Lightroom's share feature is one of those tools that sounds simple but has enough depth to change how you deliver photos to clients and subjects. If you photograph people and want them to walk away with easy access to their images, the built-in sharing and QR code system in Lightroom is worth understanding fully.
Coming to you from Glyn Dewis, this practical video walks through the complete sharing workflow in Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and Lightroom Mobile. Dewis is working on a real portrait project called "I Am Lyme," documenting the people of Lyme Regis in southwest England, and he built this workflow specifically to let his subjects access their own portraits without any back-and-forth. The core idea is that once images are in the cloud as an album, Lightroom generates a live web page with a shareable link that you can control down to permissions and appearance. You can set whether people can view only, download JPEGs, contribute their own images, or even make edits.
On the desktop side, Dewis covers both Lightroom and Lightroom Classic, since the two handle things differently. In Lightroom, you work with albums that live in the cloud by default. In Lightroom Classic, you work with collections, and syncing with Lightroom is a checkbox you have to manually tick when creating the collection. Once that sync is active, the collection shows up as an album across all versions of Lightroom, including mobile. From there, the share options are the same regardless of where you access them: a direct link, Facebook and X sharing, privacy controls, and layout customization including photo grid, column, or single-image views in light or dark themes.
The part of this video that's genuinely useful for anyone photographing people in the field is the QR code feature in Lightroom Mobile. Instead of collecting email addresses on the spot and following up later, you can pull up a QR code directly from the app, show it to whoever you just photographed, and they scan it and immediately land on the album page. Dewis has this set up so subjects can download their own images on the spot. He also covers what to do if you're a Lightroom Classic user who doesn't have or want Lightroom Mobile installed. Logging into lightroom.adobe.com gives you access to the same share controls through a browser, including the link and QR code, so you're not locked out of the feature just because you skipped the mobile app. There are also finer details around inviting specific people by email and setting granular permissions per invite that Dewis walks through in the video. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Dewis.
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