Google+ is a great way to share photos and there’s a thriving community of photographers sharing work, links, and discussions about photography. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is used by many pros and serious hobbyist photographers. It’s not too hard to share work from Lightroom to Google’s Picasa photo service so that it can then easily be shared on Google+. Here’s how to do it:
- Download Jeffrey Friedl’s Export to Picasaweb Lightroom Plugin. Mr. Friedl has created several Lightroom plugins; if you’re not familiar with his offerings you should spend a few minutes perusing his site and you might find something else you need as well.
- Follow the installation instructions for the plugin and get it connected with your Google account.
- Optionally create some shell albums in Picasa for various categories of photos. It’s easy to do this from within Lightroom using the plugin. Just right-click on the publish collection, go to Edit Settings, and look for the PicasaWeb: Tools section. Choose to create a public album, give it a name, and click the Save button. You should then see your new album listed in the publish collection area.
- Drag and drop the photo(s) you’d like to share into your new album, then click the “Publish” button to send them to PicasaWeb.
- Open Google+ in your web browser and click the “Photos” link in the navigation bar across the top of the page. You should see your new album along with any other preexisting albums. Click on the album to open it up.
- Click on the photo you’d like to share.
- Copy the URL
- Go back to Google+ and click in the box to share a new item. Enter any text you’d like to display before the photo, then paste the URL to the photo. You should see the image appear. You can optionally delete the URL at this point (the image will remain).
- Choose which circles you’d like to share with (or better yet, make it public) and share the item.
This seems like a lot of steps but once you’ve done it a couple times it’ll be really straightforward (and you probably won’t be creating new albums every time you publish a photo). If Google+ implements an easy way to share a single photo (as opposed to an entire album), it would eliminate the last few steps.
It is always nice to have more than one way to do things, but how is this better than creating a JPEG and uploading it to G+ in the folder you want it in, in the first place?
Using the Lightroom publish plugin eliminates the step of creating the JPG as a temporary measure. I simply put the photo into the target album and press the Publish button. Prior to using the plugin, I’d save the JPG to my hard drive, then browse around Picasa to the target album, click the Upload button, browse for the JPG, and upload it. That’s about five steps instead of two…
Why not a Google+ Plugin to skip the Picasa workout? Facebook has one. Maybe we should ask Jeffrey to build one.
Given that Google+ uses Picasa for photo storage, I don’t think a separate plugin is the answer… perhaps Google will expose more settings through the API that could control Google+ publishing through the existing Picasa plugin.
Thanks for the info, Aaron. I do have Jeffrey’s plugin installed, but have not really used it yet. Does this Picasa-based approach have a disadvantage in that uploads done this way will count against the free storage limit for Picasa? My understanding is that *direct* uploads to G+ are essentially unlimited re: cumulative storage space used.
I don’t have specific information, but I would assume that the uploads to Picasa *will* count against the free storage limit.
When you add picture with LR to an existing album already shared on google plus, there is an automatic publication on your wall (like with facebook ?)