Today’s Question: I have a question about publishing to Facebook [from Lightroom]. When setting up all the parameters, I see once you have chosen an album. But you can’t change it? I may want to publish different pictures to different albums on Facebook. Can that be done via a single Facebook profile, or must I set up a separate profile for each album?
Tim’s Answer: It is true that once you have established a Publish Service for Facebook within Lightroom, you aren’t able to change the album to which that Publish Service is actually publishing. While this may seem odd, and it certainly can be a bit of an inconvenience, this limitation is based on the notion that the Collection that is used as the basis of publishing to Facebook is essentially synchronized with that Facebook album. Changing the target album could create a degree of confusion (or unintended consequences) with respect to the connection between Lightroom and Facebook.
You can, however, configure multiple Publish Services within Lightroom so that you have the option to publish to different albums on Facebook. You can create a new Publish Service by clicking the “plus” icon to the right of the Publish Services header on the left panel in the Library module and then choosing “Go to Publishing Manager” to bring up a dialog where you can establish the settings. Even easier, if you already have an existing Publish Service for Facebook, you can right-click on the header that says “Facebook” and choose the “Create Another Publish Service via ‘Facebook’” from the popup menu.
I think the thing to keep in mind here is that the Publish Services option to share photos on Facebook uses a synchronization approach. In other words, you aren’t simply posting a photo to Facebook from Lightroom, and then having Lightroom “forget” about the publication of the image. Rather, the photos you share are retained in a special Collection, and you can then review the photos you’ve published on Facebook using that collection. You can even interact with the comments for the photos on Facebook from directly within Lightroom.
Taken in this context, I think it is a little more clear why you can’t simply change the target album for the Publish Service for publishing to Facebook. For this reason, my general approach is to create a single album specifically for sharing from Lightroom, not intended to serve as an organizational tool within Facebook, but rather aimed at simply providing an easy way to share individual photos using Facebook.