Getting Images Out of Lightroom

Hi Folks: This post also started life as a response to a question asked by a friend, and when it got to a couple of thousand characters I thought I should add some images and post it here.  This topic has been covered before by others and to some extent by us.  As a prerequisite to this, if you don’t understand what parametric editing is I encourage you to read this first: Lightroom History, Snapshots and Virtual Copies. The basic Lightroom workflow is to import images (associate the image file locations with Lightroom), change the images (by adding metadata, raw conversion, post processing, etc.) and then export the images.  Exporting can be done via prints (either to paper or to print as jpg), books, slideshows, web galleries, uploading to publish services (Flickr, Smugmug and the like) or by saving the image(s) as new files.  Each of those is worth a blog post in itself; this one is focused on exporting images from Lightroom as files using the Export window. One of the advantages of Lightroom is that multiple images can be exported in one batch, although if one is exporting a lot of images it’s best to break the export process into two halves; this uses Lightroom’s memory allocation more efficiently.
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Import/ Export Tips for Lightroom

Hi Folks:

One thing I see frequently on Twitter is that someone has decided to import or export a large number of images and is then distraught about how long this particular process is taking.  There can be many reasons for this; some of them you can change, and some you can’t but I thought I’d put together a few tips.  These have been cobbled together from both my own experience and from a number of other sites, so my thanks to those others!

Update, February 19, 2014.  We’ve added a new post called ‘Getting Images Out of Lightroom‘ that covers exporting images in great detail.  This post is still valuable for tips for importing images.  Also, remember to check out our ‘The Many Faces of Lightroom Presets: The Import and Library Modules‘ for more tips on setting up import presets.

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