After a few sites like NAPP and Techcrunch jumped the gun and prematurely announced the public beta, the official Lightroom Journal says Lightroom 5 Beta Now Available.

Visualize Spots is quickly becoming my favourite new feature in LR5. Sometimes when you’re dust spotting it’s difficult to identify some spots and you only notice them later on a print. My old trick was to temporarily ramp up the Clarity slider or add a grad filter with +100 Clarity and make the spots more obvious. Now, you just switch on the Visualize Spots mask and increase the percentage.

I don’t think I really have a lot to say about it. A variety of small tweaks such as making a new collection the target collection are nice, but for me the most useful new features are the non-circular healing tool, which is a big step forward, and the new radial filter which is more about saving time than doing something you couldn’t do before.

Both of these are tools I’ll use almost daily, and I suspect the radial filter will largely take the place of the adjustment brush for local adjustment. Upright, the extra perspective tool in Lens Corrections, can be good and quick. But otherwise in Develop there’s no quantum leap forward that compares with LR3′s introduction of lens corrections and its vastly-improved handling of noise and high ISO images, or with LR4′s enormously-improved control over highlight tones.

Elsewhere you can save page layouts in Book as custom “user pages”, and add page numbers, though you still can’t create custom page sizes.

In Library I like how PNG files can now be catalogued, though such it’s a shame that progress supporting file types is being dripped out one format at a time (LR should simply catalogue all file types and let the photographer decide which are part of his or her workflow).

One nice feature for those of us who understand DNG is that there’s now a validation command which takes advantage of the format’s checksums.

Rather like LR3′s Publish took a while to be appreciated, one other innovation may be a slow burner. You can now do editing offline via “smart previews”. Essentially your catalogue creates another subfolder like the existing previews which contains small DNG files or smart previews which you generate upon import or subsequently by a menu command.

I’ve generated them for every photo in my main catalogue (they amount to 52Gb for 60,000 images) and it means I may now take the entire catalogue on the road and make adjustments while using my Mac laptop, and even output the files without having the master images with me – Lightroom uses the smart previews. Upon returning home I copy the catalogue plus the two previews folders back to my desktop PC and it will now use the master files rather than the smart previews.

On the other hand, that 52Gb does take a decent bite out of my 500Gb portable hard drive and would certainly overwhelm my Mac Air’s puny 128Gb, while the old File > Export as Catalog and Import from Another Catalog have always worked perfectly well for roundtripping.

So in practice I’d probably recommend continuing to use the Export/Import roundtrip method, but choosing to export smart previews instead of including the negatives.

Another potential use for the smart previews feature is to gain speed with bigger image files when you’re not needing to work away from your main computer. Then idea is that after building smart previews you disconnect the drive containing the master images or rename their top level folder, then continue working. LR will now use the smaller smart previews instead of the larger originals, so everything should be faster. Afterwards, reconnect the drive or correct the folder name. OK, some fine adjustments  may be awkward, but it’ll be interesting to see how this is received.

So, are smart previews LR5′s big new feature?

I’ve just released version 1.66 of my ListView plug-in which displays images in a list style just like in most other DAM programs and lets you export metadata to Excel or other apps.

The update includes some Lr5 compatibility changes and some extras metadata fields requested by users:

• Option to replace spaces in column headers (needed for some mail merge operations)
• Blank column does not export
• GPS latitude and longitude as decimals (for integration with other systems)
• Colour label text
• Smart preview information (LR5 only)
• UUID

If you use ListView and have your own special requests, just ask…..

This was interesting – the Financial Analyst Briefing Slides from last week’s Adobe Max conference. Yes, you read that right – the financial analyst briefings are interesting.

As a former accountant who is genuinely frustrated that the 2013 Q1 earnings report lacks detail, the financial analyst slides count as light reading! And the great thing about financial information, you’ve got to be more truthful in your communications with investors than in mere marketing hype (although such relative truthfulness didn’t help those triple A rated banks that vanished in a puff of smoke).

It’s most interesting from page 24 where there’s a breakdown of Adobe’s Creative Suite revenue (the whole suite, not just Photoshop) showing 10% comes from home individuals. That’s more than I expected, and 25% from education seems reasonable. I’m not sure about the difference between “Creative Professionals” and “@ Work Creatives” – maybe the former are indeed professional, and the latter more anarchic?

