Automate Lightroom delivery: from export to your subject's phone

Search for how to upload from Lightroom to a client gallery automatically and you'll find the same answer everywhere: you can't fully automate it. You can automate everything up to the publish step, and then you have to press publish.

That's true of Lightroom's own publish services. It is not true of delivery as a whole. Lightroom can export to a folder automatically, and a folder is all you need — the automation just has to live on the other side of the export, not inside Lightroom.

Here's the setup.

The principle

Lightroom's publish plugins are pull-based: the gallery service asks Lightroom for photos when you tell it to. That's the step that can't be automated.

Export is push-based. An export preset writes a finished JPEG to a location you choose, and you can trigger it with a keyboard shortcut on any selection. If something else is watching that location, the chain completes itself without a publish button anywhere in it.

Shoot tethered → Lightroom catalogue → apply preset → export to folder
                                                            ↓
                                              watcher picks up the file
                                                            ↓
                                                  QR code updates
                                                            ↓
                                              guest scans, photo downloads

Lightroom Classic, step by step

1. Set up tethered capture

File → Tethered Capture → Start Tethered Capture.

Set the destination to a folder for the session — this is where raws land, not where exports go. Keep the two separate; pointing them at the same folder will cause the watcher to pick up files you never edited.

2. Build a develop preset

Edit one representative frame the way you want every frame to look, then Develop → New Preset. Include white balance, tone, and calibration. Exclude anything spatial that varies per frame.

If you're shooting a booth under controlled light, one preset genuinely covers the whole event. Under changing daylight, build two and switch deliberately.

3. Build the export preset

File → Export, then configure:

• Export Location: a dedicated folder. Call it something unambiguous like booth-out. Nothing else should ever write here.
• File Naming: any scheme, as long as it's unique. A sequence number is fine.
• File Settings: JPEG, quality 80, sRGB. Not AdobeRGB — phones will render it wrong.
• Image Sizing: long edge 2048 px. Enough for a phone and for LinkedIn; small enough to upload in about a second.
• Output Sharpening: Screen, Standard.
• Post-Processing: Do nothing. The watcher handles what comes next.

Save it as a User Preset via the Add button on the left.

4. Bind it to a key

Once a preset exists, Cmd/Ctrl + Alt + Shift + E runs "Export with Previous" on the current selection. That's the whole per-guest interaction: select the frame, hit the shortcut.

5. Point a watcher at the folder

This is the part Lightroom doesn't do. Something has to notice a new file in booth-out and act on it.

Fotoflo's desktop app does this: pick the folder once, and every JPEG that lands in it uploads and becomes the target of the booth's QR code. But the principle isn't specific to any one tool — a watched folder is a plain integration point, which is exactly why it works with any editor.

Capture One

Same shape, different menu names.

• Capture → Capture Folder sets where tethered raws land
• Build a Style instead of a develop preset
• Create a Process Recipe — this is the export preset. Set format JPEG, quality 80, sRGB, long edge 2048, and set the Output Location to your watched folder
• Cmd/Ctrl + D processes the selection with the active recipe

Capture One's tethering is generally more robust than Lightroom's, which matters if you're doing this for eight hours straight.

Things that will bite you

Chunked writes. Lightroom writes a JPEG progressively, so a naïve watcher can grab a half-written file and upload a corrupt image. Any watcher worth using waits for the file size to stabilise before reading it. If you're scripting this yourself, add a stability check — a couple of hundred milliseconds of unchanged size is enough.

Exporting into the tether folder. Tempting, and wrong. The watcher will pick up raws, or re-pick-up exports, and you'll get duplicates.

Sleep settings. A laptop that sleeps mid-event stops the whole chain. Disable sleep before you start, not after you notice.

RAW files. Watch-folder delivery pipelines generally accept JPEG, PNG and similar — not RAW. That's fine here, because you're exporting finished files by design, but don't point a watcher at a card dump and expect it to work.

What you end up with

Per guest, your interaction is: shoot, pick the frame, press one shortcut. Everything after that — upload, QR update, the guest's download page — happens without you.

The claim that Lightroom delivery can't be automated is really a claim about Lightroom's publish services. Export presets plus a watched folder route around it entirely, and the result is a genuinely hands-off pipeline.

If you want the watcher part without building it, that's what Fotoflo's desktop app does — macOS for now, and it works with anything that can write a file into a folder.