Share your photos to social media from Lightroom Classic

It seems like most photos
at some point show up on social media sites
such as Facebook. I'd like to show you
an amazing feature that will allow you
to share directly from within Lightroom. Then we'll take a look at
how to do the same on your phone
or your tablet. In the library module
of Lightroom, just below the folders
and collections, you'll find an area
called Publish Services, and that's where you can set up posting to various
social media sites. In this case,
we're gonna look at Facebook, but the settings
for the other sites are in general the same. On the right side,
I find a choice called Set Up. And if I can click that,
it brings up this screen. At the very top you have
a choice of Publish Service. And if you click there,
you can name it. And as you'll see later, it will just have
the name on the left side. Below that we have
our Facebook account and that's
the most important part. There's a button called
Authorize on Facebook. If you press it, it's going to send you
over to your web browser after just giving you a warning, so you're not surprised. When you get
to your web browsers, as long as you're signed
into Facebook, all you need to do
is click a Continue button. And you're simply
telling Facebook that it's okay that Lightroom can have access
and can post things to your Facebook account. It's never going
to post anything without your permission though, so you don't have
to worry about weird things showing up. It's just going to be
the images you choose. After you click continue,
if you return to Lightroom, you'll find that
instead of having the Authorized
on Facebook button available, it shows that it's already been
authorized. Now the other settings that are
in this screen are very similar to what you have when you set up
an export preset. Let's just look at
our few of the settings that are specific
to social media. One of those is the album On Facebook you can organize
your photographs into albums. And if you've set up albums
there, you could choose the album
you'd like to upload to. I'm gonna have
mine set up for mobile uploads, so this shows up
in the same place as photos I upload
from my mobile devices like my phone or tablet. You can also
click on any of these other sections
to customize them, the main ones
you might want to think about would be Image Sizing 'cause you probably
don't want to post your full size pictures
to Facebook. You probably
want to get them scaled down so they're a reasonable size
and that's where you can do it. But otherwise,
these other settings are very similar to what you get
when you're exporting. The ones that are
specific to social media are mainly near the top. When you're done, on the right side
you click Save, and once you do,
you will find that in that area called Publish Services,
now Facebook is set up and it will give me
the name of the album that I chose on Facebook. If you remember, mine was called
Mobile Uploads. Now let's see
how we can post our pictures to Facebook
directly from Lightroom. It's all set up. All we have to do
is show them which photos we'd like to be posted
to Facebook. If I click on any photograph
from any section of Lightroom, I can drag it on top of the name
of that album. And when I do,
the number on the right side that is currently at zero
will increase to indicate how many images I've put there. If I click
on the name of the album, then I'm gonna see
all the photos that I've put inside them. Once I've done that,
you'll find just above it, it says new photos to publish, which means this photo
is not yet on Facebook because Lightroom never wants
to do it automatically, it wants to make sure
you're doing it on purpose. So you look at this,
click on the image and in the upper right, you'll find a Publish button. The moment
you click that Publish button, it will connect to Facebook
and post this image. Then above the photo, it will indicate that this is
a published photo. If you were to go to Facebook,
you'd see the image. And on Facebook,
if you click the Like button or start typing in comments, those comments will also be
tracked by Lightroom. And if you return
to Lightroom and you click
on the name of that album, click on the photo,
then on the right side that's where you're gonna
find your comments. And what's nice is in
this comments area, it will tell you
how many likes you have, you can read the comments
that were posted on Facebook and there's a field above where you can
type in your comment. So if I were
to respond to a comment, I can click there,
type in some text, then if I went back to Facebook,
I would see the comment as if I typed it right here
on Facebook, even though
I entered in Lightroom. So few other details, and that is if I returned
to Lightroom and I choose
another photograph and drag it
on top of that album, the number to the right
will go up again, drag another photo over
and I'll then see that this is divided up
into two parts. It will show me on the bottom the images that have
already been published and could be viewed on Facebook, and above that it will show me
new photos that have yet to be published. If I want to post those images, I just click on them
and hit the Publish button. The other thing
you might need to think about is what if after I post the image
to Facebook, I come in here to Lightroom
and I change the image, maybe I'll make it
black and white or I crop it differently. Well, most of the time
when I do something like that, I don't want to
repost the image on Facebook because I've already posted it, I have already got the comments and I don't need to
keep them too up to date. So if you ever drag
an image over and later on make a change after it's been published,
then you can right click on it. If you right click on it,
you will see a menu of choices and near the bottom
will be a choice called Mark as Up-To-Date. If you choose that, it will not attempt to upload it
again to Facebook. But if you don't mark it
as up to date, it's going to mark it
as an unpublished photo and you can hit
the publish button to post it yet again. So now you know
how to get Lightroom to help you post to your favorite
social media sites.