One reason for looking at this presentation was that Adobe have been talking about how the Creative Cloud has gained 500, 000 subscribers in the last year, and I was interested in seeing how big a proportion this might be. So the next slide – the installed base – helps put the number in perspective as it shows Adobe have around 8.4 million Creative Suite customers, half on CS6, and another 4 million on “point products”. Obviously there are no figures for the pirate base, which I only mention because it might indicate the potential for new honest customers.

Although one can’t assess the profitability of these 500,000 voluntary subscribers relative to existing customers, there is a price rise hidden in the subscriptions. Taken together with the 500,000 seeming a decent proportion of the user base, it might lead you to infer the switch to compulsory subscription is a sign of Adobe confidence.

On the other hand, the last slides show a forecast of reduced creative product sales for the next 3 years until they reach the promised land of 4 million subscribers in 2015, and that may make you wonder if the switch is as much a response to an existential threat. If they hadn’t gone for a compulsory subscription model, what might have happened?

You’d like to think it is confidence, wouldn’t you?

Other stats worth noting

From the Q1 FY13 investor datasheet

• Creative Suite/Cloud products account for just under 70% of Adobe’s revenues (sales), while the Marketing Cloud (web analytics, ad serving, business forms ) is 27%.
• 50% of revenues are in the Americas, 30% in Europe, Middle East, Africa, and 21% in Asia
• Subscription sales are about 25% of total revenue, although most of this will be Marketing Cloud products, not voluntary Creative Cloud subscriptions
• These are only sales and they don’t break down the real number – profitability

Hot off the press, this letter from Adobe Creative Cloud and the future of the creative process is worth reading. Apart from flattering their customers, rather too profusely, Adobe are making Photoshop and other Creative Suite products subscription-only:

To our creative users,

At Adobe, we believe our customers are some of the most influential people in the world. You are storytellers. You capture and relate the human experience — be it through a Hollywood blockbuster, an interactive iPad app, or photos from your child’s school play…..
[Lots more if you enjoy that kind of thing! ]
Given this, the CC applications will be available only as part of Creative Cloud. We will continue to sell and support Adobe Creative Suite 6 applications, and will provide bug fixes and security updates as necessary. We do not, however, have any current plans to release new versions of our CS applications.

For the first year only, the pricing looks like it’s dropped – CS6 customers get the complete cloud for $19.99 per month, $29.99 if you have an earlier version, and $9.99 a month for Photoshop on its own. So if you look at it closely, the loyal customer deal amounts to paying roughly the same as you would have paid for an upgrade (assuming an 18-24 month cycle). After that first year, the discount expires and those prices appear to double. You can see obvious business logic for the change.

It’s also worth correcting a misconception about the switch being because Adobe’s revenue recognition requirements conflicted with the need/desire to release product upgrades during the 18-24 month cycle. Sure, releasing significant updates mid-cycle would cause a problem because the revenues and costs reported to the stock market would no longer reflect the actual business, but an alternative would have been to change their accounting policies, not something a listed company would do lightly, but perfectly viable (and yes, I do have the professional qualifications/experience to make that assertion).

For how Lightroom is affected, see Lightroom Journal Q&A. It will continue to be sold, as well as being in the subscription service.

Is it possible to stop Lightroom from re-sorting keywords alphabetically?

No, but why do you need it? If Alamy, look up Jim Keir’s Alamy plugin. It may solve the problem.

The key problem here is how Lightroom writes keywords to exported pictures in alphabetical order, because some stock agencies’ search algorithms are weighted towards the first keywords in the file. Imagine adding keywords in the Keywording panel’s Keyword Tags box. After entering “Paris, Dog” you would see “Paris, Dog” rather than Lightroom’s alphabetical “Dog, Paris”, and the export file would also list them in the user’s order. As a result, the agency algorithm would display this picture near the top of search results for Paris and lower down if a visitor were searching for dogs.

I’ll add that while I understand the problem, I’m not sure I would want Lightroom to be changed to facilitate this workflow. I don’t think sorting is part of the relevant standards, and it’s a pretty blunt search algorithm which is limited to a few agencies. So it’s probably best done by an agency-specific plugin like the one I suggested.

Is it better to uncheck the box that says “store presets with catalog”

In my view, leave it unchecked. Its purpose is to allow presets etc to stay with individual catalogues rather than apply to the computer, and I think it is best to leave it unchecked in normal circumstances. But check it if your catalogue is on an external hard drive and you frequently attach it to other computers.

