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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

Participating Frequently
July 3, 2018
Hey Adobe give me your source code and I'll write it for you. Piece of cake.
FrostyOfTheNorth
Known Participant
June 25, 2018
Hi Victoria, I think the most elegant way would be to create export sets that contain export presets.  Run the export set and all the exports presets inside would run sequentially.  Surely that's doable and would save me so many steps every day.
Known Participant
June 25, 2018
Option 1 set up an export group - that group defines xx exports - for each you choose file type, resolution, diectory, etc

Option 2 - dialog box, checkbox your existing presets
Inspiring
June 25, 2018
That's because this feature doesn't exist.  The question was how it should work.  There should be check boxes next to each preset . . . select the ones you want, and press go.
Participating Frequently
June 25, 2018
There're no boxes to check.
Inspiring
June 25, 2018
Easy: open export dialog, check the boxes next to each preset you want to use, click export and let it run.
Victoria Bampton LR Queen
Community Expert
Community Expert
June 25, 2018
How would you envisage this being set up? At the moment, you can do it by returning to the image dialog multiple times. If it was done in a single trip to the export dialog, how would you expect to be able to set the settings for each size?
Victoria - The Lightroom Queen
FrostyOfTheNorth
Known Participant
June 25, 2018
It's been seven years since that first suggestion.  Wish I had hope for this idea to be implemented!
Inspiring
June 25, 2018
I've got to agree with the others.  I often export full size TIFF for publication, fullsize JPG for the client, 2048 or 960 for FB, and low res for email.  For some I also do Full HD, UW-FHD, or QHD for wallpapers.  All of these actions take up loads of time to repeat or to do outside of LR.  This should be a dead simple thing to output multiple resolutions at the same ratio.  Please add this!
Inspiring
December 9, 2017


Can have a way to export files at multiple settings? I often export the
same file two or three different sizes & into different
folders....Instead of manually selecting different export presets, would
there be a way to combine the exports so they all happen with one
preset that does multiple variations?