P: a simple way to email, and drag and drop modified versions

When I call my email client from the export screen, it doesn't embed the JPEG created into a new message or even into a message that's already been created. Thus I'm not sure that would work for all situations, John.

I'm surprised to hear from Victoria that this is so popular. Among average users, I'm the only person I know that even uses an email client. Everyone else uses web-based email, and as far as I know, drag-and-drop doesn't work there for any file source.

Well maybe you both are privy to some inside information since you both talk with authority about how many other feature requests there are and the limited resources of the developers. I'm sure you can understand my assuming you must be company employees. I also know it's not unusual for employees to masquerade as users on company forums just as it's also common practice for companies to have shills who lurk the forums and keep discussions going in the right direction.

Drag and drop is a dead end for this FR - far too much coding effort for what it's worth. Once you drop files on the other app, you are at the mercy of how that other app responds to having stuff dropped on it. From that point you can't necessarily intercept what it's doing and summon up Lightroom's export dialog for good stuff like sizing, watermarks etc. You'd need to know the exact email app, and how to communicate with it. And you know the fun Adobe have with Apple's iToons....

All that's needed here is to wrap what's fundamentally an export call inside a top level File > Email menu command, and then (I suspect) invoke the computer's current default email client once with a string of JPEGs as command line arguments (a regular export action command invokes the other app once for each file exported). It's then up to the user to ensure they tell the OS that their preferred email client should be recorded as such in the OS.

John

It could be as simple as dragging out of Lightroom brings up the Export dialog, with the exported photos going to wherever you dropped. Assuming that's technically possible.

Doesn't this forum bring out the best in people... ;-)

The request gets my vote for a simpler way to email. It's probably my most frequently asked question from newer users, which has to suggest it needs some attention. Whether there's a way of integrating the drag/drop, or just a smoother built-in way of exporting to standard email software (at least the OS defaults), is not a major concern to me, however sending new users off to find plug-ins IS a problem to needs to be addressed.

Greg, TK and I are both users like you, not Adobe employees.

TK, like I said, let's agree to disagree. I believe it's evident that you have a philosophical problem with what I'm suggesting. Maybe you feel it would make Lightroom seem too consumer-ish and maybe you have a problem with that or you feel it might turn off the professional user base if it looks like the app is moving in the direction of becoming a consumer grade app. Or maybe you've gone out on a limb there at Adobe against these features and now can't back track. I'm extremely happy that with the plug-in I found I can email my processed images directly from Lightroom now and I hope someone writes a plug-in to add dragging and dropping of processed images. It would make my life a lot easier. As it is now I have folders where I export all the images I use on my web site. The process now is I have to go through my Lightroom library and pick the photos I want to use. Then because I can't click and drag the processed images, oh no, instead I have to export and find them later so now naming is critical so I can find them later. The file names wouldn't be an issue if I could just drag the images into my website authoring program. But I can't so I have to make sure as I export the images out of Lightroom that I pick names that I'll recognize later but how complex can you get with file names? It's not as powerful as key wording and all the other ways one can find specific pics in Lightroom. The names are still rather generic. And because names are critical in finding the pics after they're exported it means if I want to export 10 pictures but two are of dogs, and three are kids and the rest are landscape I have make sure I put the name "dogs" into the export dialog box when I export the dog pics, and then export the kids with the name "kids", then export the landscape pics with the name "landscape". But I've got lots of other pics of kids and dogs and landscapes that I've already exported for my website, so I have to go into the finder and sort the pics in those folders by date so I can find the most recent exports and bring those into my website authoring app. If I could do it within Lightroom and skip the exporting I could just highlight those 10 pics, drag them into my destination app and I'm done. So what could be really simple is a whole big process.

All I can say in closing is I know a lot of people who wouldn't consider using Lightroom because of the issues I mentioned. You don't want their money. Fine. You've decided people shouldn't email photos. But you do mention that it's good practice for someone to put their photos on their own site and send people to their site, but that process is awkward as I mentioned above.

I understand your explanation that the images with processing applied don't exist as files till one exports them, so that's why now clicking and dragging an image yields the original. So you'd have to have Lightroom generate a temporary file with the processing applied and pass that to the destination app. It must be harder than it sounds. Understand I co-authored an HF radio based distributed server email system that was used for many years by missionaries in the jungle, I wrote the radio control/transport software. I have a grasp on these issues. You already have code that exports the images with the processing applied when a person does an export. So to do what I'm suggesting (drag and drop with processing applied) you'd need to execute that code and generate a temporary file and pass that file to the destination app. "Pull-from-server"? "Push-to-client"? What?

I don't believe emailing images is a bad practice at all and is useful for the vast majority of images and uses. I use email to send jpegs to newspapers regularly, is this bad?? Not in my mind or the papers, that's what works best for both of us. Also emailing files for prints at photolabs is common practice.
Would I send a large file for critical use by email - no.
And as mentioned, it works to drag and drop to Apple Mail already but the file used contains no processing so to have the file show up in mail as it does in the Lightroom preview

Greg, you said "And pros do that stuff as well." that's why I talked about pros. Also, I think what makes sense for a pro, can also make sense for a semi-pro / amateur. Flickr, Picasaweb, etc. provide a way to (even privately) share images that are far better than sending them via email.

You of course have a very valid point in that adding your feature would not hurt anyone not using it.

However, notice that there are much more important issues in Lightroom to address and that you are competing about valuable development resources with other feature requests, so you should understand people who are reluctant to embrace a feature request that asks for a bad way of accomplishing something while there is a good way of accomplishing the same thing already.

I think that dragging a folder or collection into an email client, causing images uploaded to a specified location (Flickr, Picasaweb, own website) and then inserting the link to the set of images into the email might be useful.

But supporting the use of a bad practice (attaching images to emails), I'm not in favour of.

Well let's agree to disagree on whether or not this can be done effortlessly. I can tell you I know a lot of digital photo enthusiasts for whom the current method isn't effortless. In fact I know more people in that category than I do folks who'd think the current way is sufficiently easy to justify buying and using Lightroom.

But, since you're the guy who brings me new cool features with each new release I really can't complain (which I'm really not, I'm just offering a suggestion). Each new version has been a big improvement and worth the price of admission. : - )