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.
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