How can I make Lightroom auto-backup to jpeg?

Question

I have recently got an android tablet and would like to keep a copy of most of my photos from my Lightroom archive on it for showing off my work, browsing etc.

Is there any way to, preferably automatically on close (as with the backup procedure), export any photos that match a certain criteria to a folder on my hard drive. For example, I organise all my photos as so:

/photos
    /album1
        /good
            goodShot1.raw
        /rough
            roughShot1.raw
            roughShot2.raw
    /album2
        /good
            goodShot1.raw
        /rough
            roughShot1.raw
            roughShot2.raw

The rough folder in each case stores all the photos for a particular shoot, just incase I need to go back for textures,edits etc. The good folder stores all the shots I was happy with/have edited.

My desire would be to have a copy of each photo from the good folder exported as a jpeg in the similar folder structure like so:

/export
    /album1
        goodShot1.jpeg
    /album2
        goodShot1.jpeg

This would allow me to use Dropbox, etc. to sync these lower quality/memory images to my device for displaying to the world without too much hassle.

Answer 1

I don't see why you couldn't use Publish Services for this. If you are in the Library module, it is on the left pane all the way at the bottom. Simply setup a new Publish Services to your hard drive, and select the criteria that you would like to use, such as Photos Edited today with 5 Stars.

Once you have that setup, you can really extend the functionality to do many different things that add to it. The publish service to hard drive is really setup for exactly what you are trying to do - something like manage files that will be synced to a tablet PC. So it should work very well for you.

The one "catch" here is that to actually publish the photos I believe you either have to click on the "Publish" at the bottom of the left pane in the Library Module, or Publish up at the top of the center pane. This will send them over.

Answer 2

Try Jeffrey Friedl's Tree Publisher Plugin.

It's gives you a publish service that will preserve your tree structure. You can set it up using Smart Collection rules to have it export a subset of your photos. In your specific case, you could have a rule that selects folders with "good" in the name.

Two things it won't do:

• I don't believe it will handle moving photos to different folders like your example. Instead of using a "rough" and a "good" folder, though, you could put all your photos in one folder and add a "good" tag to good photos. That way the export will be exactly as you want it, and you can use filtering to show only "good" photos when you need them.
• It won't run when you close Lightroom. Instead, you have to manually tell it to publish.