With the release of Adobe’s Lightroom Export SDK, developers and users alike can take advantage of Lightroom’s image processing and format conversion engine to do some very cool things.

During my search for a Lightroom RAW export plugin I have been working a lot with the current SDK, and I have become especially fond of the FTP export plugin that comes with it. Most of the discussions I have been part of generally circle around dumping JPEG’s into a remote directory via FTP for storage purposes only. While this is especially handy, I began to think of how this FTP upload utility could be leveraged to automatically update an AJAX-based image gallery that we use on our current website.

First, let’s start with the web page and its AJAX components we wish to manage:

http://x-equals.com/portfolio.html

Although this page uses an AJAX library for sliding images back and forth, it’s simply calling a directory of JPEG’s to display its content. This would be true for any Flash, Flex, or HTML gallery as well. Since we can use the export plugin to target a remote directory for placement of images, we can literally control the gallery contents and order from within Lightroom. A quick peek at the source code for the above page reveals a simple structure for the calling of images within the gallery:

<img src=“portfolio1/images/01.jpg”>
<img src=“portfolio1/images/02.jpg”>
<img src=“portfolio1/images/03.jpg”>
<img src=“portfolio1/images/04.jpg”>
<img src=“portfolio1/images/05.jpg”>
<img src=“portfolio1/images/06.jpg”>
<img src=“portfolio1/images/07.jpg”>
<img src=“portfolio1/images/08.jpg”>
<img src=“portfolio1/images/09.jpg”>
<img src=“portfolio1/images/10.jpg”>

Knowing this, let’s look at how we setup Lightroom for the export. Prior to this make sure you have installed the Lightroom SDK FTP export plugin.

First, select the images you wish to use in your presentation:

Next select File>>Export to open the export dialog:

Having installed the export plugin prior to this step, it will show up in the upper right menu by selecting FTP Upload. While in the FTP Upload settings, select the Destination drop-down and select Edit.

For more information on supplying FTP information in Lightroom please see my previous entry on this topic. Since I know all of you are experts in FTP, supply your login credentials, select your destination directory for upload, and select OK.

Once the upload is complete, your online gallery will be updated. I’m never touching this code again, and thanks to Lightroom, I don’t have to.

Until next time ... happy shooting ... err ... uploading!

|Brandon Oelling
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