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Marcus-J-T
Known Participant
October 5, 2011
Released

P: Export images at multiple resolutions in one go

  • October 5, 2011
  • 113 replies
  • 5071 views

I have discovered through experimentation that photos published to Facebook look best at 2048 pixels on the longest side (the maximum it supports) but images measuring 960 pixels on the longest side come a very close second so that's what I export at when Facebook.

I also publish the images on my own website, which uses SmugMug as a backend and is capable of automatically displaying delivering higher resolution photos (than Facebook) to the browser depending on the viewport size, so I export at 1400px resolution to strike a balance between filesize and image quality.

My problem is that it's not currently possible to export these two sets of images at the same time, I have to do them one after each other (because doing them in parallel is MORE than twice as slow due to LR's poor parallelisation of task execution), manually switching between different export resolutions and folders.

Instead, I would like to be able to pick two (or more) resolutions to export at, set (sticky) subfolder names for them (so that they end up in separate folders within the base export folder), and set LR to export all the images in one go. This would save me a huge amount of manual faffing around every time I export, and because LR would only have to fully render each image once (instead of twice as at present) it would dramatically reduce the total time taken to export both sets of images.

I realise that it should be possible to write a plugin to achieve this (and I'm looking into it) but surely exporting a set of images multiple times at varying resolutions is a fairly common use case (e.g. web/client DVD res and print ordering res for wedding photos) and it would therefore be of benefit to a significant proportion of the LR user base to make it worthwhile Adobe implementing it as a native feature?

    113 replies

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    S
    Scott_Martin_
    Known Participant
    August 29, 2016
    Bridge is much better - but with a  relatively small amount of work Lightroom could easily be better than Bridge...
    L
    Lumigraphics
    Legend
    August 29, 2016
    On the Mac, its pretty easy to have a watched folder and an Automator action which would save out various sizes. Export (let's say) to full resolution JPEG and then resize those using Automator.

    You can also use Bridge and Image Processor Pro with Photoshop. I have not tested but I believe you can create a Photoshop action droplet and specify that as a post-export action in Lightroom, but for batch processing, Bridge is MUCH better.
    T
    TCtopcat22
    Participant
    August 29, 2016


    Think this would be a great update to have in future. I would love to set up a preset package to export from with say 3 different quality sizes to its own folder say high res ,medium and small. but you give the package folder a main name. for example to have : Chris wedding HQ, Medium, SML
    FrostyOfTheNorth
    FrostyOfTheNorth
    Known Participant
    July 12, 2016
    That doesn't sound like an ideal solution.
    K
    knipsefritze
    Participating Frequently
    July 12, 2016
    I tried everything I could find and ended up with Rob Cole's Export Manager plugin for LR back in version 3. It still works in version 6, but you have to manually activate it through the plugin manager vevery time you restart LR 6, which unfortunately happens automatically every time I switch to another catalogue (also a thing that I don't get. Why can you not have two catalogues open at the same time as you can in almost any program?).
    And while LR is rendering the export sets, it is wise not to touch it, because it can get confused and mix up your files. If you have a selection of files for export and initiate the export, it will not remember the selection of fies, when you deselect them to work on something else while LR renders in the background (I think that is called multitasking;-) ) If it was true multitasking though, you should be able to make a selection, initiate an export for that selection and then be able to work on another selection while rendering, right?
    But maybe that is working with LR 6 now, I have not tested it, because the time it takes me to check if everything did render fine, would take me longer than letting LR just render everything and then go on working. 
    A
    agile_Marshmallow15A7
    Participant
    July 12, 2016


    Many photographers must output files for clients in several sizes and formats. Sure we all created export presets. Right now I'm close to one hundred of those. With client specific file names sizes etc.

    I'd love to see a new feature where you can group several export actions into one export action set or group. Thus enabling a one click, multiple export.

    I'm not a programmer but I assume that most functioanlity for this is already there. By the way capture one has this nice feature already
    FrostyOfTheNorth
    FrostyOfTheNorth
    Known Participant
    July 12, 2016


    I find myself often needing to run 3-4 export presets from Lightroom for the same image. (e.g. one sized for blog posts to a specific folder, another for low-resolution, another for high resolution, another to Dropbox, etc.). I've been running each preset manually one after another.

    It would be so helpful to be able to assign export presets to groups so that running a group would run the whole set of export presets.
     
    F
    FeedbackCommunityMember
    Inspiring
    October 6, 2015
    I'm only working with Lightroom since a few weeks. But since then I've run into so many limitations (small stuff, but extremely hampering the workflow) of this software were I can't understand how Adobe actually managed to keep it's business alive. All the Pros who use it daily must go mental.
    This multiple export thing is also one of those issues. To run several presets one after the other is so time and energy wasting and ridiculously stupid that one just wants to smash his head against the wall. Even the Freeware Canon DPP software can do that.
    The Xnview tip is really good. I know it since several years. It's batch processing is a real treat. Scaling, Watermarking, rotating etc. etc. at a very high speed with the newer MP version. Adobe, you can learn from that software a lot and also maybe start to listen to the users/costumers who actually pay you.
    S
    Scott_Martin_
    Known Participant
    September 1, 2015
    I've always been a big fan of Photoshop's Image Processor Pro script for this purpose, and would love to see something similar in LR. The biggest need/ example that I see for this in the field is commercial photographers that want to deliver a folder of low res sRGB JPEGs and a folder of full res, press ready CMYK TIFFs to a client. So expanding LR"s capability to export to a CMYK color space would be big too....
    S
    shanebettsphotog
    Known Participant
    September 1, 2015
    Aspect ratios need to be saveable to presets as well. Like others in this thread, I would have a one click/keyboard shortcut solution to export to a number of file sizes. I have tried Automator on the Mac but 1. it softens images off and 2. often just goes away and does nothing at all.
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