Embed images from lightroom.adobe.com?

Hello everyone! Apologies if this topic has already been discussed - I was suprised when my various searches of the vast knowledge base here turned up dry.

I've recently made the jump from my archaic LR 5.7 setup into the Adobe CC ecosystem. I'm learning all of the various cloud integrations and features, and have found the centralized management and sharing of photos with new Lightroom to be a great improvement to my workflow. I'm now wondering if there's a good way for me to leverage Adobe's cloud hosting and sharing to embed my photos here on the forum. Previously, I would export and upload to Flickr for sharing, using Flickr URLs for embedding here. I can't seem to figure out the secret sauce to make the same thing work with Lightroom online sharing.

As an example, let's say I want to share a lovely photo of some lovely ducks. I've gotten these up into my LR cloud, and set up sharing via LR online, which gives me a short URL: https://adobe.ly/3bUbS​zA. This of course takes us to a longer "album" URL: https://lightroom.adob​e.com …c67e04846845cf6​0ac643034a where we can then pick a specific photo, which has its own even longer URL: https://lightroom.adob​e.com …5be1176a2b70cde​ccc4e84ad8.

Trying any of these three URLs in the embed dialog doesn't work. I also tried getting the more direct image URL from LR online, which is this: https://lightroom.adob​e.com …899af058f0435ba​3527607554, and that URL doesn't seem to line up either for the forum.

Anyhow, wanted to share this specific example so we can, of course, discuss specifics. Anyone have ideas on how best to get this working? Even a pointer to an already existing thread that I missed would be helpful. Thanks!

I am far from the expert, but it looks like Adobe has done a lot to make it hard for the classic type of image URL embedding to NOT work. For example the site, even the individual image, requires java script to see the page or images.
Again, I'm not the expert on this, but my layman's view is that Adobe has done what it can to make it impossible to share these images in the classic way. It is the source that requires some change to make this happen. If this is Adobe's intention, I'm not sure it is even ethical for POTN do try to circumvent this protection.

Sharing sites like Zenfolio provide specific ways to share an image. It's part of the package. These features can be turned off to make it just as difficult as Adobe's site is.

Is there any possibility that you can go into the dashboard for your site and turn some form of image link sharing on?

CyberDyneSystems wrote in post #19240500
...Adobe has done what it can to make it impossible to share these images in the classic way. It is the source that requires some change to make this happen. If this is Adobe's intention, I'm not sure it is even ethical for POTN do try to circumvent this protection.

Sharing sites like Zenfolio provide specific ways to share an image. It's part of the package. These features can be turned off to make it just as difficult as Adobe's site is.

Is there any possibility that you can go into the dashboard for your site and turn some form of image link sharing on?

Thanks, and yes I agree that Adobe (and truthfully, other image sharing services too, as you mention) does what they can here to obfuscate/hide the image files themselves from the viewer. Your point of ethicality in sharing I wholly agree with - if Adobe and their system is attempting to keep a photographer's images protected, that should be respected and systems shouldn't be trying to circumvent it. Only if both the image owner and the hosting system support export/embed should the images be pulled by other systems.

I did take a closer look at the album/photo sharing settings in LR online, and it seems that I have downloads and export enabled for this sample album - the option is called "Allow downloads (JPG) and export", and in fact this was enabled for the sample links above. Playing with it a bit, enabling the setting seems to do two things (perhaps more). First, it allows a user to right-click on the image and have image context menu actions, like opening in another tab or saving the image (right-click menus are blocked when the option is disabled). Second, it adds a download menu option into the UI, and interacting with it grabs a copy of the image. Under the covers there is yet another URL: https://dl.lightroom.a​dobe.com …5be1176a2b70cde​ccc4e84ad8. This one also doesn't work in the embed dialog here.

This seems to be the most direct image URL available from the system, but, for the web devs out there, it looks like Adobe has some strict cross-origin requirements enforced here (this is different from other sharing services, like Flickr, which don't). This sort of server-side protection allows *.adobe.com sites to access the images, but strictly blocks other sites from doing so. All of that means that Adobe's provided LR site can open the image API and allow the user to download the file, and users can even open the URL directly in their browser to view/download, but other sites are not allowed to open the URL. So, all of that is to say that even though I'm a willing owner that wants to share, I don't believe this part of Adobe's cloud system is willing.

