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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

    Show previous replies
    F
    FeedbackCommunityMember
    Inspiring
    August 22, 2015


    Exporting actions:
    I often send out files with High Res version and Screen Res versions. I have two presets that I have to do one, then the other. I think that Lightroom would benefit wholly if you were able to export to multiple locations and in multiple formats with a single preset.
    So like I would have it make a folder (Job Name) and in that would contain (High Res), .tiffs for instance, and (Screen Res) that has jpegs. All with one click.
    M
    Marcus-J-TAuthor
    Known Participant
    April 30, 2015
    "Would be great if Adobe could find a solution to efficiently export multiple formats."

    It's not difficult, LR has to generate a max-res image during export anyway and then resizes it to the target size - it's only the last stage that needs to be enhanced to support multiple target sizes.

    The problem is that Adobe clearly isn't interested in implementing this suggestion/feature, which is fair enough as it's only had 5 likes since I posted the suggestion back in 2011.

    Meanwhile, time has moved on and I now have 100Mb broadband so I now export at 2048 and upload that to both Facebook and my SmugMug site, so I no longer need the feature myself as originally requested, though I would like to have a second copy automatically exported at the same size into a different (ideally sub-) folder without my usual watermark.
    hans3d
    hans3d
    Participating Frequently
    April 28, 2015
    when Time is critical I sometimes just export the Full Res JPGs out of LR and then use something like Xnview (http://www.xnview.com/) to generate the smaller versions.
    But of course thats not the best way as it is a cumbersome workaround and its rendering new JPGs out of existing JPGs, potentially increasing artifacts.

    Would be great if Adobe could find a solution to efficiently export multiple formats.
    hans3d
    hans3d
    Participating Frequently
    April 26, 2015


    Lightroom Image Export: Multiple Image Size exports at once

    I often export my images in 2 or 3 different sizes: fullres, 4800px and 1920px (HD)
    Right know it seems like LR is calculating all devopements AGAIN for each export wich seems to be an excessive workload.
    It would be great if we could specify MULTIPLE Size and sharpening Outputs alltogether with one Export Task, thus LR could do all its develope calculations on one Image, keep the resulting image in memory and then resize, sharpen and output to the different output sizes from there.

    Much like the outputs in AfterEffects where i can easyly specify multiple formats at once
    M
    Marcus-J-TAuthor
    Known Participant
    July 11, 2012
    Catchy indeed! And your help is appreciated, thank you Rob!
    areohbee
    areohbee
    Legend
    July 11, 2012
    Yep - export-manager saves clicks, not ticks (hmmm, catchy huh?)

    However, preview-exporter does save ticks (no re-rendering) - suitable for quick jpegs at reduced size or quality. (not appropriate for max quality jpegs. - although the jpegs start out at max quality, you are always re-jpeging a jpeg, instead of re-rendering the raw).

    Not disagreeing with the original request (quite the opposite in fact), just tryin' ta help...

    Rob
    M
    Marcus-J-TAuthor
    Known Participant
    July 11, 2012
    @705730 - Thanks, ExportManager helps a little but it's still a slow process thanks to the multiple renders.

    @Phil & @apmadoc - Sounds we all have similar problems, and the ability to export multiple presets with a single render pass would be the solution that works for everyone.
    T
    tudor@apmadoc.net
    Known Participant
    July 11, 2012
    I need to do batch exports. Example:
    1. Select a group of photos
    2. Batch export :
    a. Full Res TIF
    b. Full Res JPG
    c. Resized JPG

    Each to their own directory

    Ideas?

    P
    PhilD11
    Participant
    July 11, 2012
    To prepare the files that my wedding clients require, I have to export three versions of every file: one is full resolution, the next is an A4 resolution, the final is a facebook size with a watermark.

    Instead of clogging LR up with re-rendering files that have already been rendered (and this process has actually caused disk problems for me in the past - don't know why, but maybe something to do with RAID1?), please we have the option to export the same file with multiple presets?

    So, it would basically allow you to queue up presets. Once it has rendered the file, it would run that file through the queue of presets and not move into the next until it has finished the queue.

    This would massively speed up exporting and reduce the hit on my disks.

    areohbee
    areohbee
    Legend
    October 6, 2011
    Two things you may want to consider in the mean time:

    ExportManager - will initiate multiple exports, one after the other (or in parallel). Re-renders each time, but at least you get it done with one click.

    PreviewExporter - Exports from the preview cache for fastest export in the west (or east).
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