Andrew Appleton

Question for you: who uses the Lightroom Publish services? If you do, you’re probably already enjoying the time it’s saving you. Sleeping in later, enjoying extended holidays, spending more time with the kids etc. Ah, choices, choices.

OK, I might be exaggerating. A little. But really, the humble Publish function in LR has to be one of the best tools a busy photographer can have – and it’s been hiding in plain sight if the folks I talk to about it are anything to go by. Trust me. It just saves so much time!

Why? How? Well let’s start by taking a quick look at the nature and functionality of Lightroom. As well as being an excellent RAW convertor, it’s a brilliant organiser of images – I have over 250,000 in my main catalogue and I can rapidly locate anything using a variety of search criteria. I can even find all the images I took at a certain ISO with a selection of camera bodies. And I only store locally the original RAW or PSD files – OK I have some JPGs in the catalogue as well but these are my original full sized-images when I shoot JPG in camera. I don’t store a selection of different-sized files for different purposes with a variety of watermarks – for Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, website use etc. So what do I do instead? I Publish!