In my previous post I discussed my love affair with Lightroom presets as a way to extend my workflow and in turn automate post-processing. This week we’re going to visit the bleeding egde of Lightroom’s plugin architecture to look at a solution that literally made me stand up from my desk and cheer. It’s amazing.

First let me introduce you to two people that made this innovative approach possible: Jeffrey Friedl and Timothy Armes

What is it? What is it? What is it?

Ok here we go:

Working together, Jeffrey and Tim have brought to life an approach for extending Lightroom’s plugin architecture to afford for all kinds of cool functionality. Being an avid flickr user, I have used Jeffrey’s ‘upload to flickr‘ plugin for quite a while. And while it is a great plugin, I also would like to add borders to my images, apply text, rotate, watermark, sharpen, and publish metadata. I also want to do this all in the post-processing stage as I publish to my flickr account - or hard drive.

This is where Jeffrey’s Lightroom flickr Export Plugin, his Piglet framework, and Timothy Armes Lightroom Mogrify come into play.

What’s a Piglet you say … Jeffrey best describes his framework much better than I do. In short, piglets allow you to ’stitch’ piglet enabled plugins together to create a composite menu in Lightroom (see image at right). As you can see, I can select any number of images from within Lightroom and with these piglet-enabled plugins I can leverage all the features of both plugins in one dialog.

To see a real example of what this means to my workflow, please see the following examples of output using the flickr and Mogrify plugin(s) together:

1. Final output with border and text overlay using Mogrify:
2. Enhanced output using flickr plugin

Sit back and think for a minute: What framework do we all currently use to stitch together discreet image processing functions to create composite image effects … Photoshop Actions.

As much as I expect this approach to become standard in Lightroom, it is because of the Lightroom plugin API being made available inLightroom 1.3 that we can begin to bring these ideas to life.

So how do we make this happen?

1. Read Jeffrey’s primer on his approach.
2. Download the flickr export plugin from Jeffrey Friedl
3. Understand Installing Lightroom Export Plugins
4. Download Timothy Armes Lightroom/Mogrify (with Piglet)
5. Install Lightroom/Mogrify
6. Download ImageMagick and Install (OSX and PC compatible)
7. Enable the Mogrify plugin via Piglet Manager

For questions regarding the installation and configuration of these plugins please comment below.

I truly believe this is a step in the right direction for enabling outside developers to extend Lightroom - thanks Jeff and Tim!

Best Wishes,

|Brandon Oelling