Finally, it looks like Adobe has a few other features built in to CC for online sharing that I haven't played with yet. There are Galleries, Libraries and Portfolios that all can be used, and perhaps one of those options is more aligned with embedding photos into other systems. That's what I'll be playing with next, as it seems that perhaps LR online isn't designed for this. I'll report back here with whatever I might find out!

I gave the "galleries" and "portfolio" option a play in the CC system. Here are my findings.

Looks like the "gallery" option is essentially an orphaned feature in LR online. There's still an option in the LR UI for a photo called "Share to Gallery", but I can't for the life of me figure out what it's actually doing (nothing seems to happen when I click it). I found some old documentation (2018) on the "Web Gallery" feature, but things don't look like what that site is talking about any longer. It seems Adobe has reworked this feature into what I had already tried previously with "Album" sharing.

Next was to try the "portfolio" feature. This is Adobe's way of creating a porfolio website for sharing your work publicly on the internet, which sounds promising. I dropped my ducks into the portfolio and got things set up as mentioned above to allow for downloading of images: https://bluspikez.mypo​rtfolio.com/ducks. While there are no direct links shown on the page, I can easily grab an image URL from within an album. Dropping this into the embed dialog does fetch the image, but the image is a size too large for use here:

1920 x 1280

EMBED PREVENTED, IMAGE TOO LARGE: https://pro2-bar-s3-cdn-cf.myportfolio.com …ce5d70e2c140445​227283e302 Click here to see our image rules.

bluspikez wrote in post #19241212
I gave the "galleries" and "portfolio" option a play in the CC system. Here are my findings.

Looks like the "gallery" option is essentially an orphaned feature in LR online. There's still an option in the LR UI for a photo called "Share to Gallery", but I can't for the life of me figure out what it's actually doing (nothing seems to happen when I click it). I found some old documentation (2018) on the "Web Gallery" feature, but things don't look like what that site is talking about any longer. It seems Adobe has reworked this feature into what I had already tried previously with "Album" sharing.

Next was to try the "portfolio" feature. This is Adobe's way of creating a porfolio website for sharing your work publicly on the internet, which sounds promising. I dropped my ducks into the portfolio and got things set up as mentioned above to allow for downloading of images: https://bluspikez.mypo​rtfolio.com/ducks. While there are no direct links shown on the page, I can easily grab an image URL from within an album. Dropping this into the embed dialog does fetch the image, but the image is a size too large for use here:

1920 x 1280

EMBED PREVENTED, IMAGE TOO LARGE: https://pro2-bar-s3-cdn-cf.myportfolio.com …ce5d70e2c140445​227283e302 Click here to see our image rules.

Technically, it seems that sending images to the Portfolio side of Adobe CC puts them on a different host that doesn't have strict cross-origin controls in place. This of course allows the forum to request the images from the API.

Making progress! Now to see if I can get a link that will fit within the 1600x1600 requirements, and after that, to see if the image metadata comes through properly after I post...

I'm sorry your having to go through so much trouble to make this work, but it is good to see you are making progress.
Based on the "Embed Prevented" message, it looks like you have this solved! Good work. (I hope I didn't just jinx it!)

CyberDyneSystems wrote in post #19241279
I'm sorry your having to go through so much trouble to make this work, but it is good to see you are making progress.
Based on the "Embed Prevented" message, it looks like you have this solved! Good work. (I hope I didn't just jinx it!)

I appreciate the encouragement!

I'm treating this as a challenge that can help the community here - let's hope we can figure something workable so that if anyone else is looking for the same sort of sharing, they can also be successful. More to come...

Dug a little more and it appears I have 600px, 1200px and 1920px available to me in the portfolio's image API. Could this 1200px URL (https://pro2-bar.myportfolio.com …394ccfd80609207​ea47bddde4) be the secret sauce?

Well, it was close! Only my EXIF was missing on that one. I couldn't tell for certain if that was a side effect of a setting at the time that I imported the photo into the portfolio, so here are some more ducks to try

They are displaying perfectly at my end!

