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

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

For emailing photos you can do the post processing trick where you have Lightroom open the pictures in your email client after exporting, and leave copies the photos someplace on your hard drive that you have to then delete later because that method requires exporting the files as the first step.

There is a dude (Andréas Saudemont) who made a really cool plug-in so you can email directly from Lightroom skipping the need to actually export the image to a file someplace on your hard drive as an intermediate step.

I have to ask, with all due respect (I love lightroom, it's the only photo management app for me, I couldn't love it more, I know Adobe is a great company, no insult here), what were you guys there at Adobe thinking? How about being able to drag a modified image out of Lightroom and drop it in your mail app (or website creation app) and you actually get the modified version???!!!! Either that or a way to simply email the modified version as Andréas Saudemont's plug-in does smoothly, with no file clutter afterwards? Drag and drop makes the most sense to me. Why does dragging and dropping an image from Lightroom give me the original unmodified version? That seems like it would be the second most popular choice. Maybe you could add a way to pick on a case by case basis, like when you drag and drop an image somewhere a pop-up window asks "do you want the original or modified version?".

This really is a huge hole in Lightroom. I'd recommend Lightroom to people who are less technical and want to use Lightroom's basic features and then be able to email their photos. This just seems like a total no brainer. Make Lightroom so it can compete head to head with programs like Picasa and iPhoto in the ease of use category. It's already every easy to use and intuitive. Sure, the price is high, but it's relative. Make Lightroom more attractive and the price is less of an issue. If more people want to give you their money that's a good thing. Make them want to do that.

If the Adobe code guys aren't reading this forum how about anyone from sales?

With all respect, I love Lightroom and respect Adobe greatly, but you dropped the ball on this one.

[ssprengel]

I don't think it's a case of LR dropping the ball...

Lightroom has access to the original file, a possible preview file, and could render a copy of the original file with LR adjustments.

Which of these that Lightroom would serve-up for drag-and-drop, and whether the delete the file, afterwards, would depend on the destination and LR cannot predict or necessarily know what the destination is for the particular drag-and-drop operation. That is the issue.

In the case of e-mail, you are probably sending a temporarily-created rendered copy of the file that may need to be a particular small size or have a watermark and probably needs to be cleaned up, later.

If you are dragging and dropping onto Photoshop, then it needs the original with the conversion recipe so PS can use ACR to open the file in memory, but how does the conversion recipe get communicated if it is a camera-raw format that doesn't have it embedded in the original file?

If you are dragging and dropping onto a third-party image editor, then LR needs to send a full-sized rendered copy of the file but can't know if it should clean the file up, or if the third-party application has saved it and it should keep it around.

The issue comes down to when you drag-and-drop LR would need to allow you to choose between what happens with Edit In Photoshop, Edit In, and Export, or just sending references to the original files like it does, now, and also would need to know if an intermediate file should be kept or deleted.

This is too much or at least too cumbersome for a simple drag-and-drop process to do, itself, so Adobe has provided separate Edit In, Export and drag-and-drop-original-reference functionality.

[john beardsworth]

Come on Steve, you're being far too forgiving with all that fluff. Users should not need to go looking for plug-ins to email files directly from LR.

It's not rocket science and IIRC it was simply an export preset (limited to Mac) in LR1.

[john beardsworth]

Windows users - see SBSutherland's plugin

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Steve,

I understand what you wrote and I agree 100% with the part of the picture that you described, but I think there's just more to the picture.

I think the fact that it's not easy to email from Lightroom is one of the biggest gripes consumer and semi-pro users have with it. I understand Lightroom's target group is the pro and semi-pro photographers, but if adding an easy way to email photos would attract a very large more consumer-level user group then to me it seems like a no brainer. And if I was in sales, and I saw that with just a very minor tweak to the code we could make a substantial increase in sales I would call that "dropping-the-ball".

I mean honestly, how many people are going to do all the corrections and adjustments they make to a photo and then want to drag and drop the untouched original into an email or web page? Yes, they will want to drag and drop the original to another app in their professional workflow, but when the workflow is done and the finished product is there all nice and pretty, how about an easy way to do something with it.

