Lightroom at the center of your web presence – Part 1

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Rosh Sillars talks about your web site as the center of your Social Media Solar System Plan

I see my use of Lightroom as an extension of this idea.

When I first started using digital technology in my photography, finding an efficient way to manage and publish images became a project in and of itself.

I built my earliest website from the ground up using a product called ThumbsPlus to manage the images and then use the database to display images on the web

I was even using my own linux server I had built myself to learn web coding.

I eventually realized that was way too much work and I started using Lightroom to manage my photos.

In 2010 I found a plug-in for Lightroom that let me post images to WordPress galleries.
In WordPress i am using the Nextgen Gallery Plugin
In Lightroom I am using the NextGEN Gallery Export by AlloyPhoto

Check out this post on Publishing with the Lightroom Plugin
I am using a keyword format of gallery_{Gallery_Name}
So for photos in my Belly Dance gallery I have a keyword gallery_Belly_Dance assigned to them. These keywords are set up to not export (Include on Export is unchecked) so they are only used within Lightroom. See Use Keywords on adobe.com for more information on using keywords in Lightroom

I set up smart collections in the NextGEN Gallery Export in Lightroom for each of my gallery_* keywords to go into a photo gallery on my WordPress website. All I then do is publish the collection in Lightroom and the photos are sent to WordPress.

Each gallery in WordPress is on it’s own page and the page contains only a Nextgen Gallery Basic Slideshow Gallery  pointing to it’s relevant gallery. If I make changes to the the existing photos, the WordPress gallery is automatically updated once i have published from Lightroom. To add or remove photos from the gallery, I just add or remove the relevant gallery_* keyword in Lightroom and republish the gallery to make changes on the WordPress website, without having to log into WordPress at all. It is all managed in Lightroom.

Check this tutorial on Lightroom Publishing for more information

In my next post I will go through how I manage the images for the front page and posts on the site with Lightroom

The picture at the top is a multi-exposure HDR done in Lightroom at the Saville Dam in Barkhamsted, Connecticut.

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