As for EXIF, if it's not picking it up automatically, (none of it, sometimes we only get some) then it could be how the images are being saved. In PS, using "save for web" strips all exif. I don't know if LR or the subscription online tools are the same way. You do have the option to add your own info.

CyberDyneSystems wrote in post #19241403
...you do have the option to add your own info.

Unfortunately it looks like that will have to be the case here. LR online does make the EXIF available, and it has a toggle for whether or not it is shown in LR online web galleries (the first share option I tried in this thread). Unfortunately, even if the EXIF is made available on the LR side, it looks like it does not make it across to the Portfolio side.

I'll take one more look today to make sure I'm not missing anything, and after that will post a short writeup of steps to the thread here in case anyone else wants to use a similar approach. I think that even without the EXIF maintained this can still be pretty useful option for sharing, all from within the Adobe CC suite.

I've confirmed what I can about this process, so here's a step-by-step writeup for how to leverage the Adobe CC suite for image embedding here on the forum. This is written from the perspective of a Lightroom Classic user, but would also apply if you're using cloud LR.

1. Import photos into LrC following your standard workflow
   
2. Follow the steps to sync an LrC gallery to the cloud (Note - this only syncs 2048px smart previews, which for forum sharing purposes are just fine for me. There's an additional step to sync originals to the cloud if desired that I'm not including here)
   
3. Once the sync completes, ensure the album shows up on lightroom.adobe.com (when you're logged in, of course)
   
4. Select the album, and in the upper right, press the three dots [...] "more" button and select "Send to Portfolio". Follow the prompts that will take you to portfolio.adobe.com
   
5. Select the portfolio site that you want to drop the images onto. (Note - Adobe allows you to make up to 5 portfolio sites, so you may want to create one that is used solely for sharing here on the forum)
   
6. Ensure your album shows up on your portfolio site. Also, under Essentials -> Settings -> Site Options, uncheck both General -> "Disable right-click to protect your images" and Lightbox for Images -> "Enable lightbox for images on my pages"
   
7. In the lower left, click the "Publish Site" or "Update Live Site" button to make the site go live.
   
8. Visit your portfolio site and navigate to the image you want to share. Right-click the image and select "Copy Image Address". Bring that link here to the forum and paste it into the Embed URL box
   
9. Before pressing "FETCH", you'll need to replace a small portion of the URL to select the correct image size. For example, the copied URL will look like this:

   https://pro2-bar-s3-cdn-cf4.myportfolio.com/8e​9b3bc1-993d-4e94-9903-a85100d2594d/feea23da-b60a-4b2c-b78c-ac68047960d8_rw_1920.j​pg?h=0bd5b6b20f7744044​ff528a0c2af93f1

   Notice that it contains a "1920" in there, right before the ".jpg". Replace that with "1200", like this:

   https://pro2-bar-s3-cdn-cf4.myportfolio.com/8e​9b3bc1-993d-4e94-9903-a85100d2594d/feea23da-b60a-4b2c-b78c-ac68047960d8_rw_1200.j​pg?h=0bd5b6b20f7744044​ff528a0c2af93f1

10. Press "FETCH" and insert your image into your post
    
11. Finish your post and "SUBMIT", and at this time circle back to fill out any metadata that ended up missing during this process
    

Wanted to circle back on this thread to share something I noticed. Looks like Adobe has changed some of the underlying links that I used above, and as you might expect that ends up breaking embed links to images here on the forum. You'll notice above that strangely some of the images still work, but some that were working are now failing.

After taking a closer look, it appears there are two pieces that may have changed, so if you've followed the same steps for sharing this is what to check:
- The beginning of the URLs seems to have been simplified. Instead of specific CDN addresses that were used before, it seems Adobe has aligned on using "cdn.myporfolio.com" instead now.
- In some cases, there appears to be a "URL" parameter used at the end of the image URL. In some cases, it seems that removing this URL breaks the link and causes a 403 error.

In all cases, it seems that the fix is to simply follow the same steps from above again, and re-copy the image link to include here on the forum. That'll get you back to sharing your lovely ducks.