Again, I realize dropping pictures into emails and web pages is a more consumer-ish thing but go after that market too. And pros do that stuff as well. So if you make it easy to do one or the other, to drag-and-drop either the original or the modified version, you're going to make both the consumer and the pro happy.

You're right, there's many times when the user is going to want to drag and drop the original. And for the professional photographer, that's probably more than 50% of the time.

Now here comes the really important part I want to focus on. How hard would it be for after a photo drag and drop for the app to pop up a dialog box asking "do you want the original or the modified version of this image/images"? Compared to all the lines of code that went into Lightroom, I think it would be a tiny amount. And that right there could satisfy both needs. It could satisfy the pro and the consumer.

Or here's another idea. Holding down the option key while dragging and dropping delivers the modified version instead of the original? How much code would that be? How many people would say "That's cool! I always wished Lightroom could do that!"?

I'm not trying to be argumentative here but I'm honestly telling you there's a number of friends to whom I've not recommend Lightroom but because of lack of an easy (compared to other consumer grade photo management apps) way to use the beautiful photos that Lightroom makes so easy to manage and improve.

I totally love Lightroom. 100%. And for me having to export photos before using them in my web site or emails isn't a show stopper. It's a pain in the posterior, but I deal with it. If I had an easier way to go straight from Lightroom to my emails and web pages it would be heaven.

Now with Andréas Saudemont's plug-in I have an easy way to email my photos straight from Lightroom. I love it and I use it all the time. I'm not trying to plug his product. It's free and I can't even find a donate button on his web site. I emailed him and asked him how I can buy him a beer.

I have to say I've never understood software developers who hard code one choice which is only going to satisfy a portion of their user base (or potential user base if the lack of choice keeps people away) when offering the choice would make everyone happy. Apple is the quintessential example of this. It's Steve's way or the highway for a lot of things, like the user base crying out for an autocorrecting spell check. So guess what, a lot of people use Microsoft's (there I said it and now I feel dirty) Entourage/Outlook email program just for that one feature. Sometimes one feature can make a big difference.

Back to the topic at hand, google "lightroom export to email" and you'll see people are looking for this.

Lightroom is perfect in everything it does. If it just had one or two more features that made it a bit easier to actually use the photos it would appeal to a bigger audience. More people would want to give Adobe their money. I don't see the downside in that, unless they just don't want any more money. In that case, since I'm the one pushing this thing, maybe they could send me the extra money. I'd gladly do that to help make Lightroom better.

Respectfully
Greg Ihnen

[Geoff the kiwi]

I agree with the above comments regarding making the process easy.
If you drag a thumbnail to your email app surely you would want that version emailed - I know I would and do.
Hence my support for this request.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

That seems to be problematic going by the comments on the dude's site, plus it appears that it still requires exporting the files to the hard drive, and it seems to be for Windows only. Andréas Saudemont's plug-in is the cat's meow.

[Lee_Jay]

"How about being able to drag a modified image out of Lightroom and drop it in your mail app (or website creation app) and you actually get the modified version???!!!! "

Which modified version? What size? What export sharpening? What file name? How would that be controlled?

"what were you guys there at Adobe thinking?"

Perhaps what I am, that about a thousand other feature requests are more important than this one, since this one can already be done so easily with the existing tools.

[john beardsworth]

There are always people who have problems! I'm not sure where it exports files (I planned to dig around temp folders) but I've used this happily for a while on a number of machines.

I agree emailing should be built in, as it is in many other cross-platform programs. It could go through Export, though I think it would be easier to use if cloaked behind a File > Email command.

For the reasons Lee Jay specified, I don't think drag and drop works for this.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Well said, Lee.

I'd add that sending images via email is not a good idea, in particular not for pros. Either the images are too small to have impact or they clog up the recipient's Inbox and/or are too big for convenient viewing.

I would expect pros to simply send a link pointing to a gallery generated by LR. This way emails stay small and the pro has full control over the presentation of the images, can use reasonable sizes, etc.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Q: Which modified version?
A: How about the one you're dragging and dropping.

Q: What size?
A: My mail app (Apple Mail) lets me choose that. I can choose small, medium, large or original.