Since the misty dawn of time, or 2007 to be precise, Lightroom has supplied a set of default web galleries which are suitable for individual sets of pictures, if not providing the complete multi-gallery web sites that many people always expect they’re getting when they see a program like LR offers web output. Little has changed since their introduction – or really needed to be changed, at least not by Adobe themselves.

But if you ever use these default galleries there are little details that aren’t ideal and for a few years I’ve maintained my own shadow version of the built-in HTML gallery. I’ve sent it to various people who have asked “why can’t I change the thumbnail size?” or “how do I show the filename in the grid instead of index numbers?” and after the latest such request I thought I’d just leave it online for anyone who wants it.

It goes in:

• PC: C:\Users\USER\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Web galleries
• Mac: USER\Library\Application Support\Adobe\Lightroom\Web galleries

You may have to create the “Web galleries” folder).

What are my tweaks? Mostly they affect the thumbnail pages:

• Rounded corners
• Choose size of thumbnails
• Set size of thumbnail number text
• Filenames or characters from filenames (unique ID numbers) instead of thumbnail numbers
• Show star ratings under thumbnails
• Thumbnail grids with more or fewer rows
• Clicking large images takes you to next photo instead of returning to the grid
• On main photo page, clicking the image advances to the next image instead of returning to the thumbnail grid
• You can suppress the titles and contact areas – easier to cut and paste into existing HTML pages

This is supplied “as is” and without any support. If you like it, great.

Twice recently I’ve seen people asking about getting a simple list of filenames to copy and email, and I wrote this little script for one of them. But I just saw someone asking again, so here it is (zip file) – free in celebration of my having gone through January without a beer, glass of wine, sip of single malt etc.

In your LR application support folder (find it by Preferences > Presets > Show Lightroom Presets Folder), create a folder called Scripts. This new folder should be in the same Lightroom folder as ones like Smart Collection Templates, Text Style Presets etc.

Unzip the file and save the little lua file in there, restart LR and you’ll have a scripts menu to the right of Help. Select a bunch of pictures, run the Filenames script, and you’ll see something like this:

 Update (to celebrate Pancake Day)

You can easily modify this script to get other fields. The key line is getFormattedMetadata(‘fileName’) where the script calls a function and passes LR’s internal field name as an argument. So you just need to copy the script and change that field name?

Well, not quite. How do you know the internal field names? And some fields need to be called with the getFormattedMetadata function, others with getRawMetadata. So while you can guess the field name or work it out by editing a metadata template in Notepad/TextEdit, you really need to look up the field in the Lightroom 4 SDK under LrPhoto.

In the comments Hans asked about the full folder path, so in this case you’d just change getFormattedMetadata(‘fileName’) to getRawMetadata(‘path’). Restart LR and you’re done.

Incidentally, if you have Photoshop or the Creative Suite, you can use the Extend Script Toolkit as your editor instead of Notepad/TextEdit. It allows you to format the code for Lua and it’s not over the head of those like me who’re unnaturally frightened of real programmers and their very clever integrated editing environments.

Out of curiosity I revisited my analysis of visitors to this site which I last did in June last year.

Since you’d have to be crazy to visit this site for anything other than Lightroom, such stats are about as good an approximation of Lightroom’s user base as one can get from public data, and it is interesting to see such as shift from Windows to Mac over the period since Lightroom 4 came out.

I’ve just uploaded version 1.41 of my Search and Replace plug-in.

It has a bit of tidying up, more language support, and also adds a button to change the case of text. Each time you click the button, it cycles on to a different case. So if you type some captions in capitals, it can convert them to lower case, capitalize only the first letters of each word or the first letter in the field.

My computer’s got Lightroom, can you tell me a good very basic guide for simpletons (his word not mine)?

OK, let’s say you’re starting out and don’t have a lot of confidence. You could do a lot worse than watching these videos, and in fact anything by Julieanne Kost. I’d also point you to a book by Victoria Bampton Lightroom the Missing FAQ. I wouldn’t recommend anything by Scott Kelby – fine as they are for learning about adjusting images, they’re often weak and even misleading on managing your pictures.

The other simpleton tip of the season is this Photoshop product line feature comparison. But to be honest, aren’t the real simpletons those who never ask?

I’ve just released version 1.44 of my Syncomatic plug-in which synchronizes the metadata of files with matching names.

The change is a “Merge Keywords” checkbox which replaces one called “total keyword sync” which sneaked into 1.43 but didn’t do anything except provoke a few puzzled emails. ”Merge Keywords” works, and I hope it’s a more intuitive name for the feature.

