Enlighten Lightroom

I’m not sure, if I already told you (maybe in one of by I Love Opera-Posts): I’m a big fan of cool, eye-candy, professional software. That’s why I love Opera. That’s also why I use Lightroom to manage my photo collection. Put there is a limitation on a windows OS, that really drives me mad: Drag&Drop does’nt work as it should in Adobe Lightroom to external Applications. This SUCKS! Well, here’s what I did to make it some kind of usable again: I created an export setting for each application I want to feed with pics from lightroom. The tools I use are Paint.Net (for some graphical adjustments and texts on the pics) and MS ICE for Panoramas and Silverlight Deep Zoom Experiments (a really cool MS Research project – give it a try, it’s FREE). And more over Windows Live Movie Maker to create some movie stuff.

Here’s the way how to do this:

1. Open the Export Dialog (Ctrl+Shift+E)

2. Choose a Export folder (I recommend to call it something like: …\TempExports\ )

3. Choose Export settings (e.g for a movie, you won’t need the full resolution).

4.Configure “Post-Processing”: Choose “Open in Other Application” an search for the correct .exe File in all your “Program Files” or “Programme” or “Programme (x86)”  folders on your system drive.

5. Save your export settings.

6. Now if you want to create a panaorma of 20 files, just mark the files in LR, right-click them and choose the export setting you created. Works like a charm on Win7.

This is what my Export settings look like now:

Unfortunately I did not get this running with Opera-Mail :-/ … *gnaaa*

Ok. It’s not a real replacement for Drag&Drop support, but it helps getting along with Windows.