Adobe released the beginnings of the Lightroom SDK today in conjunction with Lightroom 1.3.  I eagerly downloaded the 1.3 meg SDK as I've been waiting for this for awhile.  The manual is 96 pages.  There's an API document (html based), and three sample plug-ins, including the programmer favorite, Hello World.  For now, the SDK only supports extending the Export module, but at least it's a start.

Now, Lightroom can play nice with other programs and workflows.  It won't be long until someone has a PicasaWeb uploader and I won't need to use Picasa anymore to manage this.

I'm hoping in the future the SDK will grow so we can create other types of modules allowing companies to create plug-ins that modify image data.  Maybe in future versions, they'll open up and expose some Actionscript/FLEX APIs for modifying/adding to the UI!  That would be sweet.

To prepare for Lightroom SDK development, though, it looks like the developer is going to need to learn the LUA programming language.  According to the LUA website, it's a dynamic scripting language.  Those of you familiar with Python, Ruby, Perl, etc. will easily be able to learn this.  I wonder what kind of code libraries exist in LUA to aid in creating these plugins?  Time for me to dig in.

Quickly looking at the API, it looks like Adobe does a good job of including a lot of useful functionality, from LRFtp, LRHttp, Localization, Logging, etc.  So while we can only build Export plugins for now, it looks like there's a good base to expand upon for future development.

Start creating those Lightroom Export plugins!