This is my first article in what will be a several part series on Lightroom’s Export function. This article will focus on what exporting is for and when you should export. Future ones will go into the settings.
Background: Lightroom’s Non-Destructive Approach to Image Editing
Lightroom works non-destructively, meaning that it never touches your original raw or JPEG files. Instead, your editing work is saved separately behind the scenes as a set of instructions. In Lightroom you’re essentially seeing the instructions hovering over your original photos, but the instructions are not baked in to your originals. This is great, as it means that you can undo all or part of your work at any time – you can’t ruin your photo as you work on it!
What Exporting Is For
Because of this non-destructive approach, if you go outside of Lightroom to Mac Finder or Windows Explorer/My Computer and preview files that you have edited, you’ll see that your editing work isn’t there – so you can’t share your edited photos with people by sending them these files. Of course sending people the originals plus sets of Lightroom instructions also isn’t an option. Instead, when you want to share your photos you’ll create copies of them with the editing work applied. These copies are made through the Export dialog.
Should I Export to Save My Work?
Many users believe they need to export copies of all their edited photos in order to save their work – this is not the case, and will simply clutter up your hard drive with unnecessary copies. Your work is being saved automatically in Lightroom’s catalog. (Read more about this in, “How Do I Save My Lightroom Work?“) Instead, exporting copies is only necessary when you want to share your photos with the outside world.
Should I Keep All My Exported Copies?
I almost always delete the exported copies once I send them out since I can always export new copies if I need them again. Each export shows up as an entry in the History panel in the Develop module, so if I have done additional editing since I exported, I can always get back to how it looked when I last exported, if I need to. Some pros, however, do retain the copies that they send to clients so that they have readily-accessible documentation of exactly what was sent out. (Note that while Lightroom will record editing settings when you perform an export, it will not record export settings such as size, so if you need to keep track of these you’ll need to keep your files.)
Whether or Note You’ll Need to Use Lightroom’s Export Dialog
Generally speaking, you’ll export copies by clicking on the Export button in the bottom right in the Library Module, or by going to File>Export…, and then working through the settings.
However, there are other ways to share photos, depending on the circumstance. In these Lightroom does the under-the-cover exporting:
- You can email photos directly from Lightroom. This will save you from the time of exporting JPEGs and attaching them to emails.
- You can upload photos directly to Facebook, Flickr and some other online services using Publish Services, in the bottom left in the Library module.
- Creative Cloud subscribers can “sync” collections of photos to the cloud, at which time they are available on mobile devices and on Lightroom web. You can send clients and friends links to these collections on the web and people can like and comment on them.
- You can create slideshows, web galleries, prints and electronic print layouts, and photo books using Lightroom’s output modules, and then export / upload / print from there.
These are outside the scope of my current Export series, but I thought I’d mention them.
Related Post: Exporting Lightroom: Location Settings
How do you track what versions you sold who?
E.g. You have a master M.
Now you produce a cropped version, and sell a copy to a person A.
The local newspaper asks for it, so you make a lower resolution copy in black and white B.
You use it on your web site, so have 6 different low to medium resolution, custom sharpened C1-6
The newspaper calls back. They want permission to crop down to just one person. BA
Now the shoot that produce M produced one like it, M2, with slight differences that occur with two shots 3 seconds apart. IT has it’s own history.
And so it goes.
Two years later someone calls back and wants a higher res version of the one they bought.
This is one of those professional examples where it can make sense to keep them, Sherwood, particularly since there’s no way to record sizes exported or other export settings. You can keep notes on the side with the details, or you can add these exported files to the catalog and put notes in the metadata. That said, I personally wouldn’t keep C1-6 – once they’re on my website, they are stored there (and that should be backed up.)
Btw, if you do decide to add them to the catalog, it can be handy to stack them with the original. I’ll cover this in my next article. Thanks btw, Sherwood, for your example!
My preferred way of keeping track of delivered photos whether to customers or just to social media is to create for each image delivery an annotated Snapshot. Each Snapshot takes very little room in the catalog and I label each with the date and important particulars about what I delivered (e.g., B&W, Aspect Ratio (2:3), Long Edge (LE=640), and so on). I also create regular collections for customers and other delivery targets (e.g., Flickr) and add each image to the appropriate collection. With such collections, I can always see what deliveries were produced for each each customer by right clicking the image and hovering over “Go to Collection”, and with the Snapshots I can recreate any delivered image. In this way, I don’t clutter my HD with extra copies that also need organizing.
