One of the new features in Adobe Lightroom 3 beta (Lr3B) is the Publish services. These provide a new way to ‘export’ images from your catalog, but also keep track on which images have been published where and if they have been changed and need to be re-published.
This also struck me as a great way to get my files easily backed up onto ‘the cloud’. Click through to find out more.
Overview of publish services
Before we get all excited about saving our photos online, lets take a quick look at what publish services do. Rather than redo the work myself, I’ll point you at Gene McCullagh’s excellent write-up of the Publish to hard disk: Lightroom 3 Beta Publish Services - Part 1.
What do I mean by ‘the cloud’?
For the purposes of this post, I just mean online storage rather than anything more fancy. There are a fair few services out there – dropbox, drop.io etc and dedicated online backup solutions such as carbonite, jungle disk etc.
I am going to concentrate on dropbox for this example.
Why?
It is free, and you get a couple of gigabytes storage. They also keep a months worth of incremental backups of your files for you, so you can go back in time to recover a changed or deleted file.
First step - get Dropbox and set it up
- Go to www.getdropbox.com and create your own account (if you sign up using that link I get extra free space on my account).
- Install dropbox on your computer, following their instructions
- On your desktop, go to My Dropbox (PC) or Dropbox (Mac) and create a new folder called “Lightroom Photos”
- If you login to your account on www.getdropbox.com, you should see this new folder in the files tab
Setup Lightroom 3 Beta
- Open Lightroom Publishing Manager by clicking on setup alongside ‘Hard Drive’ in the Publish Services panel or right click and ‘create another hard drive connection’ if you have already configured the first one
- Create the new hard Drive connection, call it something like ‘Dropbox’ and set the export location to the ‘Lightroom Photos’ folder you created earlier in Dropbox. You can then set the other options as you require. For a backup I set the file to be ‘Original’ and stuck with the original filename.
- With these settings saved, you can start to add images you want copied to Dropbox by dragging and dropping them onto the new ‘Lightroom Photos’ folder.
How do they get onto ‘the cloud’?
Once you have some photos in the ‘Lightroom Photos’ folder in Lr3B, you can publish them to dropbox by selecting the folder and clicking the Publish button.
Doing this creates the photos in the ‘Lightroom Photos’ folder in My Dropbox and they will be ‘copied’ to Dropbox on the internet in the background. This all happens outside of Lightroom, so you can carry on working as normal.
It will take a while for your files to be copied up to Dropbox, depending on how many and how big they are.
What next?
A great feature of the Publish Services is that it keeps track of when you change a file that has been published. The next time you look in the Lightroom Photos folder, it will list the files that need to be updated. All you have to do is press Publish again and they will get updated.
Can I automate any of this?
Yes and no. The folders in Publish Services are very similar to collections, so you can create smart folders that automatically populate based on the rules you set.
For example, I use star ratings – 5 stars for my best photos. By creating a Published Smart Folder that gets all photos that have 5 stars, I can back-up my best photos to online storage with a single mouse click.
However, it is not currently possible to automatically trigger publishing the files…so you have to remember to manually publish the folder.
and finally…
This is only the start of what you can do with Publish services. Dropbox isn’t the only service like this, anything that has a virtual ‘folder’ on your computer can be configured in the same way.
There is also much more you can do with this on the Dropbox side – recover old versions of files, share photos with people etc.
Whilst not an ideal backup solution, it is one easy way of securely saving your most precious files away from your PC.
Click here for more on Lightroom 3 Beta
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Lightroom, 
