You might not have noticed it, but when you went to set up a Facebook account to share to in Lightroom Classic or CC recently, you were greeted with the following message:

Facebook is Discontinuing Sharing from Desktop Applications: Starting on August 1st, 2018 Facebook will no longer allow applications like Lightroom Classic to post photos on your timeline. You can continue to use this feature until then, but after that date it will not be possible to share photos directly to Facebook from Lightroom Classic.”

So, what’s this mean? Well, if you currently have your Lightroom application hooked up to have Facebook as a publish service, that feature will no longer be available effective August 1. This isn’t a decision made by Adobe, rather it’s one that Facebook is making due to its new API changes — and it affects ALL desktop programs out there.

For now, this decision is just affecting desktop users. Meaning, if you’re sharing via the Lightroom CC apps on your phone or iPad, you should be able to continue sharing your images.

Going back to the browser

This might seem obvious, but your best bet is to open up your internet browser and upload via the Facebook website. While it’s an extra step, Facebook usually does a good job of grabbing things like captions that are in your image’s metadata. Despite this being an easy solution, it’s one that I’ve had difficulties within the past — when uploading large batches of photos (usually over 50), I’ve experienced freezing during the upload and things like captions and facial recognition tags not saving after I manually add them.

Social media management platforms

While desktop apps are most likely out of the question here, you’ll be able to continue using web-based services like HootSuite and Buffer. These are third-party solutions for individuals and businesses to upload and schedule their social media posts. This is handy because it’s just not for Facebook — it’ll let you post to services like Twitter and Instagram as well.

You can check out a complete rundown of these services in my article, “Photography Marketing: Uploading Finished Images to Instagram.”

The downside with HootSuite and Buffer? You’re limited to just uploading a few photos. If you have to upload an entire album of images, you’re restricted to Facebook.com.

Share your Flickr or Instagram stream

One of the options that Flickr has offered since I can remember is the ability to share your uploads to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. To set this up, log in and visit your Account Settings page, clicking on the Sharing & Extending tab. Here you can set up for any uploads you make to Flickr to automatically be posted on your Facebook wall.

You can also set this up to not automatically share your photos, instead of allowing you to manually share via each individual photo page.

If you don’t use Flickr, you can also set up a similar action via Instagram, under your Account Options section.

If This, Then That

The website If This, Then That offers a ton of solutions for posting your photos to Facebook and other services. Sadly, there’s no great way to upload a large group of photos, outside of Facebook.com.

That might be a signal — instead of using Facebook for your photo delivery to your followers, why not push your audience to your website or blog? Post albums on your WordPress blog, and with an If This, Then That applet, make sure that that post is automatically shared on Facebook to your followers.

This will do two things — one, it’ll continue to serve up your work to your Facebook followers. And two, most importantly, it’ll get followers to your website, allowing you to control the experience for your readers, instead of having them bombarded with ads and other content.

Conclusion

While Facebook’s decision to disallow desktop apps from posting photos is a definite annoyance, it’s one that can be overcome. With a little creativity and thought behind what you post, you can continue sharing your images with your followers, and even draw them over to your own website in the process.

 

For more on Photography Marketing, see our weekly column.