I just installed the Flickr Upload Demo plugin for the Adobe Lightoom SDK to quickly see how the integration with Lightroom looks.  I gotta say, I'm pretty impressed.  While, I'll admit I'm not a massive power user of Flickr, and the Flickr plugin included in the SDK is only for demo purposes (it requires you're personal Flickr API key), it does seem to work well.

Here's what the main dialog looks like (for those of you who haven't installed Lightroom 1.3, the Export dialog has changed quite a bit, probably to support the SDK):

As you can see, it supports a lot of what you'd expect: The resizing of images, the managing of the Flickr account, the naming of files, the inclusion of Metadata, whether the upload should be public/private.  What looks really appealing is the ability to include metadata from Lightroom and adding other tags just for the flickr upload.

Something I'd like to see on a Flickr upload plugin, is the ability to map tags.  For example, if I have an image tagged bob_smith, I'd like to have a mapping file that changes all my bob_smith tags in Lightroom it to just Bob tags in Flickr. 

Here's a shot of what Lightroom looks like during the image upload:

As you can see, the integration is top notch.

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!