It's taken me a little while to get this post up, mainly because I think it's the weakest part of the workflow (which I'm trying my best to improve) and a little because of continued issues with China's censoring of Blogger (I don't think I'm going to stop complaining about this until I'm out of the country). Anyway, here it is:
Once I have completed the processing of my photos, including keywords and titles/descriptions I post them to Flickr. Currently I am using Lightroom's Publishing feature that allows uploading directly to Flickr within Lightroom. I am also working with Jeffrey's "Export to Flickr" Lightroom Plugin, an enhanced Publishing plugin that provides a little more flexibility, but still not enough for me to be completely satisfied with publishing to the internet.
I have chosen Flickr due to it's strong market share in the online photo world. I think Picasa Web (also blocked in China, see I can't help myself) is an excellent and free alternative (you can get a free Flickr account, but you can only display 200 photos and a few other limitations), but I think the Flickr community is larger and more established.
The Flickr and Lightroom integration allows for the publishing of photos along with their metadata (specifically keywords and location/GPS data). I've really enjoyed being able to view the photos on a map as a way of tracking our travels. A few of the shortcomings with the built in Flickr publisher are the inability to have a photo in more than one photo set (or group) without having to upload the photo multiple times, this is remedied with the Jeffrey's plugin thankfully. However the largest drawback is anytime a photo is modified, even metadata updates like keywords, the photo must be re-uploaded, this has become the bane of my workflow. Once I have tagged a photo and posted it to our blog I cannot make any keyword changes or else it will break the photo on the blog, you may have seen some photos disappear from the blog occasionally, I think they are all correctly displaying now.
Once the photos have been uploaded to Flickr they are hosted there and then displayed on our blog. Flickr doesn't provide an easy way of posting multiple photos to a blog so we use an online app called Includr, which allows us to easily select multiple photos. The nice thing about using Flickr as the host rather than publishing them to Picasa Web (Blogger's default image host) too is that clicking on an image in the blog takes you directly to the image on Flickr, allowing you to view the photo's title and description as well as any other metadata about the photo.
So getting the photos online is handled solely in Lightroom. However the process to get a photo onto the blog involves Lightroom, Flickr, Includr and Blogger as well as some manual copying and pasting, definitely not my style. There you have it, the publishing workflow. Overall it's rather cumbersome and time consuming, but without it you wouldn't have any pictures to look at when you should be working.
For more info on the other aspects of my workflow, check the main post for links: Photography Workflow
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