How to export all snapshots at once

Question

Hi Everybody,
I've created various snapshots of a series of photos and I'm ready to export. Is there a way to export all the snapshots at once, in a single export step? Up to now, I've been doing this step by step, exporting one version of the image, than going to the next snapshot and exporting again. Your help will be much appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Cheers
Luke

Answer 1

You can have a separate virtual copy representing the same edits, that you currently have stored in each snapshot. That makes new thumbnails that are capable of showing side-by-side at the same time. You can export those as if they were independent photos, in a batch (even though they all refer to the same single file on disk for their original picture data). You can further edit them too, which is a LOT easier than recalling, editing and re-saving a snapshot while also preserving other edits that have not been saved into a snapshot.
To get to that point: you can recall a snapshot, make a virtual copy, recall a different snapshot, make a virtual copy, and so on - then roll back your History to recall the latest editing you had done before that. By default virtual copies are "stacked" with the original version so as to group them together.
The only caveat is that snapshots are accessible to ACR independently (if you write your LR changes to disk), if you open the image directly into Photoshop outside LR - while virtual copies are not visible outside LR. But personally, I see little point in doing that when you can open images with your very latest edits directly into PS as needed, from inside LR, regardless whether those edits belong to a virtual copy or not.
You can think of virtual copies as parallel options for the image, and of snapshots as serial ones.