Lightroom 3 Beta:
Library Module and Publishing

After a late night playing with the new Lightroom 3 beta, I’m back at it. This time we’ll look at what’s new in the library module, including the new Publish Services.

Disclaimer: Lightroom 3 is beta software, that means it’s not ready for production use and may have buggy, incompletely implemented or completely missing features. In the case of Lightroom 3 of these are certainly the case. It also means that problems seen now will likely be fixed by the final release.

The Library Module

The library module should be very familiar to Lightroom 2 users. Unlike the transition from LR1 to LR2, the changes this time are relatively minor, other than the new things added.

The left panel gets the new Publish Services pallet. I have to say, having only played with this for a few minutes, I’m already liking this over having to export and upload manually or with a plug-in. But more on this later.

Continuing around to the bottom panel, Adobe has removed the filter options from there, prefering to have you use the Library Filter bar across the top of the thumbnails to set those things. Speaking of the Library filter bar, and filtering LR3 changes things a bit. In LR2 filters were sticky to the folder or collection they were done in and Lighroom saved them if you navigated away from the folder. You couldn’t filter say all images that were shot with a specific camera, then navigate though a series of folders or collections and keep that filter active.

Filtering in Lightroom 3 acts in one of two ways. Either it stays how you set it or it resets to none any time you navigate to another folder, collection or publish service. This is achieved by way of the lock icon on the very right side of the Library Filter toolbar.

Personally I like this change, I always found it a bit odd in LR2 when I’d navigate to a folder I filtered some time ago and forgot about only to find that there were only 2 or 3 images showing out of what should have been many more. The new system makes a lot more sense to me.

Where the left panel pertains to where, the right panel still pertains to what. The only change here is the inclusion of a Comment panel which lets you post and follow discussions of images that are published to a service that supports that (for example Flickr).

A brief aside about the pallets in Lightroom 3. Like Lightroom 2, they can be expanded or collapsed down to just their title block, or you can right click on the title and hide the pallet completely. You can also run the sidebar in solo mode, collapsing all the pallets except the current one to just their title blocks. However, you still can’t reorder them. The left column is always Navigator, Catalog, Folders, Collections and Publish Services; the right; Histogram, Quick Develop, Keywording, Keyword List, Metadata and Comments in that order.

Adobe has made some minor changes to the toolbar most notably the removal of the rather redundant “info” box that only showed the file name. I doubt this will make much of a difference anyway, as the file name is typically available in the metadata pallet, in the thumbnail frame and as an image overlay anyway.

Publishing

Publish services are new ways to push out files to a destination while keeping them in sync with Lightroom. The Lightroom 3 beta comes with two services “Hard Drive” and “Flickr”. Flicker ties in rather well to Yahoo’s Flickr service handling uploads and deletions.

Setting up a Service

Setting up services is obviously going to be slightly different depending on the service in question. In this case we’re going to look at setting up a Flickr service as that’s probably what’s going to be most used. At least I know it will be for me.

Clicking on the “Set Up…” text or right clicking on the title block and selecting “Create another … Connection” will bring up the Lighroom Publishing Manager dialog box.

One in the Publishing Manager, setup is much easier than I expected it to be. Give the service a name in the first box. Click “Log In” in the second, and that will take you to a browser window for Flickr that, if you’re logged in on your default browser, asks if you want to allow Lightroom to access the service. If you’re not logged in it will obviously prompt you to create an accout or log in.

After you authorize Lightroom to be able to access flicker, you can configure the rest of the settings, which are identical to the export settings in either the new export dialog or Lightroom 2′s export dialog with the exception of the last section that’s Flickr specific. When you’re done there, click the Save button and you end up with a named section in the Publish Service Pallet.

All told, it took longer to read this description than it actually does to setup Lightroom 3 to publish to Flickr.

Publishing

This is where things get interesting. Once you have Lightroom setup to publish to Flickr you can seamlessly manage what’s on Flickr with out actually having to go to Flickr.

First photosets behave much the same way collections do. You can create both normal photosets that you have to add files to manually, as well as Smart Photosets that work like smart collections automatically selecting images to publish form your library. You can also set a photoset as the default target, in lieu of the Quick Collection or any other collection.

Placing an image in a Photoset queues it up to be sent to Flickr. If you’re viewing the queue in the library Lightroom will show you which images are published and which have yet to be published. You can then publish them individually though the context menu or publish them in bulk using the publish button.

In addition the Comments panel on the right side now becomes useful. Selecting a photo in one of the Flickr Photosets will show the associated discussion in the comments panel. In addition you can use the Comments panel to add comments to the image and they get published to Flickr automatically.

Publishing to Flickr Caveats

There are several caveats to the whole publishing process as it stands. Though this is still beta software so hopefully man will be cleared up before it goes gold.

The biggest issue is that Lightroom doesn’t seem to be able to retrieve information from Flickr. Specifically it doesn’t automatically get a list of existing sets. I can understand now importing and managing images that are already on Flickr but sets tend to be something frequently used. The apparent lack of bi-directional communication also hits in the comments box. In the screen shot above you can see that there is only one comment on Flickr but two show up in the Comments panel. This actually is the result of an interisting point of failure.

I had origionally added the image of the Mockingbird to my photostream before I created the Lightroom 3 set in Lightroom. I then added the image to that set from Flickr’s site and not though light room. When the change didn’t propagate back to Lightroom, I moved the image there too. In doing that, and republishing it I ended up with 2 copies of the image on my Flickr stream, one I subsequently deleted. The end result is that Lightroom apparently got confused and since it seems to keep track of the comments locally is showing both the comment on the new image, and the comment on the image that was deleted.

Conclusions so Far

So far, I’ve been very impressed with the features that Adobe has added to Lightroom 3. While I’m a bit disappointed that I can’t customize by moving panels around or redefining keystrokes yet, some of the new features are very nice.

The publishing system looks to hold a lot of promise, especially if the more commercial orientated sites (like Photoshelter or the micro stock sites) start offering modules that will let you publish directly to your catalog on their service.