Publish services are Lightroom Classic's way of keeping a destination in sync with your catalog. You set up a service once with the same options as the Export dialog, drag photos into a publish collection, and press Publish. From then on, Lightroom remembers which version of each photo went out. Edit one and it moves to a list of photos waiting to be re-published; remove one and Lightroom can delete it at the destination too.
That makes them the right tool for anything you keep updating: a folder that feeds your phone, a portfolio selection, a stock library, a Flickr account. For a one-time delivery, such as a client gallery you export once and hand over, a plain File > Export is simpler and does the same job.
Where is the Publish Services panel?
It sits in the left panel of the Library module, under Collections. If you cannot see it, right-click any panel header in that column (Catalog, Folders, Collections) and tick Publish Services in the menu that appears.
Current versions of Lightroom Classic come with three services built in: Hard Drive, Flickr and Adobe Stock. Each shows a Set Up button until you configure it. Click the plus icon at the top of the panel and choose Go to Publishing Manager to see every installed service, add a second copy of one, or change its settings later. Cloud Lightroom does not have publish services at all; this is a Lightroom Classic feature.
How does the Hard Drive service work?
The Hard Drive service is the one most photographers should try first, because it needs no account and shows the mechanics clearly.
- Click Set Up next to Hard Drive.
- Give it a description, such as "Phone portfolio, 2048px".
- Fill in the settings exactly as you would in Export: a destination folder, file naming, JPEG quality, sRGB, long edge, output sharpening, metadata.
- Save, then right-click the service and choose Create Published Folder. Each published folder becomes a subfolder of the destination.
- Drag photos onto it and click Publish at the bottom of the left panel.
Now edit one of those photos in the Develop module. Back in the collection, Lightroom has moved it into a group called Modified Photos to Re-Publish. Click Publish again and only that file is rewritten. Remove a photo from the collection and it sits under Deleted Photos to Remove until the next publish, which deletes the file from the folder.
Point the destination at a folder your cloud storage syncs and the result is a portfolio folder on every device that updates itself whenever you tweak an edit.
What is the difference between publish and export?
Export is fire and forget. Lightroom writes the files and has no further interest in them. If you change the edit next month, you export again and decide yourself what to overwrite.
Publish keeps a record per photo per collection. In practice that gives you three things export cannot:
- A status for every file: new, published, modified since publishing, or waiting to be removed.
- Selective updates: a re-publish sends only what changed, which matters on a 400 photo collection.
- Removal: taking a photo out of the collection takes it off the destination, if the service supports deleting.
The cost is that the record lives in your catalog. Publish collections are tied to the catalog that created them, and if you rebuild or split catalogs, the history does not follow. If you keep one catalog per year, which plenty of people do (see organising a Lightroom catalog), publish collections used for long-running destinations belong in whichever catalog you keep open longest.
Can you use smart collections with publish services?
Yes, and it is the most useful trick in the panel. Right-click the Hard Drive service and choose Create Published Smart Folder (other services call it a smart collection). Set the rule, for example "rating is 5 stars and keyword contains portfolio", and every photo that matches is queued for publishing automatically. Give an image five stars in the grid and it is in the next publish; drop it to four and it is marked for removal.
One right-click option saves time when something goes wrong. Mark as Published tells Lightroom a photo is already at the destination without sending it again, which is useful after a catalog restore or when you copied the files over by hand.
What about third-party publish plugins?
Plugin developers can build publish services for any destination with an upload API, and they install through File > Plug-in Manager > Add. Long-running examples include Flickr and photo sharing plugins with more options than the built-in one, and services for website builders and cloud storage.
Before you install one, check three things: that it supports the current Lightroom Classic release, what it does when you remove a photo (some delete at the destination, some leave it), and whether it uploads in the background while you keep working. A plugin that stalls the Library module for every upload costs more time than it saves.
When should you use export instead?
Most client delivery is a one-off. You cull, edit, export once at full size, and the gallery goes to the client. Nobody needs Lightroom to track that set for the next five years, and a publish collection per client turns the panel into hundreds of entries you will never open again.
So a sensible split looks like this:
- Publish: your phone portfolio, your website's portfolio selection, stock libraries, a Flickr account, any folder you sync somewhere.
- Export with a preset: client galleries, social posts sized for each platform (the settings are in Lightroom export settings for Instagram), files for a print lab.
Save an export preset for each of those with a consistent file name template, since a naming convention is what lets you find a delivered file again when a client asks two years later.
Is every Lightroom upload plugin a publish service?
No. Many plugins are export plugins: they appear in the Export To menu at the top of the File > Export dialog, not in the Publish Services panel. The plugin Xposure includes on its Pro plan is one of these. You choose File > Export, pick it as the destination, pick or create the client album, and the JPEGs upload straight into the gallery. It runs on Lightroom Classic 10 and later, not cloud Lightroom.
It borrows the part of publish that matters for clients. Re-exporting the same photos skips or updates the duplicates rather than adding copies, so the client's favourites and proofing notes on those images survive a corrected edit. EXIF camera data is kept and GPS location is stripped on the way out. For a gallery you deliver once and occasionally fix, that is the behaviour you want without a publish collection per client.
Open the Library module now, set up the Hard Drive service with your phone portfolio settings, and build one smart publish collection on a five star rule. Every portfolio choice you make from today updates itself.
