Lightroom: Exporting to Flickr

Say you use Lightroom, and you love it. Say you also use Flickr, and you love it. But what you don't love is processing a batch of photos, then getting them uploaded to Flickr by hand. A laborious and time consuming process if there ever was one.

What if I told you there was a way to export photos from Lightroom to Flickr?

What you need:
Lightroom
Flickr Uploadr

How to do this with Windows Vista:
1. Go to the folder that Flickr Uploadr has been installed to. In most cases, this will be "C:\Program Files\Flickr Uploadr". Right-click on "Flickr Uploadr.exe". Select 'Create Shortcut" from the context menu. Select the newly created shortcut and hit ctrl+C to copy it.

2. Go to the folder Lightroom stores its application data under for Windows Vista. (this was a bit of a pain to find, and it's the entire reason I'm writing this post). The folder will be "C:\Users\YourUserNameHere\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Export Actions". Paste the shortcut into this folder.

3. Start up Lightroom. Click on a photo. Then select File > Export... Scroll down to the bottom of the Export settings box. Under 'Post-processing', there's a setting 'After export'. You'll see options like 'do nothing', 'Show in Explorer', etc, etc. If you pasted the shortcut in the right folder, you'll see an option that says 'uploadr' (or whatever you named your shortcut). Select this.

Now when you export a batch of photos, they're automatically loaded into the Flickr Uploadr. Yay!

(for how to do this in Windows XP, refer to this post in the Flickr Adobe_Lightroom users group)

Firefox With Multiple Profiles Running At the Same Time

Some times you like to be logged into the same website twice, under different credentials. For instance, I have two gmail addresses, one I use for personal correspondence and another I use for professional. Logging out, logging in under a different account, logging back out, and logging back in again under the first account is just annoying as all get out.

Now, Firefox supports profiles, which is awesome. But out of the box, it won't let different profiles run at the same time, which sucks.

But through the power of the command line and a few switches, we can fix this!

Right click on your Firefox shortcut. Under the 'Target' box, it will probably say something like this:

"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"

Change it to:

"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -no-remote -P NameOfYourCustomProfileHere

The '-no-remote' switch, aka noremote or no remote, allows multiple profiles to run at the same time. The -P switch tells it what profile to use.

If you haven't created multiple profiles, just change it to:

"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -no-remote -P

When you click on the shortcut, this will bring up the profile manager. Check the box that says 'don't run on startup'. Make a new profile, call it 'Alt'. Keep in mind that for the command line, capitalization does matter. '-P alt' is a different profile than '-P Alt'.

Now to get back to your first profile, make another shortcut that looks like this:

"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -no-remote -P default


So now you should have several different shortcuts, renamed to keep them from getting confused.

'Firefox' -> "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -no-remote -P default
'Firefox Alt' -> "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -no-remote -P Alt
'Firefox Personal' -> "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -no-remote -P Personal

etc, etc.