I like your solution a lot, Sam – thank you for sharing it. Snapshots, as you say, allow you to label what the export was for, whereas the line automatically created in the History panel just shows the date exported. Collections are a good idea as well. Neither of these allows for identification of whether the export was a low resolution or high resolution one, for example, but I suspect that most users don’t need this (as Sherwood does). (One could keep a record of this info in the metadata for the image – the caption field, for example.)
I simply put the name of the client in the Export sub folder and add to the catalog.
Hi Sherwood, I understand that you wrote to us stating that you were trying to unsubscribe to my newsletter but were unable to. My assistant sent you an email indicating that the email address you wrote to us from is not in our database, but he did not hear back from you. Please write to us again letting us know what email address you receive the newsletter at or forward us a newsletter, and we will unsubscribe that address. I take requirements surrounding subscriptions seriously.
Dear Laura.
Thank you for your email, and for the Adobe updates, your newsletter makes very interesting reading.
Best Wishes.
John.
You’re welcome, John – and thank you for your note!
I’d like to be save by RAW files along with their Lightroom adjustments using my Amazon Prime photo storage as part of my online backup strategy. Is there a way to do this?
I’m not familiar with Amazon’s service, Ron. Ideally you’d upload your photo files and the Lightroom catalog. If you can’t do this, then second best would be to write your work out to XMP files (though this wouldn’t include collections, virtual copies, step-by-step edit history, or pick/reject flags) and upload these along with the photo files. If it won’t do this, then I’d look for another cloud service. I use BackBlaze, which backs up all my user files on my computer and external drives, regardless of file type.
Note that Facebook has removed the ability to use Lightroom publish to post to FB and instagram which is the owner of.
I’m starting to post JPEGs to stock agencies- Royalty-Free (RF) for now, but maybe Rights Managed (RM) later. RF images can be posted to several agencies. RM is exclusive to one.
1) How can I export keywords so I don’t have to enter the keywords twice- once for LR and again for the agency?
2) I’m thinking of creating three keyword hierarchies under a root, PIX;
a) Category keywords (folders such as Abstract, Airplanes, Architecture…)
b) Descriptive keywords ( horizontal/vertical, color(s), moods, concepts, seasons, location…)
c) Control keywords (Clients, Online Sales Venues, Agencies & within Agency submitted/accepted/rejected)
The first two hierarchies are for export, the third is not and will be used to help me manage what I’ve done with a given image. I’ve been looking at Smart Collections to do this. The particular problem is that a given image can be accepted by one agency, but not another. So, I need a way to have the Submitted keyword apply within an agency that has received the photo and further apply either the Accepted or Rejected keyword as things progress, but specifically to the image in the context of that agency.
If I understand Smart Collections, they are a kind of ‘permanent query’ of the attributes of images that produce an up-to-date result of all images satisfying the conditions of the SC I could query the Submitted keyword at any time and get a result of all the images I’ve submitted to all the agencies, but it wouldn’t tell me (directly) to which agency and what the status of the image is. I would have to look at each image’s keywords to see that. I’m hoping the Smart Collection, if created with the correct specifics, would give me all the agencies I’ve submitted IMG_xxxx to or give me all the images that have been accepted by Agency-A.
Is this a workable method, and if not, what would you recommend as a way to keep things straight?
Many thanks!
Hi Michael, by default keywords are exported as long as you include all metadata in the Export dialog metadata options. For those you don’t want to include, right-click on the keyword in the Keyword List panel and uncheck Will Export. Yes, smart collections can be used to track your various scenarios … set them up to require the keywords you want to track, for example, submitted, agency=X, etc.
Thank you! I apologize for not having responded to your answer sooner. It’s good to know that I can keep track of submissions via Smart Collections. I still am not clear as to how the output of keywords from LR will get to a stock agency. I’ll have to check with them to find out their particular method(s).
When you export, Michael, assuming you choose to include all metadata, the keywords tag along in the metadata section of the files, and the stock agency will be able to see them using Lightroom, Bridge or whatever they use. Do a test – export a copy, and at the top of the export dialog choose “add to this catalog” so that the copy will show in Lightroom. After export select that copy in LR and look at the Keywords panel – you should see the keywords. (Then delete the file now that the test is over.)
Great idea, Laura! I expect I’ll have keywords that I will use for my internal control so I won’t be exporting them, but the others I certainly will. Now, i have to contact the agency to find out exactly how they want to receive the keywords. My aim is not to have to enter them twice, once for LR on my end and then in the Contributor’s portion on the agency end. I guess I don’t have a mental picture of how this will get done on the agency side. Time to ask them, directly.