Now all the way down the bottom of the left hand panel in the library is a little thing called publish services. So it's been locked in for quite a while now I think it was maybe version four or five it appeared. And it's it's an interesting little area with quite a few options for what it can achieve. So, simply put publish services is like export shortcuts in many ways. So I'm going to show you just by setting up an obvious one first, so that I can set up a public service to my hard drive. So I'm just going to click setup right here.

And I'm going to give this public service a name, I'm just going to call it test, you guessed it, test. Service, I'm going to say I want it to go to a specific folder on the desktop. I'm going to put it in a subfolder called publish test. So it's going to get a desktop And it's going to create a sub folder called publish test. I can rename the file, I'm not going to worry about that. Just now I'm going to say, let's this publish service create me a JPEG.

Let's make it a nice kind of 90%, good quality JPEG, the sRGB color space will be fine. And let's resize it to 1200 pixels on the long edge. And 72 pixels per inch will be fine. And let's sharpen it for screen a stone of standard amount will do. And let's just include my copyright and contact information in the metadata. And no watermarking you guessed it.

So there is my new published service just created. I'm going to go ahead and click Save right now. And that's going to save that public service there and you can see it right there. It's called public test. So now in order to activate that publish service, it's simply a case of dragging and dropping an image onto it. And when I go to it, you'll see it's got a new photo to publish.

So it doesn't automatically publish it by simply dropping the photo there, but it's ready. So now when I click publish, it's going to go ahead and it's going to publish that photo with the settings I chose. And it's going to move it up to the published photos section. So if I were to just pop into my finder for a moment, and have a look on my desktop, there's my published test. And there's my exported image exactly as requested. So how does that differ from a an export?

Well, not a lot, really not a lot. It's just a basically a little export shortcut. So let me just go back. Let me go back to all photographs for a moment and just show you a couple of other things quickly. I'm just going to drag another image into publish test. I don't want to show you what it looks like when We've got images both published and waiting to be published.

So you can see my new photo is sitting up there white to be published, whereas this one has already been published. So I might go ahead and publish that one again. Now. I click Publish. And now, off it goes. And it's moved down to the bottom to confirm that it's published.

And I'm sure you trust me, but let me just show you anyway. That there it is. They're all nice and published. So as I've said, this doesn't seem very different from a regular export or an export preset, and it's not. But where it is different is where we publish to somewhere other than our hard drive. So here's you can see here we can publish to Facebook, or we can publish to Flickr or we can publish to Adobe Stock photos, you can download a service to publish to Instagram and so forth.

So if I to click on the Facebook setup, for example, I would go ahead now give it a name called, I guess Facebook. And I need to go in and authorize on Facebook. So I'd have to click Authorize on Facebook, go into my facebook account, enter my password, username, password, and so forth. I'm basically giving Lightroom permission to publish directly to Facebook. So then once that's set up, I can have images. If I just remind you of this situation here.

Let me just check a couple more images in here with intent to be waiting to publish. So imagine now, these images are not going to be published just to my hard drive just to a folder on my hard drive. They're actually going to be published to Facebook. So I've got these images sitting here waiting, and I can go Okay, I will actually maybe I won't publish that one. So I remove it and I save it I will publish these two. So I go ahead and click Publish.

And up they go directly to Facebook. So once that's all set up, that's just going to happen automatically. Now, once you get that happening, and you're publishing directly to Facebook from Lightroom, that's when over here on the right hand panel, your comments tab comes into play. So right now you can see comments not supported, because I'm not logged into Facebook. But if I was, if I set up the Facebook publish service, then any comments that I received on my photos will appear here, I can see if people have liked my photos, what they've said. And I can even reply here as well and type a comment.

So that's a pretty interesting little setup. If you like to sort of publish things to Facebook on a on a regular basis, you can get all that set up for Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, and many other services. So that's the role of public services just they're much like a export preset, but with the significant point of difference that it doesn't just export to your hard drive it can export to a whole range of social media services.