From Lightroom to Instagram – a short note

A Plugin I used to use in Lightroom Classic has ceased working due to changes in the way the Instagram API works. Now I’m not overly keen to get back involved in using Instagram (Facebook connections, etc.) but I recognise that I should at least know how to easily get images out of Lightroom Classic after post-processing, and into Instagram. Hence, a little research was undertaken.

The solution is remarkably easy if you’ve subscribed to Adobe’s Creative Cloud Photography Plan – which gives you Lightroom Classic (desktop editing), Lightroom (the cloud-based version which runs on mobile devices) and Photoshop, as well as 20Gb of cloud storage – and a Mobile device (eg iPad or iPhone) that you can run the Lightroom app on.

This post builds upon two other posts I found and combines them.

How to Post Photos to Instagram From Lightroom Classic Using the Lightroom for Mobile app and How to Export Photos for Instagram from Lightroom Classic CC (2018).

Here’s what you do:

  1. You create a Collection in Lightroom Classic of the images that you intend to send to Instagram …
  2. You will see the Collection has been created and that it will be sync’d to Lightroom when you see the two-way arrow highlighted in the box to the left of the Collection name …
  3. You then do whatever edits you want to do to the image and drag it to the Collection when you’re ready. You might wish to crop the image appropriately for Instagram; this you can do in the Develop module > Crop & Straighten by choosing one of the preferred Instagram dimensions – Square (1 x 1); Portrait (4 x 5) or Landscape (1.91 x 1) which you will have to add as a Custom Aspect Ratio, eg …
  4. You then are ready to Sync your Collection(s) with Lightroom (this will happen automatically if it’s switched on, as below) otherwise you’ll have to click on the Paused arrow icon to start it) …
  5. You are now ready to switch to Lightroom on your mobile device. You should see the image you’ve sync’d …
  6. … and you have another chance here to crop the image to an Instagram size before you select the Open In option from the Share menu [NB Any changes you make here will be sync’d back to Lightroom Classic]. You will be offered a choice for re-sizing and should choose Small – 2048px …
  7. … and select “Copy to Instagram” from the range of Options you are offered (NB You might need to Add this option to the list provided) …
  8. … and then this window will open …
  9. … which for most Instagram posting purposes you will select “Feed” …
  10. … which will allow you to Caption your post, add tags, etc …
  11. … as well as letting you add additional information to your Instagram post and publicise it on Twitter etc., before clicking on Share …
  12. … which should create the post as above.

And that’s it. Note also that any changes you make to the image in Lightroom after posting will NOT be reflected in a change in the Instagram post … it’s not a Lightroom Publish Service.

 

Lightroom CC (iPhone) working with Lightroom Classic CC

I’ve been putting off tackling how the two different pieces of software could work together, but having been asked explicitly to have a look at it by a member of the Cardiff U3A Photography Group, and having realised that it might just be a helpful, and easy, way of getting photos on my iPhone into Lightroom Classic (on the desktop), I started to investigate how it could be done.

Starting point was this video clip from Adobe’s Benjamin Wade who has a series of short videos which are called Lightroom Coffee Break. This one is called ‘Syncing Photos with Lightroom Mobile’ which although it has a confusing title, it does actually describe a way of working for the iOS Lightroom CC app and Lightroom Classic CC.

Which is what I wanted; it might not actually be what I was asked to investigate, but perhaps I’ll return to that another day.

Anyway, I followed the instructions on the video. Created a collection in Lightroom Classic that I wanted photos on the iPhone to be sync’d to,

and then went to my iPhone, saw the Collection had appeared as an album; selected that album and took a photo. It very soon sync’d back to the desktop and appeared in a folder called Imported Photos under my Device name (on my laptop/desktop) – the iPhone – as well as in the Collection above

I was delighted to see that the GPS information had indeed been copied over with the image and was present in the Metadata. All I needed to do now was to Move the images from the Imported Photos folder on the Device to the correct folder in my Lightroom file store. And that was that! A quite easy way of ensuring that I had good GPS information (from the iPhone) to locate photos taken with the A7r.

A side product of the workflow is that I can now see a reason for ditching the Camera app, and just using the Lightroom app. All I needed to do there was set my ‘iPhone images’ album to Auto Import from the Camera Roll on the iPhone. For the moment I’ll just use a single Album/Collection as I don’t really want to do mobile editing – I use my laptop for that anyway – so sync’ing albums/collections is not what I really want/need. But I do now have a quick and easy way of getting my iPhone images into Lightroom Classic.