Batch export scheduler for Lightroom Classic

A photographer finishing a 500-image wedding edit knows that exporting the full batch will lock Lightroom Classic for 45 minutes and make their machine unusable. The obvious move is to start the export before bed or before a meeting — but Lightroom Classic has no native scheduler, no queue prioritization, and no way to say 'start this batch at 11pm.' So they either babysit the export during work hours or leave their machine running overnight with no notification if it fails halfway through.

This gap exists because Lightroom Classic's development prioritization has shifted toward Lightroom (cloud) and mobile. Classic is in maintenance mode for most new workflow features, and Adobe's roadmap pushes users toward cloud sync — which is a separate revenue stream. Adding a smart export scheduler to Classic would reduce churn away from it, which Adobe apparently doesn't mind. The user base for Classic is largely professional photographers who bought into a perpetual-license or grandfathered workflow and are vocal about being de-prioritized.

The specific complaint that 'rendering previews and exporting large batches can be slow, especially on older machines' points to the real issue: these users can't just buy newer hardware on a photographer's margin, and they need to schedule around their machine's limits rather than fight them. Without a scheduler, every large export is a manual babysitting job. That cost — in lost work hours, failed overnight exports with no recovery log, and deadline pressure — recurs after every shoot.

What to build

Build a standalone Windows and macOS app that integrates with Lightroom Classic's export presets via watched folder or Lightroom publish service, lets photographers schedule batch exports to run at a specified time or when CPU drops below a threshold, and sends an email or SMS notification with a pass/fail count when the batch finishes.

Where to start

Start with wedding photographers on Facebook groups and forums already complaining loudly about Classic being abandoned — they are organized, they share tools with each other, and a single recommendation in a 10,000-member group is a meaningful distribution event.

The hard part

Lightroom Classic's plugin and publish service API is functional but poorly documented for automation outside of Adobe's ecosystem, so the first version will likely need to use a watched-folder workaround that feels hacky — which is a trust problem when the pitch is 'reliable overnight exports.'

How it makes money

subscription at $8/month or $69/year, targeting the segment already paying $10–55/month to Adobe and demonstrably willing to pay for workflow tools.