Lightroom and WordPress gallery NextGen
Meanwhile i published a lot of my photos on my flickr page and the upload of the images is done via the [post id=279]jf flickr[/post] plugin for Lightroom.
Introduction
At the beginning of the last year i went online with my fotoblog , where i uploaded quite a bit of images during the last year. But uploading is done manually til now. But this is quite annoying, because you’ll loose overview i you changed development or cropping of an image. Using the flickr pkugin such image processing will result in the changed images will be amrked to be published again. Only the upload itsself has to be started by the user. So i intended for the year 2015 to automate this process for the wordpress blog.
Plugin
From alloyphoto there is a plugin for Lightroom available, which in combination with the NextGen gallery on the wordpress side offers such a functionality. The plugin is not free of charge though, it sells for $15 which is about 13 Euros. Not too expensive i think, but i picked a wrong moment to get the plugin licensed, because you have to pay again with any major release of Lightroom, and since we’re using version 5.7 a version 6 should allready be planned.
Without licensing the plugin is restricted to 10 images per upload and 10 images in a gallery. But you can try it out before you buy, but if you decided on a plugin because you’ll have to mange a bunch of images you’ll get it licensed very soon.
Installation
The most recent version 3.0.2 can be downloaded as an executable, installing the plugin for Lightroom.
For the first setup you’ll only need your web address and of course your crendetials. The plugin communicates with your blog through XML-RPC which is enbled by default in newer wordpress installations. For security reasons you should not run the plugin with admin rights, it is sufficient that the username belongs to an editor within the wordpress blog. You’ll have to supplly the rights within the NEXTGen options in wordpress for such a user to handle albums and galleries. Unfortunately if you operate the plugin with editor rights only you’ll loose the ability to create new pages. I created some pages manually within wordpress, because i wanted to change the strcuture a little bit, and added the galleries with the plugin.
After the first setup, you’ll can start to create albums and/or galleries.
Albums are higher-level folders which is in Lightroom terms the collection set, which can contain (smart) collections. Only galleries can be defined as a smart collection or “intelligent gallery” by questioning the database.
In the above example all images are marked for upload which contais label color “Blue“, the keyword “flickr” and were taken with “Canon 5D MK II” but don’t contain the keywords “Panorama” and “Makrofotografie” .
As mentioned in the article about the [post id=279]jf flickr[/post] plugin, all settings can be exported and imported as well. For me there is a big advantage about this, because i mainly import the same settings as i used for the flickr export.
Besides the sorting you can define an image size for every gallery, if you like.
With the settings in the “Gallery settings” you can either create a page (but only as an admin of the blog) or a blog post. In case you want to use this feature keep the status to “draft” so can edit the post later on.
Conclusion
The plugin too me is worth the money even though i bought it at the wrong moment, since we’re awaiting version 6 of Lightroom. If you estimate a new Lightroom published once every year you’ll result in less than 1 Euro per month.
How do think about it, or are you working with the free of charge alternative , but their further development seems to have stopped. Just let me know in the comments or ask questions, they are welcome too.
ciao tuxoche
