What are Lightroom plug-ins and what can you do with them?

Thursday 8 October 2020, 20:02 by Dick Holtman | 6,012 views | 4 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

Lightroom plug-ins. What are they? Which ones are available? Why should you use them? What do they cost? Where can you get them? These are the questions covered in this blog.

Photo by Garett Mizunaka on Unsplash

What are plug-ins?

Plug-ins are pieces of external software that add new functionality to Lightroom. This can be very useful, because Adobe does not always develop everything we would like to see. External parties can therefore create plug-ins.

Why should you use them?

Because they add new functionality to Lightroom, allowing you to do things that Lightroom does not provide. This saves you a lot of time and/or manual work.

Other plug-ins automate manual tasks, improving quality and reducing the chance of human errors. They support or optimise your workflow.

And ultimately: time is money and quality means satisfied customers.

Example
Last month I was asked whether I wanted to create a plug-in. This company received a great many photos of products. These photos were supplied in a main folder for each product, with folders for each type inside it.

The client wanted all photos to automatically receive the type as a keyword. Of course, you can do this by hand. Select a folder, select all the photos and type in the keyword. But when there are a great many products, each with different types, it is both a lot of work and prone to errors.

Which plug-ins are available?

A great many. But if we look at the Adobe Lightroom website, we see a number of plug-in categories.

I have taken the category division below from the Adobe support website:

• Export plug-ins
  These plug-ins allow you to use the Lightroom export interface to send images to specific websites where you can share photos online, such as social networking sites like Facebook, or even to other applications, allowing you to send a photo directly by email via your Gmail account.



• Publishing plug-ins
  Publishing plug-ins allow you to upload images to websites for sharing photos online, such as Flickr® and Facebook, directly from the Lightroom Library. Keep checking for new publishing plug-ins.


• Web galleries
  The many stunning templates and styles are available as plug-ins and expand the number and variety of HTML- and Adobe Flash® Player-compatible web galleries that you can create in the Lightroom Web module.


• Workflow plug-ins
  Complete your photography tasks more easily and quickly with plug-ins for specialised tasks and specific steps in your workflow.

Other categories include:

• Image editing plug-ins
  These are plug-ins that edit the photo. This could involve making the background transparent, for example, or using external photo editing software.
  
  Examples include:
  
  ImageMagick
  ImageMagick is a collection of software programmes / library that allows you to apply all kinds of edits to one or more photos.
  
  In my next blog, I want to discuss combining Lightroom and ImageMagick.
  
  Timothy Armes from Photographers-Toolbox.com, see the next paragraph, and I use this frequently.
  
  Nik Collection
  
  On1 plug-in for Lightroom
  
  Skylum Luminar plug-in


• Import plug-ins
  The "Photo list importer" is an example of this. Based on a list of file names, this plug-in searches for all the photos in your catalogue and collects them in a collection.


• Metadata plug-ins
  This category includes plug-ins for adding GPS information and keywords, translating keywords, titles and descriptions into another language, checking whether you have filled in the essential metadata, finding and replacing keywords, and so on.


• Plug-ins for all kinds of tasks
  This category includes all other plug-ins. However, do not underestimate this collection, as they can help you enormously and save you a lot of time.

Note: the list on the Adobe website is only a very small selection of all the plug-ins available.

Marketplace, photo by nrd on Unsplash

Where can you find them?

In this section, I will give an overview of places where you can find plug-ins. I will also mention a few people who have contributed greatly to the development of plug-ins.

Plug-in authors and marketplaces

• Jeffrey Friedl's Blog
  This is one of the first and best plug-in developers. In addition to many plug-ins for exporting to specific photography websites, he also has many useful plug-ins for all kinds of other tasks.


• John Ellis
  Author of excellent plug-ins and a specialist in developing them. He is also a source of help and support on the Adobe Lightroom forum for plug-in developers.


• Timothy Armes - Photographers-Toolbox.com
  Timothy set up the plug-in marketplace Photographers-Toolbox.com website.
  
  Highly recommended for finding very useful plug-ins.
  
  You can find his plug-ins here, along with those by John Beardsworth and Matt Dawson. There are also 11 plug-ins that I have written.


• Capture Monkey
  This website also contains several very interesting plug-ins, of which I think Fader is the best.


• AlloyPhoto
  This plug-in author has many export plug-ins for all kinds of photography websites, cloud storage platforms such as Dropbox and Box, and print labs.


• LightroomStatistics
  I have now published 11 plug-ins on the Photographers-Toolbox.com website.
  
  In addition, I have now written more than 10 custom plug-ins to order.

Articles about plug-ins

• The Lighroom Queen - Victoria Bampton
  Victoria writes books about Lightroom and has run a website with a great deal of information about Lightroom for years.
  
  She also maintains a page with links to websites with plug-ins. This list is also limited and sometimes somewhat out of date.


• Digital photography tips
  This page provides more information about Lightroom plug-ins.

What does it cost?

As a good Dutch person, you naturally want to know: 'how much does it cost?'. Jeffrey Friedl's plug-ins cost 'whatever people are willing to pay'.

Most other plug-ins cost between 5 and 10 euros, with some more expensive exceptions for very special or specialised plug-ins. Many photo stock websites provide free Lightroom plug-ins for uploading photos to their site.

Custom development

Sometimes your needs are not covered by an existing plug-in. You can then have a plug-in made specifically for you. Several of the developers mentioned above offer custom development.

Note: this involves much higher costs. After all, the plug-in developer will charge their hourly rate.

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