How many social media websites do you upload photos to regularly? I have five – a Facebook page, my personal Facebook profile, Google+, Flickr and 500px. Some people have more. For photographers who want to get their work out there, this seems like a must. Yet it’s time consuming and, truth be told, an inefficient way of working.
If this is you, then you’ll be interested in new photo sharing website, Expojure. A startup based in Mumbai, it lets you upload the photos you want to share to a central Expojure account, arrange them in Collections, add keywords, titles, tags and descriptions, then upload them to as many as six photo sharing websites (the five listed above plus SmugMug).
I’ve been using Expojure for a few weeks now and I’m very impressed with the setup. The website is well-designed and easy to use. The layout is simple, doing exactly what most people will need it to, without adding unnecessary extras.
There’s also a plug-in for uploading photos to your Expojure account directly from Lightroom.
How Expojure works
When you sign in to Expojure you’ll see a page that looks something like this – it is your Dashboard. If you’ve uploaded any photos to Expojure already, you will see them here. If not, you’re presented with the option to sign into the photo sharing accounts you wish to use. Just click the buttons to do so. Connected accounts are shown afterwards on the left.
Once you’ve connected to some photo sharing websites, it’s time to go to the Organizer and add photos. Uploaded photos are automatically placed in a new Collection. You can rename the Collection and add a description using the panel on the right. You can also move photos around between Collections.
You can add or amend details of individual photos by clicking on them and entering the new information on the right. If you haven’t already added a title, description, or tags now is your chance to do so.
Click the green Publish buttons in the bottom right corner to upload the photos. Expojure places all the photos in the Collection into a new Set on your selected website.
Every photo in the Collection is sent to the chosen website. If you want to upload a single image, you need to create a new Collection and add the chosen photo to that first.
Here’s a photo that I uploaded to Flickr. The title, description, EXIF data and tags have been successfully added. The only thing left to do is add the photo to any Groups or mark the location on the map.
Expojure Lightroom plug-in
If you click on the Settings tab at the top of the Expojure website page you can download a free plug-in for Lightroom. Use Plug-in manager to add it. It shows up in Lightroom’s Publish Services.
Once installed, you can create new Publish Collections containing photos to upload to your Expojure account. Lightroom uploads them when you press the Publish button. The images are held there until you log in and distribute them to your photo sharing websites.
Notes about Expojure
At the time of writing Expojure is free to use, and has been since the service went live. However, at some point (most likely after this article has been written, but before it is published) Expojure is switching to a subscription model. There will still be a free account, which limits you to uploading 20 photos a week and connection to two social media accounts. Paid accounts retain unlimited photo uploads and unlimited social media accounts.
If you have a free 500px account, you will receive an error message when you upload photos to it. This is because free accounts don’t support Sets. However, your photos are still successfully uploaded to 500px, despite the error message.
Expojure will add more features, and more services to its supported photo sharing websites over the next few weeks. Some of these may be active by the time you read this article.
Alternatives to Expojure
The only alternative to Expojure that I’m aware of is Lightroom’s Publish Services (please let us know in the comments if you know of any others). The benefit of Lightroom’s Publish Services is that it is free (once you own Lightroom). However it’s not as efficient or easy to use as Expojure and doesn’t support websites like Google+ out of the box (plug-ins are available for many photo sharing websites).
Conclusion
Expojure is a well thought out service that greatly simplifies the task of uploading photos to social media websites. If you find the process of adding images to multiple websites frustrating, then please take a look at Expojure’s website, you’ll be glad you did. The video posted at the top of the article gives you a good overview of how it works.
Which photo sharing accounts do you use and how do you manage them? Please let us know in the comments.
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Summary
Reviewer
Andrew S. Gibson
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Expojure website
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