Jeffrey’s “Lightroom Collection Publisher” Plugin

We control our portfolios with keywords and Smart Collections. Now you have all your nice portfolios in Lightroom but want to load them also to your iPad/iPhone or Android device. What you want is to export all the portfolio images into a folder hierarchy. This is what the Collection Publisher allows you to do.
Instead of creating your collections in the Collection section of Lightroom you install this plugin and organize all your collections inside the Published Service created by the Collection Publisher plugin.

1. Install the plugin (follow the online instructions)

2. Initialize the plugin

• Give it a name
• Select a root folder on your disks to which the images should be exported
• Define your naming (we add a "_mobile" suffix)
• Define your File Settings (we use JPEG at medium low compression)
• Define the output image size (here 1200×800)
• Define criteria that will trigger export updates for your images (we use Caption, Title and keywords). Any changes in the Develop settings will trigger an update by default)

3. Create Folders and Smart Collections

How can we create a proper folder hierarchy? While in collections we have a Collection Set to hold other collections. For Published Services we can create nested folders that contain collections. Each portfolio is defined by a Smart Collection:

• We name the collection (here Monterey)
• Define the Smart Collection rules:

o Keywords contains "BUP_Monterey"
o Keywords contains "BUP__Master" (we create this organizing keyword to define which images are part of the final portfolio. Just all BUP_Monterey images would allow to little control
o Folder contains "_MasterImage" which is the root folder of our master image hierarchy.
o File Type is not "raw" (only TIFFs and JPEGs are in our final master image folders)
o There are additional settings (in red) that allow us to create a proper folder/collection hierarchy on output.

Why again do we use the "BUP_" (stands for Bettina Uwe Portfolio) prefix? This way these keywords don't get mixed up with normal words.
Here is a sample collection tree:

4. You then publish the content like with all the other Publish Services. As a result you maintain a copy of this hierarchy on disk (properly down sampled).
We find the Collection Publisher a very cool plugin that does exactly what we planned to do. Download from http://goo.gl/1p2mR.

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