Since the 2020 Adobe update for Lightroom it has been possible to export files for multiple uses at the same time using presets in the export dialogue. There are a couple of caveats to this- you cannot batch export directly to email or to Cd/DVD it has to be to a drive, internal or external does not matter, and the feature is probably going to be most useful with user generated presets. So in the example here (fig 1), I have created several export presets and you will notice they now have a check box by the side of them (red arrow).
As soon as you place a check mark in any of the pre-sets they are immediately greyed out, so you will need to have made sure they are set correctly first, if for instance you occasionally change the folder that a pre-set exports to- make the change-right click over the pre-set name and select update with current settings from the drop down menu. Also you will notice, after checking one of the boxes a message appears in small orange writing at the bottom of the box ( “some sections are hidden when pre-sets are checked”) (green arrow), this is referring to the post processing section and any third party plug in processes, and although it is missing, Lightroom still respects any settings you had selected, (so if the pre-set
was set to sharpen using a plug in such as Define 2.0 or set to run an action via a droplet, they would still perform the task on export), so again is something to be aware of before you hit the export button
In the past if you wanted to export an image to a social media folder and create a full sized tiff to send to an agency you would need to revisit the export dialogue box to complete the second export, now you can select as many different presets as you have created and Lightroom will process them in a batch- in the example here I have checked four boxes so Lightroom will process them and in the status bar you would see four operations in progress, and in the background, images being exported to the different folders and to the criteria set out when you created the preset. So now, if you imagine processing hundreds of files, you can start to see big time savings by not going back and forth to export them as separate operations.
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