In this instructional video, Joe Houghton walks viewers through the complete workflow for preparing Lightroom images for a club competition submission, specifically the Edinburgh Members Exhibition. He begins by showing how to locate relevant photos across scattered folders using the Library Filter and metadata date filtering. Selected images are then organized into a new collection (e.g., “EPS Exhibition”) with options to add or remove photos. Houghton demonstrates how to set up export settings that meet the competition’s requirements: JPEG format, sRGB color profile, maximum dimensions of 1600 px width for landscape and 1200 px height for portrait images. He builds a custom file‑naming convention (League, membership number, panel, sequence, title) by inserting metadata fields such as the image title. The video covers creating separate export presets for landscape and portrait formats, saving them for future use, and verifying the exported files in Finder, including checking dimensions and correcting sequence numbers. The tutorial emphasizes efficiency, repeatability, and adherence to the competition’s technical specifications.
Chapters
Hi there, Joe Houghton here. Just a quick video to take you through the process of saving images out of Lightroom for a club competition. I got an email recently for the Edinburgh Members Exhibition competition. PDIs must be JPEG, sRGB profile, 1600 pixels maximum horizontally, 1200 pixels maximum Maximum vertically. File names should follow the following convention. So I just thought I'd show you, you know, how you can use Lightroom to make that process a little bit easier. So I'll just put the email away for now, and we can bring that back later on. So the first thing you would need to do in Lightroom is locate some images that you want to to use. Okay, now they may all be in a particular folder, but let's say they're not. Let's say, you know, you've got potential images scattered all over the place. So I have a folder here called Print Photos, and you can see there's lots of subfolders in that Print Photos folder. But if I go up to the Library Filter— and if you can't see the Library Filter, use the backslash key on your keyboard just to show it. And then I go to Metadata, this will sort all the images in the Print Photos folder, all 9,500 images, by date for me. So let's just say that I want to have a look at the images that I've got from 2021 and 2022, or, you know, a particular year or period. So I can just highlight the year. And if I hold the Shift key down, I can highlight 2022 as well there. Okay, and then that's giving me all the images, yeah, within Print Photos that were taken in 2021 and 2022. And you can see there's, there's some images here. Okay, so let's say that those are the ones that I'm going to think about. And, um, so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to choose— let's do a— let's do 4, um, light trails images. So let's pick that one and Command click that one, and let's see whether I've got any more. Yeah, maybe that one and this one. Okay, so there's my, my 4 entries. So I've picked those from wherever, whichever folders they're in. What I'm going to do now is, while those are selected, I'm going to scroll down to where it says Collections on the left-hand side. So there's my different photo drives. Here we are, Collections, and I'm going to create a new collection, and I'm going to call this one, I don't know, EPS Exhibition. Now I'm going to tell Include Selected Photos, so it will put these photos into this collection. And if you want to sync it with Lightroom, that'll sync it to the Adobe Cloud or whatever, but really just include the selected photos is fine. So I'm going to create that. So then here we are, EPS Exhibition, and there's the 4 images that I had selected. And if you hadn't selected all your images before you created that collection, you could go up again to, you know, any folder. So let's just pick, oh, I don't know, pick that 500px folder. Yeah, and let's say we wanted to add this one into that set as well. So I could select it and I could go back down to my EPS Exhibition folder there, and I could right-click on that folder and then Add Selected Photo to it. And when you do that, when you add selected photo to a folder, you can see it's gone up to 5, and now that appears in the folder as well. So that's okay, and I just want to show you one more thing. So if I find a folder that's got a vertical format as well, so I don't know, there must be one from— yeah, there we are, we'll just pick that one. Okay, so go back down to my EPS Exhibition folder, add that selected photo to the collection. So I've now got 6 in my collection. There we are. Now let's just bring back onto the screen the requirements: JPEG, sRGB, 1600 pixels horizontally, 1200 vertically. Okay, and you can put in up to 4. So let's choose the ones that we want. So I'm going to keep that one in and maybe these 3. So that one, and that one, Command or Control-click. Yeah, I can now right-click on those and remove them from the collection. So they're gone. So these are the ones that I'm going to use in my, in my submission. Okay, so now take the landscape ones first. So Shift and click on the right-hand of the 3 and it selects them all. And now we're going to go down to Export. And we're going to define the export. So typically when I'm exporting for a club competition or whatever, I have a folder called Print Photos, which you saw before, and then I create a subfolder for the particular exhibition or salon or club night or whatever. Okay, so we'll just call this EPS Exhibition 2022. There we are. And just make a check in that box there and a check in Add to This Catalogue. Okay, you can rename your files, so we need to do that, don't we, because we have a particular naming