I've been trying to find the differences between these two options, but have not yet been successful. For the purposes of this question, I will assume that my end goal is to "export" the images to my hard drive in .jpg format, either using the "Export" option or the "Publish" option.
So far, I have come up with these differences, although I'm not certain about all of them:
- With the Publish option, you can retract the exported images simply by removing it from Lightroom. The Export option is only one-way, so you'd need to delete the exported photo manually.
- With Export, if you make changes to images after exporting already, you need to find the modified images manually and then re-export them. With Publish, photos with changes since the last publish are automatically detected and exported on the next Publish.
- If you want to export a certain set of images, you need to select them and open the Export dialog, otherwise with Publish you need to select the images, drag them to the Publish collection, and then hit publish.
- With Export, there is the ability to make many presets and even various folders containing presets which are in general very easy to change. With Publish, you don't have this level of organization. Instead, you must make a new "Publish to Hard Drive" service every time you want to export using different settings.
Are these differences accurate? Are there any other differences (advantages/disadvantages) I'm overlooking? I'm wondering this because I am considering switching over to a different mode of exporting photos.
