October 7, 2009
An introduction to Lightroom Plugins
Plugins in Lightroom
Lightroom has a plugin architecture that allows third parties to add to the functionality of Lightroom. Often these plugins add to Lightroom’s core functions, but more often they add entirely new features to the program. Plugins are a very different beast to Presets, and sometimes users can get the two confused. Presets are merely stored sets of instructions for Lightroom tools (and for plugins for that matter). Plugins, on the other hand, are additional programming, added to Lightroom.
Plugins for Lightroom originally came in one of two forms, Export and Web Gallery. But programmers being what they are have made much more of the available SDK to create even more than this, along with changes in the SDK. So we can broaden this view into more sections:
- Web Galleries
- Export Plugins
- Metadata Plugins
- Post Process Plugins
- External Editors
- Import
- Utilities