How it was built
My first Lightroom plug-in, built by chatting.
Every other Co Lab tool runs in a browser. This one lives inside Lightroom, where I actually find the moments. Same approach as always: no coding background, just plain English, a real problem from my own editing, and a lot of testing on real weddings.
Step 1 · A photo and its story, sent to Notion
I started with the smallest useful version: pick a photo in Lightroom, type the couple and the caption, and have it turn up somewhere online. I chose Notion because it's free, it's easy to share, and it shows images beautifully. The one rule was that it had to work on Notion's free plan, which caps files at 5MB.
Build a Lightroom Classic plug-in that saves the selected photo plus its Instagram caption into a Notion database, as a bank of ready-to-post content. Export it at Instagram size and keep it under 5MB so it works on Notion's free plan.
Made a plug-in with a Save to Instagram Bank menu item. It exports a 1440px-wide JPEG at full quality, only easing off if a file would top 5MB, uploads it to Notion and creates a row with the couple and caption. If you're offline, it queues the save and retries next time.
Step 2 · Make the bank somewhere you want to open
A plain table of rows isn't inspiring on a Tuesday when you need something to post. So I asked for a Notion template in The Co Lab's colours and fonts, with the photos big on the main screen and the instructions tucked away on separate pages, simple enough for someone who's never opened Notion.
Design the Notion template to match The Co Lab's branding. It's a bank of content, not a posting schedule. Make the main screen a big visual gallery with filters for labels and dates, and put the setup instructions on separate pages so they're out of the way.
Built a branded template: a large-card gallery called The Bank, a Posted view for things that have gone out, and filters by label and date. The beginner's guide sits on its own Start here page, step by step, with the same steps in a printable setup guide.
Step 3 · Carousels, titles and labels of your own
Using it on a real wedding showed me what was missing. I wanted to save a few frames as one carousel, give each post a title I'd recognise, and sort them my own way. I didn't want labels I'd picked for everyone else; I wanted people to make their own, once, and have them stick.
Let me select several photos and save them as one carousel row in Notion. Add a Title field. And add custom labels with no defaults: users type their own, and any label they've made shows up as a tick box next time, pulled from their Notion.
Added carousel saving (up to 20 photos in one row), a Title shown on each gallery card, and labels read live from your Notion. A new label you type is created in Notion and appears as a tick box from then on.
Step 4 · Ready for other photographers
To share it properly it needed a free trial, licence keys, and a way to send updates to people who already have it, without them losing their settings or having to rebuild their Notion. All of it had to be locked down so nobody can see anyone else's details.
Add a 14-day free trial and an annual licence key, issued by me. Build it securely, so no one can access it but me. Then make sure existing customers get updates without losing their key, their settings or their Notion connection.
Added a trial and key activation in Lightroom's Plug-in Manager, checked against a private database of its own. Keys are only stored as scrambled hashes, and the admin page only lets you in. The plug-in checks for updates daily, and after an update it quietly adds any new Notion columns it needs.
The bits that went wrong
The very first install said “Installed but not working” because the plug-in was tucked one folder too deep. My first upload showed as a grey question mark in Notion, which turned out to be Notion taking a moment to make the preview. And getting Notion to see the page at all needed one extra Connections step that everyone misses. All three are now spelled out in the setup guide, so you don't have to find them the way I did.
What I left out, on purpose
I was tempted to add scheduling, hashtag sets and quick-save shortcuts. I didn't. The whole point is that it's light touch: you're mid-edit, you save the moment, you get back to work. Anything that slows that down doesn't belong in it.
Want to try it?
It's free during the beta, for Lightroom Classic on a Mac with a free Notion account.