Q: What sharpening?
A: How about the sharpening already applied to the one that's being dragged and dropped?

Q: What file name?
A: How about the file name of the version you're dragging and dropping?

I'm really not trying to be argumentative. I'd say let's not make this more complicated that it is. Want more control than what I answered here above, how about having presets for dragging and dropping just as there are for printing and for exporting.

But even if there were no presets and all you got when you dragged and dropped a file is the modified file as is (existing file name, existing size, existing sharpening) it still would be a big help. And if one could choose whether they got the original or the modified version by something like holding down the option key you could add a feature obviously some people would like without breaking the existing feature, and you could do it with very little code. I just don't see the down side.

Let's say you're working on your web site and you want pics limited to 800px on the longest dimension with medium sharpening, you could click on that preset and just drag and drop pics to your web design app. To do that presently you have to choose those settings, export, then find those files on the hard drive either through the finder or the web design app. You can do it, but it's more work. And as far as I know there's no existing tool that lets you drag and drop the modified version. Is there one?

I'm not sure if anyone commenting here is from Adobe or just other users like myself, but I use a lot of software, I've done a lot of beta testing, and the usual response to suggestions from companies I deal with is one of appreciation.

"about a thousand other feature requests"? Honestly?

[Geoff the kiwi]

I'm in agreement with this. There is already a send by Email set of Presets for Mac Mail and they have no user settings for sharpening, file name, etc. Would it not be too hard to invoke theses options for drag and drop as well.

[Lee_Jay]

"Q: What size?
A: My mail app (Apple Mail) lets me choose that. I can choose small, medium, large or original.

That's a lousy way to do it. Does your mail application apply proper sharpening after using proper size reduction methods like Lightroom does? The difference are far from subtle.

Q: What sharpening?
A: How about the sharpening already applied to the one that's being dragged and dropped?

Because I'm talking about export sharpening, which should be done by Lightroom, not the email application, because it's done *after* resizing.

Q: What file name?
A: How about the file name of the version you're dragging and dropping?

Because that's usually some meaningless name with an index number of some sort in it. It means nothing to those receiving the email. Which does Grandma want, "IMG_3456.jpg" or "Billy at age 1.jpg"?

"To do that presently you have to choose those settings, export, then find those files on the hard drive either through the finder or the web design app."

That's what the desktop is for - temporary working space, just like a real top-of-the-desk. I have my presets set up for that. Things just appear before my eye on the desktop, I drag them from there to where I want them, and then delete. Simple, takes a second.

"about a thousand other feature requests"? Honestly? "

Probably more, actually.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

uh, yeah, that's kinda why I said that maybe the features I'm suggesting aren't for the pros. What the pros want is already there.

But they could very simply add a few features and make the program more attractive to the consumer and semi-pro users. There are a lot of people who are avid digital photo enthusiasts for whom exporting files and then attaching them to emails is too much work or too difficult to comprehend. If they could be accommodated easily why not do it?
If pros don't want to send their photos by email they don't have to. I'm not saying force this on people or take away existing features. I'm saying add two which I think many people would like. Is there a downside to that?

Sure, you can target only the pro user if you want. Question: Are more professional grade or more consumer and prosumer grade cameras sold each year? Which market is bigger? If you can have both why wouldn't you?

Lightroom is a beautiful program, I wouldn't use anything else. I had Aperture only so I could give my mom tech support with it since she outgrew iPhoto when she got her D7000, but I hated Aperture and as soon as I found the plug-in for emailing pics directly from Lightroom I switched her to it as well. Lightroom iss easy to use and intuitive. Everything it has is already easy enough to use for the consumer/prosumer type user, but what those folks want to do is email their pics and put them on their websites without hassle. If that could be done easily, why not do it? If a feature can be added without breaking another what's the downside? I'm not saying dumb down Lightroom, I'm saying make it easier for casual users to get their pictures out of Lightroom and where they want them and I think you'll target a bigger audience.

If the attitude on this forum is don't come here with your complaints/suggestions because we already have "about a thousand other feature requests" then why not put that in the terms of use or a sticky so people know not to bother posting.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

What I still don't understand is the way you want to do it already exists. I'm not saying take that away. What's the problem? Why won't you consider allowing another way?

