Adobe has made it very easy for us to export multiple photos in Lightroom to speed up the post production workflow. They then took it a step further and made it possible to mass export multiple images in different formats and sizes and to different places at once.
Of course, you don’t have to export photos from Lightroom, unless you want to share them digitally or print them. But if you do, I’m sure you want it to be as quick and easy possible.
We’ll first look at the straight forward way to export multiple photos and then the huge time saving way to export different versions of the same image.
How do I mass export photos from Lightroom?
Exporting multiple photos in Lightroom uses the same process as exporting a single image. The only difference is that you must first select multiple photos. Here’s how..
STEP 1 – select images to export
Lightroom gives us 3 ways to select multiple photos in Lightroom to export:
Select all photos in a folder or collection
- Command A (or Control A for Windows)
Select consecutive photos
- Click the first photo, hold down Shift and click on the last photo
Select photos that are spread out
- Click the first photo
- Hold down Command (or Control)
- Click the photos you want
STEP 2 – open Export dialog box
You can open the export dialog box from either the Library Module or the Develop Module.
Library Module
- Click the “Export” button at the bottom of the left panel
Develop Module
- Click “File” in the menu bar at the top of the screen
- Scroll down and click “Export”
A quicker way to do this is to use the Lightroom shortcut, which is to hold down Shift and Command (or Control) and push E on the keyboard.
STEP 3 – select the export preset or input your export settings
You don’t have to use a preset for exporting photos in Lightroom, but if you find that you use the same export settings often, it saves time to create an export preset.
You’d need to create an export preset first.
Further reading: Lightroom export settings for web and print
STEP 4 – export multiple photos
Once you’re happy with your export settings, click “Export”.
It will of course take longer to export multiple photos in Lightroom than single images. You can however export as many photos as you like at once.
Exporting multiple photos in Lightroom – different versions at once
We’ve covered batch exporting, this is multi-batch exporting. Basically, it’s photo exporting in overdrive!
Multi-batch exporting photos in Lightroom massively speeds up your workflow! Even better – it involves just a couple more clicks to batch export photos.
You can find detailed step by step instructions further down with screenshots to help you, but here’s the process in a nutshell:
For multi-batch exporting in Lightroom:
- First create export presets
- Then in the export dialog box check the boxes of the presets you wish to use
- The “Export” button changes to read “Batch Export”
- Select where you want to save your photos
- Click “Export”
When would you export multiple versions of a photo?
1. Posting the same photo to different social media platforms
They all have different image size requirements, which can be a real pain if you want to post the same photo on different social media platforms.
To maintain the quality of your images on social media, it’s best to export photos in Lightroom at the exact size required by the social media platform.
I’m not talking about aspect ratio, because to get exactly the right crop, you’d need to do that for each photo.
I mean the size of the image on the longest side, e.g. 2000 pixels.
2. Exporting print, web and social media versions of the same image
Did you know that you can batch export an image or set of images with different export settings and file names at the same time to different folders?
I create two versions of each image for my personal brand clients. One is high resolution for printing and the other is low resolution for using online.
So using Lightroom multi-batch export is a huge time saver for:
- Quickly exporting hundreds of high resolution and low resolution images
- At the same time
- With different filenames
- To a single folder
If I wanted to I could choose to save them in different folders, but using different filenames means that they can go into the same folder without any difficulty.
How to export multiple photos in Lightroom – multi-batch exporting
After creating export presets:
- Select all the images
- Click “Export” to open the export settings menu
- Check the boxes next to the export presets you want to use (normally, to export just one version of the image, you’d just click on the preset text)
- The “Export” button changes to read “Batch Export”
- Click “Batch Export” to open the next menu
- Choose the folder/s to send the different versions to
- Click “Export”
That’s all you need to do to batch export different versions of hundreds of photos!
As you can see from the above screenshot, I save the different versions of the photos to the same folder. I start the filename with P for the high resolution print version and with a W for the low resolution online use image. It helps me and my client to keep photo organization simple.
Sharing after exporting photos
To share the photos with my client I upload the contents of the folder to a password protected gallery on Shootproof and send my client the link. (PS – if you click on this affiliate link you can try Shootproof for a month for free).
Sharing photos this way creates a frictionless, professional experience by making it really easy for clients to view all the images and download them.
You can read more about sharing photos here…
Further reading: 7 Best photo sharing platforms for all photographers
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