The Power of SmugMug’s Lightroom Publish Tool

If you’re a SmugMug customer, you’re likely a lover of all things photography. You love taking photos, you love sharing photos, and you might even love editing photos. But we’ll bet you’re not in love with the less-romantic bits: organizing, keywording, and getting your photos from the camera to your SmugMug site.

There are some powerful tools out there to help, and we have a favorite: Adobe Lightroom.

Not only does it simplify the process of organizing photos from camera to desktop (or device), it also works directly with SmugMug using our super powerful SmugMug publish service.

Our recently updated LR plug-in will now keep itself up to date automatically, and it works with the latest Adobe Lightroom CC and Adobe Lightroom 6 software. Make sure you’ve grabbed the most recent version of our plug-in to use our best—and most recent—built-in features, including Private Sharing and automatic plug-in updates. It even keeps Lightroom’s new facial-recognition tags in place!

Here’s three reasons why we think SmugMug and Lightroom users would love using our publish service.

Keep It Simple (All Accounts)
Simplify your workflow! If you use Lightroom to manage your photos on your computer, then you already know what a timesaver it is. But did you know you can also manage your SmugMug site without opening SmugMug? Import, cull, organize, keyword, upload, and share your photos all from one place.

The most recent update to the SmugMug publish service includes our hottest new feature, private sharing. When you create or edit folders and galleries from the publisher within Lightroom, you’ll be able to select visibility and access settings for those folders and galleries—without ever firing up your browser.

Collaborate on Photos (Business Accounts)
Combine the SmugMug Event Management Feature with the power of the LR Sync Hierarchy Tool.

Have your client, or your family, go through galleries you’ve added to an event and choose their favorite photos for a photo album or special edits. Use Lightroom’s Sync Hierarchy and Sync Photos buttons to add their favorite gallery, and its photos, back to your Lightroom catalog to edit.

Lightroom will recognize when you’ve made changes to those files and will mark them for republishing to SmugMug when you’re ready!

Proof Print Orders (Portfolio and Business Accounts)
You’ve just received your favorite “Cha-ching!” email from SmugMug: a new photo order has been placed from your Portfolio or Business account. You’ve used proof delay so you can review the order and make any final edits to the photos before sending them to the print lab.

When you edit those files in your Lightroom catalog, they’ll be marked for republishing, too. Press that republish button and send your final, print-ready photos off to your SmugMug site. Now you’re ready to release the order from proof delay and send it to the lab.

This barely scratches the surface of what you can do to manage your SmugMug account from within Lightroom using our plug-in. If you’d like the Ultimate User’s Guide to the Galaxy, er, to the SmugMug Publish Service for Lightroom, check back here soon. We’ve got a great follow-up post coming your way!

19 thoughts on “The Power of SmugMug’s Lightroom Publish Tool”

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  2. Absolutely love the coordination and collaboration between SmugMug and Lightroom CC. These two powerhouse applications working together is the utilmate in my workflow. Thank you SmugMug & Lightroom!

  4. I love managing everything from Lightroom.
    However, I’d love for it to ignore errors and continue to upload. For example: Shot a dance recital. created a folder containing 39 galleries (one for each routine/group). At the folder level, I clicked publish so that it goes through all of them in some sequence.
    If a picture won’t upload for any reason, the entire upload freezes until you click OK on the error.
    So if it happens with the first gallery, I’ll wake up in the morning and have lost 6-8 hours of upload time.

    Am I missing a setting somewhere?

    2. Hi Allen

      You’re not missing something – this is the way that the plugin works at the moment. I don’t know if it’s possible to change the error recognition but I will definitely pass your feedback to our developer.

      Thanks for letting us know about your workflow. We always love to hear how to make our product better!

      Ann

  5. I love the way that LR and SM work together, and I particularly enjoy the ability to use SM Events to enable collaboration on projects I have in LR. I manage my site almost entirely from LR. However, I just discovered a problem with this – when I modify the metadata on a picture and republish it, SM doesn’t recognize that the metadata has changed! I believe that this is at least partly to avoid overwriting metadata added on the SM site; however, it makes managing the site from LR much more difficult.

    1. Hi David

      Thanks for letting us know more about your workflow. We’re really happy to know you’ve got such an efficient workflow.

      We do republish when metadata has been changed. I think you’ll find that you’ve got a setting that isn’t turned ‘on’ in your Lightroom publish settings. Open the section labeled ‘Republishing’ and make sure you have the desired metadata triggers boxes there checked. That will mark metadata changes for republishing.

      Hope that helps. Holler with any further questions.

      1. Ann,

        Thank you for a quick response!

        Yes, LR republishes when my metadata changes, and I think SM recognizes some metadata changes. However, when I update the times on my images and republish, SM still reports the old uncorrected time. I was told in a DGRIN forum that this is a SM limitation – that when republishing, SM does not update metadata. Perhaps this is a bug, and not the expected behavior. I would certainly prefer to be able to use LR to manage my SM site, as recommended.

        1. Hmm, thanks for the additional information David. I hadn’t considered the time stamp, and I don’t know whether we would update that specific metadata. I will follow up with our developer and find out.
          Do you change timestamp on all images? One workaround I can think of would be to make a slight change to the exposure or black point when updating the timestamp that wouldn’t affect the image but would mark it for republishing. Or add a keyword to do the same.

          1. Ann,

            The issue isn’t that the image is not re-published. The image is. Rather, the problem is that when the image is republished its metadata is not updated in Smugmug’a database. So, when I view the image info, Smugmug shows out-of-date info. In addition, that out-
            -of-date info is use by the API that the plug in uses to sync image. Since it tries to sync updated metadata against out-of-date, the sync fails.

            The plug in author suggested deleting images from SM and republishing when I need to update metadata, but the breaks the collaboration workflow.

          2. Hi David

            I’ve chatted with Aaron and David here, and they’d love to keep this conversation going on DGrin. David’s looking into possible solutions and he will update you there. Thanks for helping us improve our product.

            Ann

  6. Well, I’ve got the SmugMug Lightroom app (successfully) loaded — but can’t figure out how it really works (or is meant to). I am hoping that some more detailed instructions are in the offing. .

    1. Hi James
      We’ve got a follow up post planned on the Lightroom Publish tool. But in the meantime we also have a great help page. http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/1491124
      Also check these articles: http://school.smugmug.com/Photography-Tips/5-Reasons-We-Love-Lightroom
      http://school.smugmug.com/Video-Tutorials/Workflow/Lightroom-Publish-Service
      Do you have a specific question? Where are you having troubles? Happy to help if I can.

      1. Ann: Thanks for pointing me to those sites and information, which I will be studying at more length. I suppose my basic question, and need, is to get all the Galleries and their contents which are on my SmugMug site into the Galleries hierarchy which I have apparently already successfully synced into Lightroom. thanks for your patience. Jim

  9. Hi!

    The plug-in is great but I have one question.

    Is there any way to automatically recognize that a new folder has been created and create a Smugmug gallery for it? Right now, the most time-consuming part is having to manually create 000s of galleries by hand when they already exist in a hard-disk hierarchy.

    Thanks!

    1. Hi Antonis
      At the moment we don’t have a way for the publish tool to automatically recognize that you’ve created a gallery or folder, but when you have a new folder full of galleries ready to publish you can hit publish for the folder and everything within will update.
      You can leave a feature request at https://feedback.smugmug.com/, and our product managers will see it there.

      Thanks for your feedback!

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