Lightroom Exporting Ninja Style

I like to keep track of the photographs I post to social media. I like to know what I’ve posted and when, if I’ve already posted a particular photograph and how long ago so I don’t repeat myself too much. I do this using keywords; I post an image to, say, Instagram then add an ‘Instagram’ keyword to the photograph.

I also like to keep a collection of photographs that I think might make good candidates for posting. By setting this collection to be the Target Collection I can quickly rip through folders and use the ‘B’ to add photos to the collection.

To get an overview of what I’ve posted and what I might want to post that hasn’t yet been posted, I keep two smart collections for each social media site that I’m regularly posting to. So, for example:

Exports.Pool is my candidate collection. Instagram is a containing collection set. Posted is a smart collection that holds only photos with an Instagram keyword. Not Posted, a second smart collection that contains photographs that are in the candidate collection but don’t have an Instagram keyword.
And the smart collection search rules:

And:

Dates

It’s useful to keep a note of when a photo has been posted by adding its export date to a metadata field. It’s a bit fiddly and less than ideal but there’s a number of IPTC and EXIF that aren’t used much and can be stolen. It helps to create a custom Metadata preset in the metadata field to the right in Lightroom:

Automating the process using a plugin

BFEP is a Lightroom export plugin which simplifies the above process by extending Lightroom’s Export to Disk:

• Adds user specified keywords to exported photos.
• Adds export dates to photos’ BFEPExportData metadata field.
• Allows collections to be sorted on the export dates added to photo metadata

BFEP documentation and download link can be found here