What's the best Lightroom Classic course for a complete beginner? I'm looking for something that explains all the tools and settings step by step, so I can actually understand how to edit photos rather than just copy someone's settings.

Long time LR Classic user. My workflow for getting a photo to my phone for Instagram was: export to desktop, AirDrop to phone, save, post. Every single time.

So over the past day I built a plugin that does it in one keystroke. Select the photo you want, hit Option+S, and it exports (2048px sRGB JPEG, 90% quality, IG-ready) and sends it to your phone over iMessage. Lands in Messages a few seconds later, tap to save, post it. Done.

Some implementation notes for anyone curious:

- It's a Lua plugin (the only thing LR Classic supports) that renders the photo and shells out to a CLI tool called imsg to actually send the iMessage, because the obvious AppleScript approach for sending attachments is broken on recent macOS. Took me embarrassingly long to figure that out.

- iCloud Photos sync was my first attempt at this. It works but the sync delay made it useless for the "edit, send, post" flow. iMessage is instant.

- Your phone number goes in a config file that's gitignored, so it never leaves your machine if you clone the repo.

Install is one line if you trust random curl|bash (no judgment either way, the script is short and readable if you want to look first):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/YashaVasilyev/send-to-phone-lightroom/main/setup.sh | bash

One caveat: you need Full Disk Access enabled for Lightroom, and the first run will throw a couple of macOS permission dialogs at you. Both are one-time things.

Tested on LR Classic 26.x / macOS. Free, MIT license, repo here: https://github.com/YashaVasilyev/send-to-phone-lightroom

Happy to answer questions or take feature requests. The thing I'm most unsure about is the export settings being hardcoded - if people want a size/quality picker I can add it.

I just read another post on here and some of you said you pay up to $50 an hour for photo editing?

That’s crazy.

I might as well quit photography and stick to editing at that point. 😭

Considering 80% of “editing” nowadays is done with presets and luts, I don’t understand why anyone would even go near $20/hour.

Hit me up if you want a photo editor. I’ll gladly take $10 an hour. Seriously. That’s our average wage here in Puerto Rico.

So unless you live in California or Washington DC where the average hourly wage is $57/hour… I just don’t see it. At that point just hire someone out-of-state to edit for you.