Lightroom export settings for publishing service to hard drive

I believe that if you select "Image#" rather than "Sequence#" in the file renaming template editor, that will continuously increment the number it uses rather than beginning again for each batch. 

However I can't really see any benefit to applying numbering at this stage. One of the benefits of Publish, is that it can detect when a given image has been further edited since the last time published. and replace the first external file with a suitably updated version, intelligently. A numbering sequence within the Publish setup will sabotage that since the newly made filename and the previously made one, are pretty much guaranteed not to match.

In any case the sequencing of images within a Publish set will not be meaningful or consistent once repeated Publish of the changing source set has happened. There will be gaps for removed images, and either conflicts of different images getting the same numbering / the same image getting different numbering on different occasions - depending on which numbering method you choose.

IMO it is better to use some other naming method for the Publish, which naturally associates back to its source image within the Catalog. If someone says they liked your published image number 17 but want some changes, how are you going to later work out whihc image they mean? Given your LrC Publish Collection may now have different membership than it did before.

Best IMO to use a method which will repeatably assign the same filename to the same image, if that is output more than once. If you truly need to include an ever-increasing index number, maybe Import is the place to do that. Then whenever the same image gets re-output, its naming will naturally repeat the same, and the external version will overwrite properly.

My own recommendation is simple: I don't rename anything at import. I can't see any benefit in sequence numbering: the images' metadata and camera filenames are enough for all purposes I can envisage. For export or for Publish purposes, I prefix the original camera file name with the capture date in standard ISO format - YYYY-MM-DD. Those two combine as a unique reference (even if the in-camera counter were to circle back to zero again) that is positively informative. And this method chronologically sorts the image files by default - regardless of the, accidental, order in which they were imported to LR - or, in which they have been later output / re-output.

Part of the problem might be that when new images are added to the publish service, Lightroom Classic is probably thinking of them as their own export job that doesn’t change images already exported. It’s only sequence-renaming the new ones. For all of them to be renamed, all of the images would have to be in the same export job.

For example (I haven’t tried this): What happens if you select all existing images in the Publish Service, right-click any of them, and choose Mark to Republish to reset their status and add them to the unpublished ones, then click Publish? Does that replace everything in the folder with one correctly numbered sequence, or does it leave incorrectly renumbered files?

I'm typing this on my iPad so I can't verify this, but I do not think this is possible with Lightroom's renaming options. Sequences only work for a single series of images, the counter is reset when you publish a second series. There is also another way of adding numbers, but in that case the counter does not increment between series, so you'll get the same problem.