convention to follow. So let me bring that up to the top there, and let me bring the requirements Up here. Okay, so we've got files should follow this following naming convention. Okay, there we go. So custom settings, let's go down and edit our custom settings. So let's just get rid of all that and let's build up the file name that, that it's going to use for these different images. So the XX is League One or League Two, L1 or L2. So let's say I'm L1, and then it's an underscore, and then it's— what have we got? NNNN is your 4-digit membership number. So 1234. So that's the membership number. And then panel name, sequence, and then image title. Okay, so maybe there is no panel name, or maybe I'm just going to call this Light Trails Panel. Yeah, and then the sequencing of the images that are going to be put into that panel, you know, so 1, 2, 3, 4. Now what you can do here is you can put a sequence number in. So you see down here it says Sequence Number, and you can choose just a 1-digit or a 2-digit or whatever. Okay, so I'm going to choose a 2-digit sequence number, and I'm just going to insert that sequence number in there. And then we've got another underscore, and then we've got the image title. And if you look over here, generally what I do is I use the— I try and use the title part of the metadata in each image for that. But, you know, if you've not done that, maybe you use the caption or you just use the file name. Okay, so I'm going to add the title field in there. So if we come down to Metadata here, you can find the Title option in Metadata. There it is, and you can just insert that. Okay, so that's going to be our custom title. So when we export these 4 pictures, it will build up this for each of the 4 pictures. Okay, now we want JPEG images. The color space, sRGB. That was part of the brief, I think, sRGB profile. So the last thing we need to do is just figure out the sizing. So resize to fit, because your photos may be bigger or smaller. And in this case, we can go width and height. Okay, so the width and the height. So I'm going to leave the height blank. And then the width should be maximum 1600 pixels. So you put in 1600 there. Okay, it's not saying what resolution you need, so it doesn't really matter. So I normally just leave it at 200. So that's going to size the image to 1600 pixels and then keep the same ratio. So whatever the current ratio is, the height will be adjusted according to the current ratio. We don't need output sharpening. You can do whatever you like with the metadata. You probably don't need to watermark. And then what I do at the end of this export is in the post-processing, I show it in Finder because what it's going to do is it's going to create this subfolder under Print Photos, EPS Exhibition 2022, and then it's going to put the exported images into there. So I want it to just show me those images in Finder when I've finished. And just in case I have to come back and do this a second time or a third time or whatever, I'm going to add this now to my presets. So I'm going to call this EPS Exhibition Landscape Images. Okay, and that's under the User Presets folder. Create. So now there we are, EPS Exhibition Landscape. Okay, so that's saved it, so I don't have to put in all those things again next time I want to come in and do this. So now I can hit the export, and it's going to now come up here, and it's going to export. There we are. Now, L1 1234 Light Trails 01. 02, 03. Now you see there's no titles. Now there's no titles because— let me shut the Finder down— if I go in on each of these, I haven't put titles in here. So let's call that one Beckett Bridge Light Trails. We'll call this one O'Connell Street Light Trails, and we'll call this one Christchurch Light Trails. And while we're here, we'll put this one as well. There we are, we've got a title in for that one. So let's re-export those now. So choose them all again. Export. And now all I do is make sure that that one is highlighted. Okay, and you see now it's showing that it's seeing that those titles exist. Hit the Export. It's going to bring Finder up again for me. And now in Finder, we can see that I've got the images again. Now there's 01, 02, 03, and those are all sized to So if I show the dimensions— can I show dimensions on here? Doesn't look like I can. No. Okay, but the dimensions of that image are 1600. There we are. So over here, dimensions 1600 pixels wide. So we're following all the rules there. So now we can come back into Lightroom and we can do this one. Now let's have a look at the requirements again, 1200 pixels maximum vertically. So we need to do something slightly different for this one. So go into Export. It's remembered the landscape settings, so everything stays the same apart from here. So now, because this is a vertical crop image, we're going to make the width blank and we're going to make 1200 the maximum pixels for the height. And then I'm going to add that And call this one EPX Exhibition Portrait Format. Create. So it saves that. So now I've got a landscape format preset and a portrait format preset. I've just got the one image chosen to export to, so if I press the export now, it will Run that, and then now you see the only thing that there is because we did it as a single export. It's given that the the the the sequence number zero one. So now I just have to come in here and just change that zero one to zero four. Okay, and if I sort now, I can I can choose that one and that one and that one and that one, and they're all sized correctly for emailing off or uploading to the. I think it's the Dropbox for the exhibition. So just a quick video to show you how Lightroom can make it easy to find and export and resize your images for something like an exhibition or a club night. I hope that was useful.