I get the feeling you think people should do it the "right" way and if they're not up to it then they shouldn't be using Lightroom. And guess what, that's the current reality. I'm sure there's people who don't use Lightroom because there's no "email" button or simple way to drag and drop the modified version to another app. So you're probably selling less copies than you could. I'm not sure I understand your business model.

I'd be willing to bet that if you took a group of consumer and basic prosumer types and gave them a free copy of Lightroom and let them import and tweak their photos they'd find it easy and intuitive and usable, and then when you show them what they have to do to get their photos into their emails and web sites you'd see an obvious disappointment.

Please understand, I get what you're saying. I'm a programmer and a hard core computer user, network designer and administrator. I do what you say and I like the control Lightroom gives me over export size, sharpening, file naming etc. I get it, I get it. I like it. Why not add an easier way too if it doesn't break anything?

[ssprengel]

In regards to drag-and-drop being easy and so why not do it for e-mailing:

In general the e-mail client expects the list of filenames that are drug over to already exist and immediately be available for reading via the operating system when you release the mouse. The modified files would not exist, yet, at the time of the drag-and-drop, so how would LR give the e-mail client the modified versions, easily?

I include the word “easily” because I can think of a way to do it, but it is not trivial:

When you install LR, it also installs a system device that could be referenced as \\Lighroom\Export (this is server-share notation and I’m not sure that device-notation is the same but it should be understandable what I’m talking about) and if you know what to pass to it, in terms of a file-path, this device would serve up the modified version of file specified in the path. The way it would work is that when you did Option/Alt-Drag-and-Drop, the list of filepaths LR gives the e-mail client would be relative to that system device, and would include a unique LR identifier that specified which image and which virtual copy of it to render and return as a file-like byte-stream.

For example, when you just drag-and-drop you get the originals so the e-mail client would see something like:
C:\MyPictures\Image1.CR2
C:\MyPictures\Image2.CR2
etc

But if you did an Option/Alt-drag-and-drop the list of paths LR could drop onto the e-mail client would be:
\\Lightroom\Export\8C614B8C-8278-489E-9DAC-9D10F3E3958B\Image1.jpg
\\Lightroom\Export\6790753E-0B51-48A8-AF85-BAB82BD8C994\Image2.jpg
etc

The coding necessary to make LR be a pull-from server instead of just a push-to client is not a small undertaking, although it would be awesome.

If I were doing it, I might change the gibberish to include an Export-preset name, the physical file path, and an optional virtual-copy-number, so I could read from the LR device with other sorts of programs not related to drag-and-drop and allow it to drive my webserver photo-gallery without having to have copies of JPGs laying around.

I am not suggesting that Adobe would ever do this, or at least not before they developed a multi-user client-server version of Lightroom that would lend itself to such an extension, but it is to illustrate that what seems so simple based on our experience with a computer, is not necessarily simple behind the scenes, and Adobe’s adding a function to LR is not based on how trivial the users see it, but on how hard it actually it to implement vs the revenue generated from such an addition.

The current solutions are to use an Export plugin to send e-mails, or to just export to a folder, and drag-and-drop from that folder to the e-mail client.

[Lee_Jay]

"Why not add an easier way too if it doesn't break anything? "

Every added feature means a different feature isn't added, because the team is time and resource limited. All I'm saying is that something that can be done effortlessly already is far lower on the priority list for me than a lot of other things that are either very difficult or impossible to do right now.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Somehow the boneheads that write the cheap, cheesy consumer grade photo management/adjustment software find this very easy to do. I have a hard time understanding why Adobe's team of top notch programmers don't. I'm not being sarcastic. Adobe's programs are top shelf, not cheap but worth every penny and then some. I wouldn't consider using anything other than Lightroom and I'd own other Adobe apps if I could afford them.

Anyway, I think this dead horse has been beat to death. I can agree to disagree on this.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

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. : - )

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

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.

[Geoff the kiwi]

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

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

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?

[Lee_Jay]

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

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

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.

[Mark Sirota]

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.

[john beardsworth]

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