Tip: Publishing to flickr via Lightroom 3

So you’ve upgraded to Lightroom 3, good for you.  It’s a great update, packed with updates and features that we as photographer’s have been clamoring for.  One of those new features is the new publish feature.  With the new publish comes the ability to push your photos straight from Lightroom 3 through the intertubes and up to flickr.  No having to export then either log onto flickr and upload via the web or using a 3rd party app like flickr uploadr.

It’s a pretty straight forward process, set up your flickr account (if you dont have one) enter your flickr settings into the Lightroom publish feature and authorize and you are ready to rock and roll.  There are plenty of tutorials on the web that show you this including here at the NAPP Lightroom Learning Center.  But that isn’t the tip.

When you publish you have the options to publish with no file name, which will upload the photo with a blank title and caption.  You can upload with file name, which will do exactly that, but with no caption.  The third choice is to upload with IPTC data, if there is no IPTC it will use the file name, and here is where the tip comes in.

The photo below I published using the with filename setting.  As you can see it published with the file name.  In the beta version it also included the file extension with the filename and that was super annoying.  While this seems to be fixed in the shipping version it’s still annoying to see an image title like this.

Enter IPTC.  What is IPTC you ask?  It stands for International Press Telecommunications Council.  Long name huh?  What it really means in plain english is metadata, and it’s a standard in the world of press.  To be honest with you, prior to LR3 the only metadata entry I really did was copyright, which was a preset, and keywording.  This new version is really changing the amount of time I spend working on metadata for my photos.  Below is a screen cap of were you can find it.

In the metadata tab there are tons of fields that you can fill out, but for the purposes of using the flickr publish feature in LR3 you only need to concentrate on the Title and Caption shown in the red box.  It may sound like a pain, but its really going to streamline how you publish your photography to flickr.  Check out the flickr stream for the White House and look at the more properties section of the photo, they have to fill out every field when publishing a photo.  Imagine that is your job just typing metadata all day!!! WOW boring.  Below is what the uploaded photo looks like on flickr with all the appropriate IPTC metadata entered.

One final tidbit.  You can also uncheck the option so that if you retitle something in flickr it won’t change when you republish the photo from Lightroom.  Hope that helps you streamline your work a little.  Now get out there and take some photos!