L/R Blog Plugin to Export Photographs from Lightroom to Blogs

I’m excitedly testing the L/R Blog Plugin  by photographers-toolbox.com. This tool enables export of photos directly from Lightroom into a Blog, including interface with five different popular blog platforms.

Heart Lake, Haystack Mountain & James Peak

This is a test image I’ve just successfully exported from LR into As Seen by Janine’s Photo Blog.  It’s not a new photo;  just an old favorite I chose for a practice export from Lightroom directly to WordPress.      

The plugin is installed into the Lightroom application’s Plugin Manager and works much like other Publish Services available in Lightroom, such as Facebook, Flickr and SmugMug.

The export worked great and was very easy to use. There is lots of support documentation available on the plugin developer’s site to help download, install, and setup the plugin to interface with your blog platform, which for me is WordPress.

My test export worked nearly flawlessly. I say “nearly” because the only thing I don’t care for is that during the export, the plugin adds a prefix to the image file name. My original image file name for this photo was <Heart-Lake-Haystack-Mountain-James-Peak.jpg> and after export, the image file name is <wpid4722-Heart-Lake-Haystack-Mountain-James-Peak.jpg>. However, I don’t think adding the prefix hurts the image’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which affects the ability for the photo to be “searchable” since the important keywords in my image file name are still there. It is also very easy to eliminate that prefix in the image caption, which is what ends up being visible on the blog.

This L/R Blog exporter plugin is going to be a lifesaver! The plugin’s features allow numerous customized export options like sharpening, pixel dimensions, maximum file size, batch inclusion of a watermark, and more. There is also a choice whether to upload images only, create a new blog post, or append image to an existing post.

L/R Blog plugin will help me not just for As Seen by Janine’s Photo Blog, but also for my As Seen by Janine: Eyes of the World Images website. I’m building my new website galleries using a Photocrati WordPress theme and I will be importing hundreds of photos over the next weeks to the new site. It certainly will be nice to perform bulk automated exports from Lightroom into my new website’s WordPress Media Library. Then from there, I merely will need to organize the images into galleries within my Photocrati website.

L/R Blog, authored by Timothy Armes, is a plugin worth checking out. L/R Blog has a free trial version, but that limits image exports to 300px size. Paying for the the plugin ($12.95 US) allows full export capabilities. I really believe in making donations for good plugins anyhow, so I’d have paid either way, but certainly, I’m happy to be able to import larger than 300 px photos. I size my blog images to 950px on the longest side. The paid version allows me to have this full export capability, or the ability to specify a maximum file size up to 200 kb.

Check this cool plugin out yourself at L/R Blog Plugin.

Also be sure to check out a few of As Seen by Janine’s other Popular Posts, listed in the Sidebar. 

As Seen by Janine: Eyes of the World Images