The bridge between your Lightroom catalog and WordPress.
Photo Engine is the WordPress side of WP/LR Sync, its Lightroom plugin: a Publish Service and media organizer that keeps your photos, folders, and collections perfectly synchronized with WordPress. Edit in Lightroom, publish to WordPress, with metadata, watermarks, and all. The essential tool for photographers who refuse to upload photos twice.
Lightroom Publish Service
Publish photos directly from Lightroom to WordPress with one click.
Folders and Collections
Organize your WordPress media library exactly like your Lightroom catalog.
Always Synchronized
Edited photos are flagged in Lightroom, and one Publish updates WordPress.
Smart Photo Matching
Perceptual hashing matches existing WordPress photos to Lightroom originals.
Gallery Ready
Collections feed Meow Gallery and the standard WordPress gallery.
Media Organizer
Folders and collections in your Media Library, even without Lightroom.
How Photo Engine works
If you keep your photographs in Lightroom, WordPress is where they go to lose everything. The catalogue knows the capture date, the keywords, the title, the caption and which collection the shot belongs to. Drag the export into the media library and all of that stays behind.
Photo Engine keeps the connection alive. Publish a Lightroom collection and it arrives in WordPress as a real set, folder structure intact, with your filenames rather than a sanitised export name. Edit the photo later, re-publish, and the existing attachment updates in place instead of leaving you with three near-identical copies and no idea which one the post uses.
It carries the metadata across too: keywords become tags, titles and captions land in the right fields, and the capture date is used as the media date instead of the upload date, so a photo taken in 2019 sorts as 2019. Custom field mapping handles anything specific to your setup.
You do not need Lightroom to use it. The Media Organizer adds folders and collections to the WordPress media library on its own, which is worth having on any site with more than a few hundred images. Those collections then feed straight into Meow Gallery, your theme, or anything else that can read them.
Good to know: Photo Engine is free and needs PHP 8.1+. Publishing from Lightroom needs WP/LR Sync, its Lightroom plugin, and Lightroom Classic on Mac or Windows: Lightroom (cloud) and the mobile apps cannot run plugins.
Photo Engine and WP/LR Sync
Free Version
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Media Organizer
Folders and collections inside your Media Library, no Lightroom needed.
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Galleries From Collections
Point a standard WordPress gallery at a collection or a folder, and it stays up to date.
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Made for Meow Gallery
Meow Gallery and Meow Lightbox read your collections directly.
Pro Version
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Everything from the Free Version
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Lightroom Publish Service
Publish collections from Lightroom Classic to WordPress in one click.
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Edits Update in Place
Re-publish an edited photo and the WordPress copy is replaced, not duplicated.
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Keywords and Metadata
Keywords, titles and captions carry across instead of being retyped.
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Field Mapping
Choose which Lightroom fields fill the WordPress title, caption, alt text and description.
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Total Synchronization
Links photos already on WordPress to their Lightroom originals.
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Switch Photos
Swap a photo in Lightroom and every page using it follows.
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Priority Support
Direct access to the development team.
Get Pro, from $39/year
Screenshots
Reviews from WordPress
A must-have for all professional photographers
As a professional wedding photographer, I struggled to keep my portfolio up to date. Photo Engine lets me organize photos into folders and collections. But the real magic is WP/LR Sync for Lightroom: now I can synchronize photos and push them directly to WordPress. These plugins are a must-have for photographers. In times like these, we need to automate everything we can.