Lightroom no longer support major social media?

[Angela Maloney]

So I feel really stupid asking this. But I'm trying to upload photos to any of the major social media sites from within Lightroom. In particular, I want to put photos on Flickr, but other sites would be nice too. I found lots of info on how to do that in older versions of Lightroom Classic from back in 2013. But nothing on the current version. Has that been removed from version 4.2?

Angie

[Jao vdL]

it never was possible to do this in the Cloud version of Lightroom when run on desktop OSes like Windows and Mac OS X. You can do this on the iOS and android versions of Lightroom but not on the desktop. This is more due to the social media companies not making the APIs available than anything else. Classic supports direct posting to a few sites such as Flickr and smugmug and others that have written plugins for Classic but no instagram, twitter, or facebook. Smugmug makes a connector for Lightroom Cloudy (https://help.smugmug.com/upload-from-lightroom-HkEIllw1Erz#connector) but I don't think they have made a connector for flickr.

[Jao vdL]

>older versions of Lightroom Classic from back in 2013. But nothing on the current version. Has that been removed from version 4.2?

To be clear, Lightroom 4.2 (Adobe calls it Lightroom Desktop) is a completely different program from Lightroom Classic. Classic is regularly updated and supported and usually gets new features before Lightroom Desktop. Lightroom Desktop is basically a port of the mobile operating system version of Lightroom to Desktop OS's. It stores all your images in the cloud but misses many of the essential features of Lightroom Classic. Lightroom Classic stores all its images on your local hard disk(s) and has all the features you see described on the web such as publishing directly to flickr and many other sites. Ironically it is easier to publish to web and social services from Classic than from Lightroom Desktop.

When you see people refer to Lightroom on the web and in instruction videos it is usually actually referring to Lightroom Classic as most people use Classic.  Lightroom Desktop is nice with its synced library that looks the same on every device but if you regularly print, share to social websites, upload to sales portals, etc. Classic is a much better choice but this is personal of course. Many people are mistakingly guided into believing that Lightroom Desktop is the evolution of the old Lightroom from years ago by Adobe's marketing materials that heavily pushes Desktop on people but it really is Classic.