The intersection of everything with magical, behind-the-scenes connections continues to blow me away. Today, I’ve been admiring the photo archiving and display site Zenfolio along with a nifty, high-powered plug-in for Adobe Lightroom written by software consultant Jeffrey Friedl that makes uploading photos a snap.
The cool thing about Lightroom’s export system it that can be extended and altered by outside software writers. So Friedl’s plug-in grabs information from your Zenfolio account and lets you tailor your upload from inside Lightroom just the way you want. For example, you can upload pictures into a new collection or choose one of your existing collections as the destination. Friedl has written similar Lightroom plug-ins for SmugMug , Flickr and Picasa Web.
Now that Apple appears to have dramatically improved Aperture, the race for digital photo manager supremacy is on again. For example, Apple has rewritten the program to do operations like importing in the background, one of my big gripes about earlier versions. The ability to add extensible features in Lightroom helps give the program some added power and a continued leg up.
p.s. When I decided to write this post, I wanted to mention the trail of posts that had led me to Zenfolio and then to Friedl’s upload plug-in. Man, that was hard to reconstruct given how many sites and posts I appear to read in a day. Finally, after combing through my Firefox history, I jogged my memory that it was a post in John Gruber’s link blog leading to a post on the O’Reilly Inside Lightroom blog about online storage that made me curious about Zenfolio. Then a quick Google search for Lightroom and Zenfolio turned up the fabulous plug-in. Phew!
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