As a photographer it is likely that you work in Adobe Lightroom to select and edit your photos before publication. When are ready for publication on your WordPress site, how do you sync Lightroom to WordPress without uploading them manually?
In this post I will discuss the options that I considered as well as the choice I made to make life easier in this respect.
The issue
When you are ready to publish your photos on your own WordPress site, you basically need to export them as JPGs from Lightroom and upload them manually into WordPress. This is an extra step that could be made more efficient if you would be able to publish from Lightroom directly into WordPress. My previous post on images taken in Metz, France are a good example of this.
WordPress provides an API that uses an HTTP POST request to upload a file. This opens possibilities for Lightroom plugins to offer an integration of WordPress into Lightroom. Knowing this, I went for a search a Lightroom plugin that uses this capability of WordPress.
Here’s the plugins that I found that could be helpful in this respect:
- WP/LR sync by Meow Apps
- Photo Upload by New P Products
Both plugins will be discussed below.
WP/LR Sync
WP/LR sync consists of two components:
- a Lightroom plugin that provides a publishing service for collections to WordPress
- a WordPress plugin that enables you to create galleries in WordPress and embed these in a post using a shortcake.
The WordPress plugin is free, while the Lightroom plugin requires a yearly fee based on the number of web sites that you are using the plugin for. Minimum cost is $ 39 per year.
Pros of this plugin:
- Easy publication to WordPress
- Feature rich
- If you haven’t chosen a gallery yet, it comes with one for free
Cons of this plugin:
- Yearly fee
- If you have settled for a specific gallery already, you are paying for something you do not need
Photo Upload
Photo Upload by New P Products is a Lightroom plugin that supports the upload of photos to a number of upload services:
- Amazon Drive
- Blogger
- Box
- Dropbox
- Flickr
- FTP
- Gmail
- Google Drive
- Google Photos
- OneDrive
- pCloud
- SmugMug
- Tree Mirror
- Tumblr
- WordPress
- Zenfolio
You can choose which service you want to use, you a pay a one time fee of $15 per service. So, if you would like to use both WordPress and Google Photos as your upload target, you pay a one time fee of $30.
The plugin provides a Publishing service for WordPress, that enables you to create a collection and publish this collection to WordPress.
Pros of this plugin:
- Range of other services that you can upload to (with and additional one-time fee)
- Cheap, with a one-time fee
Cons:
- Can’t think of any
My choice
So, both plugins utilize the build upload API of WordPress to directly publish images from Lightroom. WP/LR Sync provides an additional gallery option that you may want to use, although I myself have standardized on the Jetpack galleries that are included with the Jetpack plugin.
Having said that, the Photo Upload plugin allows you to upload to other services as wel, albeit with an additional one-time fee. The WP/LR Sync plugin requires a yearly fee.
In the end, I decided to choose the Photo Upload plugin:
- I’d rather pay a one-time fee than committing to a yearly recurring fee (that is higher than the one-time fee of Photo Upload as well)
- I like to idea to have one plugin that allows me to upload to various other services. This makes it easy to use.
Conclusion
So, there you have it. My two cents regarding automated photo upload via Lightroom Publishing Services enables me to create a collection of selected images and use the Photo Upload plugin to keep these images in sync with what is stored on my WordPress site.
On my WordPress site, I can use the gallery of my preference to present the images on my web site. I am not forced into using a specific gallery.
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