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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

Known Participant
October 6, 2011
I contacted Jeffrey Friedl, the well known developer of various invaluable Lightroom goodies - see http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies - and he said that it's NOT currently possible to write a plugin to export to more than one resolution & service at the same time, so Adobe at least need to improve the API to make this possible.

Specifically, Jeffrey said:

"I'd need the ability to invoke an export via an export preset. The feature
request has been in their internal system for some time... [so] They know about it, and I'm sure they'd like to have it if there weren't
other more pressing features to attend to..."

So Adobe, please at the very least implement this API enhancement and ideally add multiple export resolutions/destinations to the LR native functionality!
Known Participant
October 6, 2011
That doesn't solve the problem because it still requires me to publish twice (and in doing so cause LR to churn through all the photos twice), and recently the publish services feature stopped working for reasons unknown, which is an entirely different issue of course.
Inspiring
October 5, 2011
Are you not using publish services for this?