Publish but no Export?

[les_stockton]

I am new to Lightroom and I usually develop and then export my images to jpg. I have people I have to send items to as soon as I can, and then later I want to publish to smugmug. When I do publish, it does a re-export to jpg. Is there a way to publish, but just use the jpgs that are already exported?

 

[Mark Sirota]

Welcome to Lightroom Forums.

No, not exactly. Export is, sorta, "export and forget". Publish is, sorta, "export and manage". With Export LR doesn't keep track of the exported file in any way, so it can't re-use it.

The way to do it with a single export would be to start with publish instead. Then you'd need a Smugmug plug-in that could leverage the existing files. No such plug-in exists today, as far as I know, but it's theoretically possible.

 

[Gene McCullagh]

Hi les_stockton! Welcome to the forums!

Take a look at Jeffrey Friedl's Smugmug plugin at http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/smugmug (it's donation ware )

He's built in quite a few features. As Mark points out, things with exports and publish are all "sorta" propositions and this area of LR has a lot of room for improvement. You'll still be stuck doing a second "export" but there's no need to bring these JPEGs into the catalog or even keep them around once the publish action is completed.