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Lightroom Developer Center

The Lightroom SDK allows you to customize and extend certain Lightroom features by creating plug-ins. In the current release these features are extensible:

Menu customization: Plug-ins can add new menu items in the Plug-in Extras menu

Export and publish functionality: You can create an export plug-in, which customizes the behavior of Lightroom's Export and Publishing Manager dialogs and export processing. You can add or remove items from the dialog, alter or augment the rendering process, and send images to locations other than files on the local computer.

Metadata: You can define customized public or private metadata fields for Lightroom. Public or private metadata can be associated with individual photos. You can also define new ways of arranging the display of metadata within the Library module’s Metadata panel.

Web engine functionality: You can create an HTML web-engine plug-in, which defines a new type of HTML photo gallery. The engines you define appear in the Gallery panel at the upper right of the Web module.

A Lightroom plug-in consists of Lua-language files (scripts) that define the plug-in functionality, and an information
or manifest file that describes the contents of the plug-in. The information file must have a specific name,
and be placed in a folder with the Lua source files and resource files; the folders may need to be in specific
locations.

• Download the Lightroom 3 SDK
• Lightroom SDK 3.0 Programmers Guide (PDF, 4 MB)

SDK Contents

The SDK contents include the following:

Lightroom SDK Guide.pdf: Describes the SDK and how to extend the functionality of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

API Reference: The Scripting API reference in HTML format

Sample Plugins: Sample plug-ins and demonstration code.

Development environment

You can use any text based editor to write your Lua scripts and use the LrLogger namespace to write debugging information to a console.

Additional Resources

Lightroom SDK User to User Forum
Lightroom Exchange for publishing and sharing information regarding your plug-ins