The other day I wrote about how you can publish your photos directly from Adobe Lightroom to WordPress using the Dossier de Press.
But what if you have a Facebook page associated with your WordPress blog? Of course, you can use WP plugins like the Jetpack Publicize plugin to push your WP content automatically to Facebook, but what if you just want to quickly publish a picture directly from Lightroom to Facebook, without having to create a corresponding post in your WP blog?
Of course, you can always export a photo from Lightroom to your hard drive and upload it to Facebook (FB) from there, but I don’t like having to store lower resolution versions of my images on my hard drive, if I don’t have to.
If your FB account is a personal FB account, then you can use a capability already built into Lightroom called Publish Services. In the Library Module on the left side tab, just go to Publish Service and click and the +-sign to configure a new publishing service, e.g. to Facebook or Flickr. You of course have to sign into your FB profile on FB to authorize Lightroom publishing to your FB account.
But if you’d like to publish your pictures to your FB fan page that you created from your FB personal account instead, you used to be out of luck, because Lightroom only supports publishing to your personal FB account, not the associated fan pages.
Enter Jeffrey Friedl’s “Export to Facebook” Lightroom plugin. With this plugin, you can choose whether you want to publish your photos from Lightroom to your personal FB account OR any of the fan pages associated with your FB account… Neat! The plugin is free, but if you don’t register it after a while, it’s features will be scaled back. Of course you’re encouraged to donate to the developer when registering.
Installing a plugin into Lightroom (LR) might seem intimidating, but it’s actually really easy:
- Download the .zip file from Jeffreys site above.
- Unpack the .zip file somewhere on your hard drive, ideally where you might have installed other LR plugins already. This will create a directory with a name that ends in .lrplugin. That’s how you recognize LR plugins.
- In LR, click on File -> Plug In Manager. On the lower left of the window that pops up, click Add and in the window that pops up now maneuver to the facebook_jfriedl.lrplugin directory you just created by unpacking the .zip file. Select the facebook_jfriedl.lrplugin directory and click OK.
That’s it!
Once you installed Jeff’s plugin, in the LR Library Module go to the left panel, scroll down to the Publish Services and right-click on the Publish Service you just installed and click on Settings to configure the plugin.
Once you’ve installed and configured the plugin, you can start using it for publishing photos to your FB page or FB fan page by right-clicking on the FB Publish Service again, and clicking Create Album… Now you can fill this album with images by drag-and-dropping pictures from the grid in the middle to the FB Publish Service. Once you added all the photos you’d like to publish to FB you right-click on the FB Publish Service again and click “Publish Now”. LR should now upload the photos in this album to FB and you should see them there, in FB.
Let me know if you have any questions by posting a comment.
Yours Robert “The Vagabond”