Keeping life simple.

In my work as a sound engineer (not to mention my photography work!), I meet new people everyday. Be it bands, friends of friends or audience members, I get to make new acquaintances all the time. One of the first topics that ladies get to is my son. He’s 2 and has a huge shock of curly blonde hair. So I get to break out the photos and do the proud father routine. I have a small bunch on my phone (a Nokia E61-love the big screen!), but I’m very bad at adding new ones. Tonight I bit the bullet and I set Lightroom up to get the pictures to my phone quickly and easily.

Being on an iMac, I have bluetooth built in, so this for me is the best way to do the job. First I invoked Shift Cmd B from the Finder, which is the internal command to open Bluetooth File Exchange. From there I right clicked on the dock icon and selected ‘Show in Finder’. This was the quickest way for me to get to the original program icon (already knowing the shortcut).
Next I switched to Lightroom and hit Export (Shift Command E to be exact). Using the final option in the Post Processing section, I selected ‘Go to Export Actions folder Now’. This opens the folder in Finder. Now I have the 2 Finder windows I need. With Option and Command held down, I drag the Bluetooth File Exchange icon into the Export Actions folder. This creates an alias in the folder.

Finally I go back to Lightroom and the close and open Export again to refresh the Post Processing menu. I then create a preset that sends a smaller size copy of my file to Bluetooth File Exchange and save it as an Export Preset.
To facilitate the speedy transfer, I have my phone and the computer paired. Now whenever I want to send images to the phone, I switch on bluetooth. I then select my images in grid and choose the Bluetooth preset from the Export Presets menu. Of course this leaves me no excuse for not having new pictures to show.