So what does it do? Well, Syncomatic usually operates by overwriting metadata in the target files, so it would take the rating, label, caption, keywords etc from the source image and make the target image the same. So in the screenshot, img1234.dng’s keywords would replace whatever keywords are img1234.jpg.

But what if you want the DNG’s keywords to be added to those in the corresponding JPEG, and vice versa? That’s what “Merge Keywords” does – copies the DNG’s keywords to the matching JPEG, and copies the JPEG’s keywords back to the DNG. So the final result is the matching pictures have identical keywords combining those in the target with those in the source files.

I’ll probably do another update to include an “Add Keywords” checkbox which will add the source file keywords to those in the target, but won’t copy those in the target. What do you think? Anything else that might be worth adding?

Should I save as PSD or TIF?

TIF. There are no quality differences, and there’s almost nothing that a PSD can do that a TIF can’t do just as well, just obscure things like saving Duotone mode images (hat tip Victoria Bampton). In the long run it’s important to save your Photoshop work in a non-proprietary file format like TIF that’s much more likely to be readable in other programs, because over the years you will try or even switch to other programs.

Coincidentally, a good example of this need for long term thinking has just popped up. Capture One 7 has been released and is now a bit more like Lightroom with cataloguing features. But while you can import TIF files, you can’t bring in PSD’s. Maybe that will be rectified in 7.1 but I’ll bet the PSD’s will still need to have been saved with Maximise Compatibility switched on. Sure, you may not wish to switch to C1 right now, but over the long run we all change applications or sometimes we want to run more than one raw converter, so you always need to think ahead. It’s really my old analogy about good DAM being like a life of serial monogamy where you’re always prepared for the next move – you avoid so many complications with TIF.

Over the last week Adobe has said a couple of interesting things about the books module, one about a bug, one about plans for the future.

I happen to be one of the small number of people who has had first hand experience of a bug affecting Book – all the pages disappear, leaving only the default front cover and first page. This has happened on more than one occasion and I’ve lost hours of work, so I’ve been making an effort to watch out for it and have been making sure Adobe knew there was something amiss in this area. Usually with these things, a pattern will emerge from your own and others’ reports. But this is one bug that occurs very rarely and is proving difficult to reproduce. While it’s annoying, really annoying, it shouldn’t put you off using the book module, and Adobe added extra code in 4.2 to help diagnose and mitigate the problem.

Lightroom’s product manager Sharad Mangalick has posted an article Help with Disappearing Books in Lightroom 4. It’s well worth reading, just to be aware of the potential problem, but this is the key point:

The Lightroom team is currently researching and evaluating this bug to ensure that there are no other ways that it can be triggered. Our aim is to include a fix in a future update to Lightroom 4.

The second interesting snippet is that Adobe have changed their minds about how to enable custom page sizes. Some people have been wanting this since it would allow them to use vendors other than Blurb, and the original plan was to allow users to create PDF templates using something Illustrator and run them through a conversion process. The trouble was, while this would allow book vendors other than Blurb to create custom templates for their products, users would then depend on the vendor doing so – or have to learn to do it themselves. Maybe you know Illustrator, but I’d owned it for years without ever opening it. What’s more, I’m not sure people want to create templates – they want something just like Lightroom already does so well with Print’s custom package where you just drag and drop pictures into the layout. Fortunately Adobe recognize this, as senior development manager Julie Kmoch says here:

Sorry, but we’ve decided that the approach we were originally pursuing to create custom page layouts was not something we were comfortable releasing to the public. The scripts we’ve built have worked well enough for our internal use but needed a lot of work before they were usable without a lot of guidance. We think it’s more prudent for us to focus on enhancing the book module itself.

Good move, and even better to say so publicly.

Can I share Lightroom catalogues over Adobe’s Creative Cloud?

I’ve not subscribed to the Creative Cloud, so I may be exaggerating or misunderstanding what’s happening, but the problem sharing catalogues over the CC seems to be that it can only upload files, not folders. This doesn’t work too well when you want to share what you’ve done in Lightroom. Ideally you’d just select the images and use File > Export as Catalog, ticking the Include Previews box, and Lightroom would create a working copy of your catalogue. Share it on the CC and the other person would then be able to add keywords and metadata or make selections and be able to see you pictures without access to the originals – thanks to the catalogue’s previews. The trouble is, CC won’t upload the previews folder – it’s a folder.

