One day you need your Flickr uploads resized to 1000×1000 pixels, the next day you need to allow only friends and family access to your uploads – is there a way to make the Flickr upload more streamlined from within Lightroom?

Since the release of Lightroom 3 there is a convenient Flickr publishing service built right into the application, and with a few mouse-clicks users can upload any selection of images stored in the Lightroom catalog.

Thanks to the foresight of the designers of the application (or the beta testers), it is possible to set up multiple Flickr publishing services with different settings. In the following tutorial I will demonstrate how that is done. At first we’ll look at the long and complicated (no, not really) method – which you need to create your initial Flickr publishing service, but can also be used for the second, third and so on service. Then we’ll use a shortcut to create the “other” publishing services.

It does not matter if you’ve already set up one Flickr publishing service, or if you are starting from scratch, the process is the same. When you look at the left panel in Lightroom, you will see the “Publish Services” category with a little “+” sign to the right of the category title – plus a small triangle that indicates that there is a menu hidden behind the plug sign.

Once you click on that plus sign, the menu will be displayed. Select the “Go to Publishing Manager…” menu item, which will display the …

… “Lightroom Publishing Manager” dialog.

Right below the list of “Publish Services” on the left side is the “Add” button to add new services to the list. Click on that and specify the details for the new service.

That’s it. Now just drag&drop your images on one of the Flickr publishing services, and once you are done, select to actually publish the images by right-clicking on the Photostream (or your custom photo set) and select to “Publish Now”:

So, now that we know the long way, here is a shortcut: Once you have your first Flickr publishing service installed, just right-click on that publishing service and select “Create Another Publish Service via ‘Flickr’”:

After that, just follow the instructions above to setup the service.

The Lightroom 2 Beta has been out for a while. If you want to get an overview about what’s new and improved, take a look at these two free video training offers:

http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?ID=581

http://www.photoshopuser.com/lightroom2/

We finally have a version of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (why did they have to add this to the Photoshop product family – it’s one word more than I want to type…) that is compatible with Apple’s Leopard operating system. Adobe’s Tom Hogarty wrote a blog article about the new version and it’s features. Tom also added some information about known problems of that version. Adobe also treated us to the first release of the Lightroom Export SDK. One part of that SDK is a sample plug-in for export to Flickr  - I tried it, and it works. Jeffrey Friedl has some information about the SDK on his blog:

Lightroom 1.3 & Export Plugins for SmugMug and Zenfolio

How to Install a Lightroom Export Plugin

On the same day, Apple released an update to Leopard – we are now up to version 10.5.1.

Adobe’s Tom Hogarty posted an article about Lightroom 1.2. and Leopard. There are known problems and workarounds, and he lists the ones they know about. This is what I expected then to do for all their applications, and not just a “wait ’til January”…

A lot of new stuff in the last four weeks: I did receive my Canon EOS 40D ahead of schedule: Amazon.com promised me an estimated shipping date of 9/24, the camera did however arrive on 9/6. That was a nice surprise. I knew that my Lightroom 1.1 would not support the new 40D RAW format, so I shot RAW+JPEG. That, and the much larger RAW files and the fact that it’s so easy to just keep the finger on the shutter and take 6 pictures per second until the buffer that holds 16 RAW images is full caused me quite a scare: I filled up my 2GB memory card in no time… I guess 2GB just does not cut it anymore

Adobe also surprised me by releasing Lightroom 1.2 about a week after I received my camera on 9/13 – I was expecting at least a month until I would have RAW support in Lightroom.

The  default settings for the 40D are much better than any of the defaults I’ve seen from Lightroom before. The pictures are beautiful, and of course the additional resolution is great. The camera is “just another Canon”, so getting used to it was no big deal. The biggest problem I had with it was (as usual) to get the strap on the camera

Adobe has released the Adobe Camera Raw 4.1 plug-in for Photoshop CS3. Jeff Schewe has a very detailed article about the new features (sharpening, clarity, noise reduction, …) on PhotoshopNews.com. All these new features will eventually also be available in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.1 – knowing what will be available makes waiting for the update even harder

Sean McCormack has a summary of all the information that’s currently available about Lightroom 1.1