Publishing photos from Lightroom

I recently purchased an Olympus Tough TG-2. I've had terrific fun with its "super macro" function. It is indeed "super"! I thought I'd experiment with sharing some of the photos directly onto my blog from Lightroom. It is not as simple as I'd hoped. I have downloaded the LR/Blog plugin but it is not working with my copy of Lightroom2! I can't find an alternative and I have spend DAYS trying to work this out!! My sweet husband told me last night that he would have "cracked the shits" ages ago and given up. Yes, he would have!!
But I CAN export straight from LR2 to Flickr using Jeffrey Friedl's Export to Flickr plugin, so here's plan B:

Experimenting with exports from Flickr

Below are some other methods I've tried with varying success. I want to be able to display the photo title and description with each photo. Do you have any suggestions?!

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Straight from Flickr 

I don't know what I'm doing wrong here but I can't get them any bigger than 75 pixels. I specified 500 pixels! Is this a bug with Flickr?

Macros, a set on Flickr.

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Using PictoBrowser

I have selected the option to permanently show the "Notes" which are the Flickr description (from the Lightroom file caption).

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

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Using FlickrSlidr

There's no option to view the Flickr description with this one :(.

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

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SlideMyPics 

All of the ones above use flash and so they don't work on iOS (iPad etc). SlideMyPics is one that uses HTML5 instead and WILL work on iOS. It is very easy to create and has some lovely configuration options (but still no caption/description option).

Happy Mother's Day!

Ok, I'm a bit late, even for my overseas friends!
But I hope you had a good one, anyway.
As my girls have grown and started leaving home Mother's Day has become so much more special. I just love seeing them all together and having fun. We had a lovely lunch at a local restaurant. Not only was the food fabulous, but they had a wall that provided the perfect backdrop and a big window for light! How thoughtful of them!
So here is my family and an extra one (extra-TALL one) who is quickly becoming a special member of the family.

And then they were gone!!

Hope your day was wonderful as mine!

Creating a Photobook from Lightroom

I've gradually been using Lightroom more and more in my workflow after being thoroughly convinced by Jared Platt's The Ultimate Lightroom Workflow class at CreativeLive. I even bought LRv4 just so I could create photobooks. (You can download Lightroom 5 Beta for free).

My first book arrived this week:

The cover was obviously not created in Lightroom. Credits here.

Lightroom only creates Blurb books so the photobooks can only be in Blurb sizes. You might notice that this book is in A4 landscape size- my preferred size. This is NOT a Blurb book. The closest Blurb has is 10"x8" or 12"x12".

So I thought I'd share how I made a non-Blurb book from Lightroom.
I pretended I was making a 12"x12" Blurb book and chose a bunch of templates that allowed a big margin at the top and the bottom. In Lightroom my pages looked like this:



Just to be sure, I made an image to use in the background that showed how much margin I needed.

That way I could easily check what was going to be chopped off my page.

Then from Lightroom I exported my book as JPG, and used the autoflow function in my photobook software (Albumworks) to automatically make full bleed pages. The excess margins were ignored.

It was so nice to be able to work within Lightroom switching between the Develop module to edit images and the Book module to work on the page. The export to JPG and import into my Albumworks photobook software at the end was a bit of a pain (I wish Blurb had A4 as an option!) but I'll certainly do it this way again.

Here are some more pages from my book:

If you're interested in giving Lightroom's Book module a try I recommend watching some of Julieanne Kost's free tutorials. She explains it very simply.

At first the set of templates in Lightroom seems a bit limited, but you can play around with the padding of cells and captions to easily customise them. I was even able to turn a photo cell into a journaling box by placing a white photo in the cell and adjusting the offset of the caption so it started at the top.

It was all quite straight forward, and I had a photobook done in record time! Great fun! :)

Is it December ALREADY?!

Last time I checked it was APRIL!! Oh dear! I went to a conference in August where a presenter said that if you don't post on your blog every couple of days it's pointless having one. I'm doomed then! Are you still there dear reader?!
I've had three photobooks printed since last I posted. I'll have to give you some previews in a future post.

In the meantime here is some scrapping news. Now that it's December the scrapping world is full of great Christmas deals and giveaways. I am very lucky to be on the creative teams of some of the very best designers.
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UPDATE 4/5/2013: I'm afraid I lost all the images on this page. I think they linked to places that no longer exist! I've deleted the rest of the post because it's pointless without pics! Sorry :(

Instead, here are some of my 365 Project page from December. The last month was effectively my Daily December project:

 Credits

Credits

Credits

Another vacation album in the making...

I've been a little quiet on the blog front - I've keeping my nose to the grindstone working on my summer vacation album. My design process this year was a variation on last year's process. This year I didn't design a theme template. Instead I decided to use a selection of Maplebrook Studio templates with rounded photo masks like these:

I've put the photo masks onto Stapled Photos Layered Templates (I also used these last year - I love the dimension they give).

Then I selected a range of paper packs that had subtle patterns and colors that would work with my photos such as:

   

I have used each of these paper packs many times already, and I mention these products because...

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templates and paper packs are ALL 30% off at Designer Digitals this week!

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So if you were thinking of starting a larger project like this, it's an ideal time to do it!
I have also used some favorite kits from Lynn Grieveson, such as Stormy Weather Kit, Wild Weekend Kit, April Morning Kit, and a variety of brushes. A few pages are below, all linked to my DD gallery where you'll find the credits if you want to know more.

So once I'd settled on the basic design, a few templates and paper packs, the rest seems to fall into place fairly quickly. It needs to, because this album is 100 pages long!!
... back to that grindstone... ;)

Rain, rain, go away...

Well, what a La Niña we are having!! Here is what has happened at our house:

 

the overnight rain (and there has been more...)

my youngest daughter's bedroom floor (she had to sleep in her sister's room last night)

the garage ceiling (I had to drill a hole in it to let the water out)

In the 20 years we have lived in our house we have not had such a problem. It seems that the company that installed our solar electricity panels drilled through the roof in inappropriate places and this is the consequence!

Meanwhile the rain continues... The forecast is not good for our nation's capital. Canberra is predicted to get half its yearly rainfall in the next few days. 

Let's hope it does not eventuate!

blog stats and jargon

I love looking at the blog stats. The data collection and analysis fascinate me!

I noticed that a few of my photos have made it to pinterest and I said to my husband that "I'm getting a lot of traffic from pinterest to my blog".

There was no response.

So I asked whether he understood what I just said.
He replied "Not a word! I'm going to bed!"

I had to laugh! That says it all, I think! How the times are changing!! :)