The solution is easy – zip the folder created by File > Export as Catalog. Or use Dropbox.

I’d be interested to hear any experience of doing this. One issue is with unzipping. If a catalogue zipped on Mac is received on Windows you seem to need to go into File Properties’ Advanced tab where you should untick Encrypt Contents to Secure Data.

Imagine you are doing a large export. What’s faster, selecting all the images and hitting export – or breaking the export down into a few batches and exporting each batch individually? I was messing around with some code and thought I’d try a few alternatives.

My starting point was 267 Nikon D700 NEF files in 3 folders which I was exporting as DNGs with full size previews, then importing into the catalogue. On my main machine, an i7-920 Window 7 64 bit PC with 12Gb of RAM, this export and import took almost 11 and a half minutes. Not too bad, and while it’s running I can always do something else, but faster is better, right?

Using code to export one image at a time reduced the start-to-finish time to 60% of the straight Lightroom export. I then simulated the effect of exporting the three folders simultaneously and shaved more than 60% off the original time.

I’m sure others have been down this track before, and I’m not really surprised at the results, but this multi-folder export is something I do quite often and saving that much off the export time isn’t going to hurt, is it?

I’m a great fan of Lightroom’s Auto Sync feature which allows you to adjust multiple images simultaneously – it’s the most efficient way to work. But I always add that if you use Auto Sync you’ve got to keep your head screwed on – it’s equally easy to unintentionally apply an adjustment to the other selected pictures. So I recommend:

• leave Lightroom in Auto Sync mode all the time
• learn to assume that adjustments won’t just apply to the image that’s currently shown in Develop
• keep the Film Strip visible so you can see how many images are selected
• if you find you simply can’t work this way, don’t use Auto Sync at all
• even if you like Auto Sync, don’t keep switching it on and off

If you do make a mistake, Lightroom’s Undo feature lets you recover from your error – at least if you notice the problem while Lightroom is still open.

Things are tougher if you close the program. Imagine you apply the same white balance to a variety of pictures in different lighting conditions. The History panel lets you go back one History step, but only for the current picture. So you’d have to go through every picture. It could take some time.

There is a solution, but it is only for those with some technical skill, and all the credit for this belongs to the Moldovan photographer Dorin Nicolaescu-Musteață. I’ll also add that the method depends on writing directly to Lightroom’s SQL database and is an exception to my usual view that SQL hacks should be avoided at all costs. The idea is that:

• you create a collection called “ScrewAutoSync” and add the problem images to it
• do this manually, maybe using a smart collection based on the Edit Time to find all pictures edited in a certain timeframe
• backup the catalogue – things could go wrong
• use a SQLLite utility to run the code shown below
• you may need to rebuild the previews (Library > Previews > Discard and then Render)

All the credit for this belongs to Dorin Nicolaescu-Musteață.

And yes, long ago I did ask for this to be a built-in feature….

UPDATE adobe_imagedevelopsettings
SET text =
(SELECT hs1.text
FROM adobe_libraryimagedevelophistorystep hs1
WHERE hs1.image = adobe_imagedevelopsettings.image
AND hs1.id_local =
(SELECT MAX (hs2.id_local)
FROM adobe_libraryimagedevelophistorystep hs2
WHERE hs2.image = adobe_imagedevelopsettings.image
AND hs2.id_global <>
adobe_imagedevelopsettings.historysettingsid)),
historysettingsid =
(SELECT hs1.id_global
FROM adobe_libraryimagedevelophistorystep hs1
WHERE hs1.image = adobe_imagedevelopsettings.image
AND hs1.id_local =
(SELECT MAX (hs2.id_local)
FROM adobe_libraryimagedevelophistorystep hs2
WHERE hs2.image = adobe_imagedevelopsettings.image
AND hs2.id_global <>
adobe_imagedevelopsettings.historysettingsid)),
digest = NULL
WHERE image IN (SELECT ci.image
FROM aglibrarycollectionimage ci, aglibrarycollection c
WHERE c.id_local = ci.collection AND NAME LIKE ‘ScrewAutoSync’)
AND (SELECT COUNT (*)
FROM adobe_libraryimagedevelophistorystep
WHERE image = adobe_imagedevelopsettings.image) > 1

On Blurb’s site, go to Your Blurb > Your Books

For a while Blurb’s site has let you convert books created with their BookSmart software into eBooks for the iPad. That wasn’t possible with books uploaded from Lightroom’s Book module, which used the PDF to Blurb method.

