Automattic Releases Free Plugin for Exporting Photos from Lightroom to WordPress

Yesterday Automattic released a new free plugin the makes it easy for Lightroom users to export their photos to WordPress. Lightroom is an Adobe product for managing and editing photos, and the plugin works with the software on MacOS and Windows. It is compatible with both WordPress.com and Jetpack-powered sites.

The Lightroom plugin requires a WordPress.com account to install. Users can then select photos in Lightroom and export them to a WordPress site with all the standard settings available, such as image resizing, watermarking, output sharpening, and more. The plugin automatically exports titles and captions. A large number of photos can take awhile to export, but once the upload is finished users can find their images in the WordPress media library.

When asked for tips on suggested upload size and compression, Automattic representative John Godley said, “WordPress.com can handle pretty much anything you throw at it! I personally go for a high quality and large size so it looks good on a HiDPI screen, and then let WordPress resize as necessary to fit the viewers device.”

It’s not yet clear how the release of Automattic’s free plugin will affect the commercial products that exist for a similar purpose. FloLight, WPLR Sync, and other solutions will need to offer more features with a quicker setup if they want to compete with the new free Lightroom plugin.

Those who want to use the plugin must already have a Lightroom license (standalone or subscription). Although this is a relatively small subset of overall WordPress users, it saves a great deal of time for photobloggers and those who process a large number of photos with Lightroom before posting online. For most, this plugin simplifies what was previously a tedious, multi-step process of manually uploading the photos after working with them in Lightroom.