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Useful Lightroom Plug-ins
Today I’d like to look at some other Lightroom plug-ins you may find useful. To clarify, I’m referring to plug-ins that add extra functionality to Lightroom by enabling you to do things with finished photos. Not programs such as those made by Nik or OnOne Software that are also plug-ins, but are used for editing photos.
Jeffrey Friedl plug-ins
Jeffrey Friedl has written lots of plug-ins for Lightroom (there’s a full list here). I’m going to highlight a few interesting ones here, but feel free to go and check the full list at the link above because there’s a lot of useful stuff there.
Jeffrey’s plug-ins work on a donation-ware basis. They are free to download and install, but will stop working properly after six weeks unless you register the plug-in. To register, you need to make a payment using Paypal. The amount you pay is up to you, the minimum is just one cent, making the plug-ins virtually free. You can pay more if you’d like to make a donation to support Jeffrey’s work.
Lightroom’s Publish Services has built-in support for exporting images to Facebook. However, the photos are published to your personal Facebook page, not a business page. Jeffrey’s Export to Facebook plug-in lets you publish to Facebook pages as well.
For those of you unfamiliar with Lightroom’s Publish Services, these are found in the Library module and let you export photos directly to a location on your hard drive or a photo sharing website such as Flickr without leaving Lightroom. You get from this (photo right) > to this (below), with just the click of a mouse button.
Lightroom’s Publish Services don’t support Google+, but you can get around that using the Export to PicasaWeb plug-in. PicasaWeb albums are used by Google+ to store your photos. Once your photo is uploaded to a PicasaWeb album, go to the photo albums in your Google+ account, select the photo and click Share to share it with your circles:
The Export to Tumblr plug-in allows you to export images to a Tumblr account. It works a little differently from the previous two in that in doesn’t set up a Publish Service. Instead, go to File > Export and select jf Tumblr from the Export To menu at the top. You will need to authenticate your Tumblr account to get started:
Photographer’s Toolbox
The Photographer’s Toolbox website sells plug-ins written by Timothy Arnes, John Beardsworth and Matt Dawson. They are not free, but you can test them out by downloading them and using them (within the trial limitations). Some of them, such as LR/Mogrify 2, a plug-in that exports your images with borders, watermarks or text annotations, are donation-ware, letting you decide how much you would like to pay for the plug-in.
LR/Blog is another useful plug-in that lets you export photos directly to a WordPress, Blogger or TypePad blog, or a NextGEN gallery for WordPress.
Website Creation
I’ve already mentioned Koken, a free CMS (content management system) that lets you build a photo website, but there are a couple more websites that sell more sophisticated plug-ins for creating photo websites. One of those is The Turning Gate, and another is Sean McCormack’s Lightroom-Blog. Take a look at both of these if you want to create your own website from within Lightroom.
Installing Lightroom Plug-ins
The easiest way to install a Lightroom Plug-In is to start by saving the uncompressed file in a folder on your computer’s hard drive. If you use the same folder for all your plug-ins, you will know exactly where to go each time.
In Lightroom, open the Plug-in Manager (File > Plug-in Manager) and click the Add button in the bottom left-hand corner. Go to the folder where the plug-in is saved, select it and click the Add Plug-in button. If you get a message asking you to update your Catalog, then click the Update button. From this point on the process may vary, so check the installation instructions that come with the plug-in you have added to finish the installation and set-up.
