Publishing to Smugmug, a geek’s view (part 1)

I have been off under the hood of my publishing setup working out the gory details of how to get all of my former flickr images onto smugmug in a way that’s usable, and to create a publishing setup that will scale without having to be torn apart every time I have a new idea of how I want things to look.

There are two ways to get images from Lightroom to Smugmug. I expect most people use the export command, either by writing images to disk and then using the smugmug uploader, or by using a plug-in that goes direct to smugmug. There’s another capability of Lightroom that takes some extra work to get going, but once you do, gives you a lot of flexibility and power — the Publish module. There’s a good overview of why the Publish module is your friend on Jeffrey Friedl’s site. The big difference: you create a continuing relationship between the image in Lightroom and the one published, so changes to that image or its metadata can be republished in place on the site without the pain and suffering of tracking them down and fixing the manually. Reprocess an image to make it better? Revamp the keyword and caption? With the publish module, flowing those out to the site(s) where the image is published is painless. Using export, they go into the “I need to fix these some day” pile, to be forgotten…

So you really want to publish instead of export. It takes some work go get running, but it’ll save you a lot of work over time. Given this, though, you want to set up the publication structure up right from the start, because otherwise, you’ll fight the limitations has you figure out what it is you really want to do in displaying your images. My original setup was to create a publishing channel for everything; one for each size of wallpaper, one for egrets, another for hawks, one for landscapes. I ended up with something like 30 publishing channels. And then I wanted to do a “best images” set. Problem: none of these channels easily share with each other.

Smugmug has the capability for smart folders to mix and match from uploaded images, but I found trying to mash different channels together to be a challenge. And then I decided to stop using flickr, and suddenly I was going from ~250 images on Smugmug to 2500, and I created a lot of new ways I wanted to display (and exclude) images.

It was clear the existing setup was not going to scale. So it was time to do something else, which meant — start over. Which means — breaking links. Which is bad. So if you’re going to build something like this, think about how it’s going to work and look when it’s twice as large. Or 10X as large. How do you grow it without breaking the links in the future?

The publishing module does that for you, if you set things up right (i.e., NOT the way I did it originally). Having just worked through this exercise, I thought it would be useful to show it to everyone, to give you ideas (and hear from you new ideas that I can borrow and add to my setup).

If you go to my smugmug site, you can take see the results. My original hope was to create two publishing channels, one for wallpapers and one for my images. The original flow for the publishing looked something like this.

As it turned out, I needed to create a publishing channel for each size of wallpaper. The interfaces between Lightroom (on my laptop) and Smugmug ended up looking like this:

The reasons we need separate publishing channels for each wallpaper is a bit obscure. I need to explain a few things to get there, so bear with me.  To set things up to publish to smugmug, first log onto smugmug and create the galleries you want to upload to. Then download and install Jeffrey Friedl’s export to Smugmug Lightroom Plugin (and throw Jeffrey a few bucks to thank him for writing it). Once it’s installed and enabled, you can create channels in the publish module which lives in the left sidebar of Lightroom:

(you will note my “all images” gallery is private. I’ll explain in a bit)

Right click on the service, and you can bring up the configuration dialog (dear Adobe: the UI on all of this kinda sucks. love, chuq). Most of the configuration is pretty straightforward.

A fe things to note; I’ve created a custom naming that tags everything uploaded to smugmug as having been uploaded there. It mostly is to help me keep straight where animate was intended. You can also set up a publishing environment and hook up multiple galleries to it, and manage them from lightroom. I’ve found it’s much more flexible to upload to a single gallery and display using smart galleries on smugmug, which I’ll go into later.

One option you have here is customizing or adding boilerplate to your caption or titles. I’m taking advantage of this to add a standard text block to each caption, as seen here. This capability has a lot more functionality than i’m using; it’s well worth exploring.

And here’s what I’m uploading.

You can have a publishing channel check what’s in the folders on Smugmug and try to connect it back to your lightroom. If it can, it saves you reloading and uploading that stuff. In my case, it was just as easy to start fresh and work from an empty gallery.

Note that there’s no watermarking. For the main gallery, the watermarking is done on Smugmug for the display images, because otherwise, the watermarks would end up on prints or licensed images.

That’s different with the wallpapers. There, since we want the watermark on the downloaded images universally, we do the watermarking on export so the “master” copy on smugmug is watermarked.

Because the watermarking I’m doing is simple, I’m using the built in watermarking tool. For more complex watermarking setups, I’ve used the tool LR/Mogrify, which I really like when I want to do things like borders and the like on an image.

One of the — quirks — of lightroom is that you can’t really set an explicit size of an image until you export it. That’s why I ended up with three publishing channels for wallpapers. I needed a separate one for each sized wallpaper, because otherwise, I have no way to make sure they’re sized correctly. The wallpaper processing allows me to set up the format (3:4 wallpaper) but I can’t render to the explicit size until I export. Hence, every size of wallpaper is its own export channel. This both makes sense, but creates complications, but I can’t really argue that this is wrong. In the context of all of this, it makes sense.

Once you get to this point, you’re ready to publish. Drag some images into the publishing channel you created. If yo go into grid mode (“G” in lightroom) and select the publishing channel, it’ll give you a sense of the state of the channel, showing you which images need to be uploaded, which have been updated and need to be re-uploaded. It’s a handy quick look to see how your lightroom library and your published galleries sync up — and this is one reason why lots of publishing channels are a problem, because you need to look at and sync each separately — lots of channels is its own set of complications…

And once you get your images online, they’re in one big gallery, waiting for you to do stuff with. How?

That’s next…..

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