One of my bigger annoyances with Lightroom CC is how magestically indifferent it is to anything a normal human being using a Mac in 2025 might want to with it in the way of sharing your pictures. It is a literal void on the desktop: AppleScript? lol. Even the standard macOS share sheet? Nope. You can export out to disk, and you can share things to Adobe’s own services. If you want more extensibility or flexibility well, go use Lightroom Classic.
LR CC does offer one out, though: It has this idea of “Connections,” of which there are very few. One of them happens to be SmugMug. So as I ponder whether I want to stick with Lightroom as my DAM – and I am leaning against, but feel very fluid with it as an editing tool – I realized I can save a tiny bit of the wasted motion Lightroom’s blinkered refusal to participate in a normal “share this image to these desktop endpoints and services” by using imgup to not just push up to backend storage services, but pull from them as well.
So I’ve added pull to its list of things it can do as a cheap and cheerful way to squirt a few images from Lightroom up to a SmugMug album, then make a post from the CLI.
imgup pull takes a few arguments: the number of images to pull, any post text you care to add, which storage backend, which album on that backend, and which destination social media services (Mastodon or Bluesky right now).
So:
imgup pull 5 --service smugmug --album "uploads" --mastodon --post "Pictures from the show"
… will trigger a pull from the last five images. If you’re using a plain old terminal, you get a list of image filenames and the description metadata if you took the time to add it at some point. Pick the index numbers of the ones you want to post and imgup will make a post to Mastodon pulling in the tags from each image.
If you’re using kitty and set kitty_thumbnails": true you get thumbnails to help you make the right choice.
If you leave out the --post switch, you get the same list and can make your selection, and imgup generates JSON and opens it in $EDITOR. There you can add the post text, tweak alt tags, etc. before closing the file, which pipes it back in for sharing to Mastodon or Bluesky.
pull has one other thing it can do, which is filter by tags with the --tags switch.
If you use Homebrew, the easy way to get it is:
$ brew tap pdxmph/tap
$ brew install --cask pdxmph/tap/imgupv2