognize them.

Note: Be sure to check the plug-in developer’s web site for additional installation instructions. Some plug-ins require other applications to be installed to work properly or there may be other special instructions. The web sites are listed with the plug-in information on the Adobe Exchange.

Step 2.

Put the .lrplugin files inside the Modules folder and Lightroom will automatically find them on next launch. This folder is located:

Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Modules

XP: Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Adobe\Lightroom\Modules

Vista: [username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Modules

Here’s a shortcut to that folder. Open the Export dialog, click the After Export drop-down menu and choose Go to Export Actions Folder Now. This will open Windows Explorer (or Finder) to the above-mentioned Lightroom folder, which contains both the Export Actions folder and the Modules folder (along with others). Create a new folder named Modules if you don’t see it listed in the Lightroom folder.

Step 3.

Close and relaunch Lightroom once the plug-in files are in the Modules folder.

When Lightroom is open again, go to File > Plug-in Manager and you should see all the plug-ins listed and displaying a green light. If so, then they are ready to be used. You can also click on each plug-in to see if the developer provided any additional information about the plug-in or possibly a button to check for new versions of the plug-in (many are updated frequently).

Another good reason to check the developer’s web sites is to learn more about how to use each plug-in. Remember, even though you are using these through Lightroom these are not supported by Adobe. Contact the actual plug-in developer if you have any questions or problems with the plug-ins.