Last year, I stopped using Flickr to host my images and, instead, started hosting images myself.

First, you’re going to need the LR/Blog plugin for Lightroom from the Photographer’s Toolbox. It’s free to try, and the £8.00 price tag for the full version is well worth the convenience it provides. If you’re unfamiliar with how to install a plugin for Lightroom, the website provides the basic steps, although it’s basically navigating to your plugins in Lightroom, clicking Add, and then pointing to the downloaded file.

For WordPress users, you’ll need to update your site configuration, basically enabling outside applications to upload images and create posts. The LR/Blog plugin uses WordPress’s supported mechanisms for doing this, so you’re not going to far outside the box. But it does require enabling this functionality, which the PT website describes here. The plugin does support other blogging platforms, as well, including Blogger and TypePad. The PT website includes configuration details for them, as well.

Once the LR/Blog plugin is installed, and WordPress is ready to accept uploads, the next step is to define your blog and upload settings inside of Lightroom. I have a few different blogs that I run, so for easy organization, I created a folder called Blogs and I have an export profile for each of my blogs, which you can see in the image below.

Quickly running through the different options…

Each of the profiles has, at the top, the URL for each of the different blogs. Easy enough. Next up, you can have LR/Blog only upload the images, or upload the images and insert them in to a new blog post. By default, I have the plugin upload the images. If you want to use the WordPress Gallery feature, make sure you have LR/Blog create a post. For whatever reason, if you upload images to WordPress, then separately create a post and insert the images, those images don’t show up in the Gallery tab of the post and, therefore, you can’t use them in an inserted gallery. This isn’t an LR/Blog limitation, it’s just the way WordPress works. If you want to use a gallery, have LR/Blog create the post, then you can go in to the draft post and move things around, remove the inserted images (they will still be “associated” with the post), and then insert a gallery.

The other options I changed were the file naming so that I can change the name of the uploaded image to make it easier to find inside of the media library of the blog (and/or SEO). I resized the images to the maximum size I’d need, changed the Quality to 75 and Output Sharpening to Screen. This seems to work for the way I use most of the images, although if you’re looking for more portfolio-sized and quality images, you should adjust accordingly.