Well, this afternoon I had left Lightroom uploading a book of my re-enactment photos and  returned to it earlier this evening as I wanted to share it with some of the people depicted. It was then that I noticed that  books uploaded from Lightroom now have an interesting “Enhance for iPad” button. Hm, I wonder when they sneaked that one out!

To use it, upload the book from Lightroom as normal, log into Blurb’s site, and go to the Your Books section. You’ll see there’s a button for converting to eBook format -  Enhance for iPad.

It seems to take a short while – it says up to 30 minutes for a large book – but that may have been that the connection was slow or I just happened to log on at the wrong time. Or it may just be that the job is queued up for the server and crunching through a big PDF takes time. Anyway, just leave it to get on with the job.

And here is the book in iBooks on my iPad

Once I returned and logged onto Blurb on my iPad, it was easy enough to go to the book and and download it to iBooks. It seems about what you expect for iBooks, and fine for many uses. So I’d say whole process works pretty well.

Every so often interesting little features sneak out without any fanfare. This seems to be one of those “soft releases” and [update 18 July] from their tweets Blurb have only been thinking it would interest InDesign users. Well, it’s handy for Lightroom users too.

Even if Lightroom’s Book doesn’t itself allow direct publishing to iPad format (let alone access to Apple’s app store), this seems to be a viable route to selling hard copy and eBook versions simultaneously – and without much extra effort.

Published Folders can group related images and make it easier to find pictures when you’re in InDesign.

If you want to create a book in InDesign using raw files adjusted in Lightroom, the way I recommend it to use a Publish service to create and maintain a folder of TIFs which you then use for the InDesign project:

• In Publish Services, click the + to add a new service.
• Select the Hard Drive option.
• Choose a folder such as “my ID book 30x30cm images” (you won’t be able to change this folder so choose its location carefully).
• Choose 16 bit TIF as the file type.
• Set the size to match the dimensions required for the book. Yes, this means that if you want to use multiple sizes, you’ll need multiple hard drive services.
• Sharpening is up to you. I’d go for standard.
• Save the Publish Service – here I called mine “inDesign Project”
• Add the pictures you want. As well as raw files and other originals, include PSDs or TIFs if you want. This allows you to mix raw files which you were able to fully adjust in Lightroom and other pictures which needed a bit of Photoshop work.
• Put the pictures in collections or “Published Folders” if you want. Here for example I’ve created collections called “Section 1″ and “Section 2″. When they are published these collections will become subfolders in Explorer or Finder, which can make life easier when adding pictures to the InDesign layout.
• Now press the Publish button – this creates the output folders and creates the TIFs.
  

  Instead of publishing each Published Folder separately, notice that you can select multiple Published Folders and publish them simultaneously by clicking the Publish button at the bottom of the panel.

At this point you have a folder of TIFs and it is these files you add to the InDesign book.

• Place the pictures in InDesign – you could pull them from the output folder using Mini Bridge (inside InDesign)
• Captions should be automatically added – see here, this video
• In InDesign pictures will be at actual size – if you resize them in InDesign some quality/sharpening impact?
• If you need to edit a picture, go back to LR, adjust, then to Publish and hit Republish, In InDesign, refresh the link in Links panel
• If you want to add another picture, go back to LR and add it to the Publish collection and hit Republish

So why is this method better than using an Export from Lightroom? One advantage is that it gathers everything into one place, in Lightroom and in your output folder. It’s ideal when you go back and forth between InDesign and Lightroom as it takes care of any republishing you may have to do – with Export it’s too easy to be inconsistent and export changed files with different filenames, for example. It works less well if your intended book design includes a variety of image sizes.

If you’re sending the book to Blurb, notice that there’s a new Blurb Plug-in for Adobe InDesign which automates the creation of the pages and the covers, and allows you to upload the book from within InDesign. See this video too.

Here’s an idea that I came across yesterday. What made it more interesting was that I very confidently expected it wouldn’t work!

You need to copy the public link for the index.html file

Well, yesterday I was bouncing ideas around for someone who needs an alternative to iDisk (as I understand it, Apple are withdrawing it, whatever it is!).

A couple of us had suggested Dropbox for sharing big files and attention then turned to a really, really simple way of sharing web galleries.

You can in fact share web galleries from your Dropbox folder. You just output a web gallery from Lightroom and save it in Dropbox’s Public folder. In Explorer / Finder you right click the gallery’s index.html file and “Copy public link”. You can then share that link with anyone.