Making a web site synced to Lightroom’s folder/album structure

[lnackman]

Lightroom Version

v 7.1.1 C4C01E/73 (iOS); 5.1 (macOS)

Operating System

1. macOS 12 Monterey
2. iOS

I have about 40,000 photos in Lightroom, organized into an extensive tree of folders and albums. I’d like to share this (view only) with family members. Using Lightroom’s sharing features I can only figure out how to share individual albums. Is there a way for me to share the “root” of the tree so that family can browse through the photos in an organized way? Ideally, this should stay synchronized with Lightroom.

 

[clee01l]

I don’t think the “pseudo” folders in Lightroom can be shared. Portfolio offers a public view of Lightroom albums as a group.

Here is a link to my Portfolio Website:

https://cletuslee.work


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[Jim Wilde]

I have about 40,000 photos in Lightroom, organized into an extensive tree of folders and albums. I’d like to share this (view only) with family members. Using Lightroom’s sharing features I can only figure out how to share individual albums. Is there a way for me to share the “root” of the tree so that family can browse through the photos in an organized way? Ideally, this should stay synchronized with Lightroom.

As Cletus said, you could use Portfolio, the downside being that you'd need to refresh each album every time you made a change to the contents. An alternative would be to use the Gallery option in LrWeb, which allows you to group a collection of albums together into a single Gallery, which then gets shared via a single URL. When a family member clicks on the link in their browser they would get a display of all the albums in that Gallery, and can peruse them individually.

The downside is that there can only be one Gallery. so you have to put the albums in that.

 

[lnackman]

I don’t think the “pseudo” folders in Lightroom can be shared. Portfolio offers a public view of Lightroom albums as a group.

Here is a link to my Portfolio Website:

https://cletuslee.work


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Thanks Cletus. I enjoyed looking at your website. It appears that Portfolio lets one import from Lr but does not sync. Ultimately, this might be what I want so that I can choose the best photos and put them in Portfolio. But right now, I’m busy scanning and organizing old photographs and want to be able to share all of that with my family as the work progresses. That’s why I’m looking for a sync solution.

 

[lnackman]

As Cletus said, you could use Portfolio, the downside being that you'd need to refresh each album every time you made a change to the contents. An alternative would be to use the Gallery option in LrWeb, which allows you to group a collection of albums together into a single Gallery, which then gets shared via a single URL. When a family member clicks on the link in their browser they would get a display of all the albums in that Gallery, and can peruse them individually.

The downside is that there can only be one Gallery. so you have to put the albums in that.

Thanks Jim. I wasn’t aware of of the Gallery option in LrWeb and will check into that. From what you write, it sounds like that could be closer to what I’m looking for than using Portfolio.

Of course, what I really want is to be able to use the sharing menu in Lr to share parts of my tree of folders and albums. But Gallery might be a good first step.

 

[prbimages]

what I really want is to be able to use the sharing menu in Lr to share parts of my tree of folders and albums. But Gallery might be a good first step.

The Gallery is a nice feature, and is probably your best bet, but it does have a couple of drawbacks:

• It's a flat collection of albums, there's no hierarchy
• There does not seem to be any ability to sort the albums, which is an amazing omission of functionality. My albums appear in some apparently random order, not alphabetical and not even in "added" order. (Please someone correct me if I'm wrong.)

 

[johnbeardy]

The gallery is pretty inflexible, and I'd suggest Portfolio might be the better option. For your family visitors, Portfolio would provide a more conventional browsing experience with less need to coach them through the oddities of the Lr Web layout.

OK, you will have to figure out how to add LR pages to Portfolio (which is pretty easy), but you then have many more options over the look of the web pages and over the structure of the site. For example, different branches of the family may have their own sections, and you might even password protect certain pages. You can add more text content, link to other web sites, and include non-Lightroom content (eg uploading a video).

So I'd suggest testing the workflow to Portfolio on a small scale. Just take one or two small collections, get them synced, then get them into Portfolio, make changes in LR and go back to Portfolio to refresh (for some odd reason Adobe use the word "reset") the content. Once you see how it hangs together, I suspect you'll see it's a viable way forward.

 

[lnackman]

The gallery is pretty inflexible, and I'd suggest Portfolio might be the better option. For your family visitors, Portfolio would provide a more conventional browsing experience with less need to coach them through the oddities of the Lr Web layout.

OK, you will have to figure out how to add LR pages to Portfolio (which is pretty easy), but you then have many more options over the look of the web pages and over the structure of the site. For example, different branches of the family may have their own sections, and you might even password protect certain pages. You can add more text content, link to other web sites, and include non-Lightroom content (eg uploading a video).

So I'd suggest testing the workflow to Portfolio on a small scale. Just take one or two small collections, get them synced, then get them into Portfolio, make changes in LR and go back to Portfolio to refresh (for some odd reason Adobe use the word "reset") the content. Once you see how it hangs together, I suspect you'll see it's a viable way forward.

Thanks -- this is almost certainly what I will do -- eventually. It will give the best experience for my family. But, it is much more work than I have time to do now. Was looking for something automatic and essentially no work, but that doesn't seem to exist.

I appreciate all the help on this forum.