Any advice on achievability of this type of Lightroom to Web folder export functionality

[ed.conley]

Lightroom Version Number

13.1 Classic

Operating System

1. macOS 12 Monterey

Hi All,
having struggled with the apparent limitations of LR and a number of LR-web gallery plug-ins, I am wondering if I'm in the right forest with regard to achieving the following:
- Fully maintain my metadata, keywords, title, captions in LR like a good boy
- Then publish one photo at a time from my library to a series of single uploadable web folders (I don't want a gallery, I'm simply trying to describe a large number of historical photos with a consistent set of fields across many pages. I don't want to add photo information into a web edit page, I'd like to do all of the photo info management in LR.

Essentials for each single page:
1. image page would have an ID displayed (from filename or other field of LR that can be used as a reference number)
2. image page would have a title above the image (taken from LR)
3. image page would display any keywords under the image (taken from the LR keywords comma separated list)
5. image page would have a caption under the keywords (taken from LR)

Thats it.

I haven't managed that spec yet but maybe more experienced LR-web publishing members would know a way forward.
I normally use Wordpress but if this is easier to achieve by straight html export so be it. What counts is the simple direct relationship between LR fields exported to displayable page.
Maybe there is an export web meister out there?
many thanks
Ed

 

[Califdan]

This is a hard question to answer directly as there are a lot of "it depends" clauses. First of all 'it depends' if you want to stay strictly within the Adobe world or are willing to use other web sites for image display. If you're willing to use others such as Flickr, SmugMug, and Zenfolio to name a few, how much flexibility you have in customizing the image (loupe view for lack of a better generic term) depends on the specific web service you pick. All of those I just mentioned are manageable (for the most part) from within LrC through Publish services So let's look at an example. Here's a loup view screen shot from my Zenfolio website

This is to some degree configurable as to layout, fonts, colors, styles, and what you want to include. You can see this page here: https://www.danhartfordphoto.com/az-canyon-de-chelley-tp/hd89a90ae#hd89a90ae

In Flickr, it is much less configurable but has all the info from LrC. The metadta is found below the image in this case. Here's an example
https://www.flickr.com/photos/danhartfordphotography/53523003433/in/album-72177720314725583/

SmugMug (owned by same folks who own Flickr) is more configurable, like Zenfolio, but I don't have an account so don't have an example.

Both SmugMug and Zenfolio create a website where you can configure various pages. as such you can give folks the URL for the whole site where they can navigate between pages or you can give them the URL of a specific page which contains one or more images.

If, on the other hand you want to stay within Adobe using products you already have a license for, there is "Share" in LR or LrC which productes a web page from an LrC Collection or LR/Cloud Album. However the metadata that can be shown is somewhat limited and does not include keywords

There is also Adobe Portfolio which, like Zenfolio and SmugMug produce a web site with pages. While the images in portfolion can be sourced from LR/Cloud which in turn can be managed from LrC, you would use the Portfolio editor tool to design the site but the capabilities to select what to display and where is limited. I'm not intimate with it but you can see my demo site here https://danhartfordphoto.myportfolio.com/

My preference is Zenfolio (or maybe SmugMug if I knew more about it) as it shows all the metadata (camera EXIF, Keywords, Titles, Captions, Copyright info, etc.) even though it is not completely flexible in how it displays it.

Hope that helps.

Dan


https://www.danhartfordphoto.com/az-canyon-de-chelley-tp/hd89a90ae#hd89a90ae

 

[ed.conley]

Hey Dan, that is so hugely helpful. Thank you for your considerations and candidate approaches. I will certainly check all of them out. I was not thinking of anything other than a regular web site but certainly Adobe Portfolio is one I didn't think of. As I say I will need to evaluate them all. Of course I'm left wondering why there isn't the facility within Lightroom to just export as HTML directly with the simple spec I showed but I guess (am I cynical?) this is more about forcing you to buy other products to achieve typical tasks. Anyway I appreciate the time you spent answering. Kudos to you.

 

[Califdan]

One thing I didn't mention was the Web Module in LrC as it is really not used much. In my years and years of doing LrC consulting I have never had any client care about it. It's pretty outdated and you would still need a web server to host the generated HTML. You can read about it here in the "Missing Faq's" book available from this website here https://www.lightroomqueen.com/shop/adobe-lightroom-classic-missing-faq/