A WordPress Plugin for Lightroom, and Faster Image Insertion!

It’s funny the things you find on the net that you wish you’d have found ages ago, things that just make life a little simpler and quicker.

Now I have tested neither of these plugins to the max yet but on the back of the first very quick test I have decided to let you all know about them. Some of you may well know of these, or similar ones already, in which case why didn’t you tell me, but there will be others like me who would export pics to file, upload those pics to WordPress and then enter each pic individually into your WordPress blog in a slow and tedious manner.

So what are these marvelous Plugins. The first is for Lightroom and it’s called LR/Blog by The Photographers Toolbox. It allows you to Export, not publish, pictures directly to your blog whether yours is a WordPress, Next Gen, TypePad, Blogger or MetaWebLog blog. The free version that I have just tested allows the pictures exported to be no longer than 300px along the longest edge, but the paid version allows them to be any size you wish, and at £8 plus vat, so £10 in total, its a tiny fee for such a great solution and I will be paying that very shortly. It even has the capability for you to create your blog in the export process so that your images are laid out how you want. This part I haven’t tested, I just wanted to know the basics worked first, and they do so well that I had to tell you all.

The bonus here for me is I would usually publish images from Lightroom to a folder on my computer and then go to WordPress and whilst writing out a new blog I would upload the images via the Upload/Insert feature embedded in WordPress and that process is so slow. As those who Blog in the same way as me will know everytime you want to insert another image you have to hit this button again, when you have the cursor placed where you want the image to appear, and then hit the media library tab, find your image and insert it, then do it all over again for the next image.

Well that process would be the same again if you were to use LR/Blog as a simple export/upload solution as I just did. I still have to write the blog as I am doing and place the images where I want in that slow manner, but I have found another plugin, this time for WordPress called Faster Image Insert, by David Frank, and this makes that slow process of inserting images into your blog a lot faster, just as the name suggests. It’s a simple solution, basically instead of hitting the Upload/Insert and bringing up the pop up box that allows you to insert your images, it leaves that box permanently beneath the one in which you type out your blog. So all you need to do is scroll down and use the Faster Insert method of entering pictures to your blog.

This plugin is totally free, which is great, but I think donating a similar fee to that of  the LR/Blog fee wouldn’t be a bad idea. It may be a simple idea but it’s a godsend.

I guess there are probably other methods on how to do what these two plugins have just allowed me to do, and there are probably many other methods of blogging that would mean neither of these would be needed anyway, but with the way I work and in using these two plugins I have just found a method that will have sped up my blogging and that for me is very pleasing, I like things that make life easier.

Well that’s it from me, sorry if this doesn’t explain things in the greatest of detail, but I’m hardly an expert at these having just found them half an hour ago, but the links to the plugins are above so if you think they could benefit you why not give them a try.

Have a great week.

Dom