What is the Comments tab in Lightroom Classic for?

Thursday 20 October 2022, 20:20 by Nando Harmsen | 3,430 views | 2 comments

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

Have you ever looked at the Comments tab in the Library module of Lightroom Classic? You will often see the message Comments not supported.

That is odd, because wouldn't it be useful to add comments to a photo? In this article, I show you what it is for.

What use is a Comments field in your Lightroom Classic catalogue if you cannot do anything with it?

I once thought it would be a good way to write information about your photo. But unfortunately, that does not work. The only thing you will ever see in that field is "Comments not supported."

If there is no support for it, what are you supposed to do with it? Why is it there? I decided to look into it, and what do you know? It is for viewing comments and likes from a published photo in Lightroom Classic.

On the right, it says that Comments are not supported. On the left, you can see the Publishing Services, including Flick-r.
To find out how this works, take a look at the Publishing Services on the other side of your screen. You have undoubtedly looked there before, and probably did not do much with it.

One of the services listed is Flick-r, the photo community site that has been around for many years. You may even have an account. I certainly do, and have done for many years.

You can sign in to Flick-r in Lightroom Classic, and then automatically publish photos to this community. Only the photos you want, of course. Set the size and a watermark, and create an album. At your command, Lightroom Classic will then publish this photo to Flick-r.

The latest photo was published from Lightroom Classic via Publishing Services. Unfortunately, only a title is added, and no description.
Once you have done that, you will see that the Comments tab suddenly contains more information. In fact, you can now add comments if you want. If you receive comments on your photo on Flick-r, and get likes, you will now see them in the Comments tab.

Now that the photo has been published, you can see that the Comments field is ready to be used. You can write a comment yourself, but what others write on Flick-r will also be visible here.
This lets you see very easily, per photo, what activity there is on Flick-r from within Lightroom. You do not need to go to Flick-r to see it. That makes it easier, and also lowers the barrier to being active on this photo community site.

Here you can see the comments posted on Flick-r. You can also see the likes and favourites.
There are some limitations, unfortunately. You cannot reply to a comment. And you cannot import albums and photos that are already on Flick-r here, or make them visible in another way. Only the photos from the moment you start using it will appear here.

Adding a comment via Lightroom Classic is no problem, but you cannot reply to comments or do anything else. So it is very limited.
There are not many services like this available. You can add SmugMug, but that is also owned by Flick-r.

There is a Facebook publishing tool and an Adobe Stock publishing tool, which can be useful if you use them. In any case, they make it easy to place photos on these sites.

Do you use the publishing tools in Lightroom Classic? Did you know that the Comments field also becomes available from that moment? Let me know in a comment below this post.

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