Adobe has just released Version 1.3 of its Lightroom photo-workflow software, two months after releasing Version 1.2. You can download the new version from Adobe's Lightroom Page, or use these direct links: Mac · Windows.
There's a ReadMe.pdf describing the release, and a much more detailed description by Victoria Bampton, but in short, it contains some small things:
- Better OSX Leopard support
- Bug fixes
- Support for a few new cameras:Nikon D3 & D300
Canon 1Ds Mark III & PowerShot G9
Olympus E-3 & SP-560
Panasonic DMC-L10 - Added support for Fuji compressed RAF files and Canon sRAW files
- You can now render 1:1 previews during import (yeah!)
- New functionality for repairing corrupt catalogs
However, the big news for many will be support for export plugins.
Lightroom has always allowed you to “export” images to your local disk, creating new versions of your images (for example, reduced-size thumbnails for a blog). With export-plugin support, third-party developers can create plugins that do things with the generated images, such as upload them to a photo-sharing site.
For example, let's imagine that some brilliantly-genius (but incredibly-humble) programmer creates plugins to export and upload images to, oh, the Zenfolio and SmugMug photo-sharing sites, and you install those plugins on your Lightroom computer. When you bring up Lightroom's export dialog, you can then choose from among three options:
Lightroom 1.3 does not come with any plugins installed, so until you obtain and install a plugin (or write one yourself), your export dialog will have only the “Export Files to Disk” option.
SDK
To enable third-party developers to write plugins, Adobe has also just put out a “Lightroom Export SDK preview release” (get it here). “SDK” stands for Software Development Kit, and is a package of code and documentation to help programmers create export plugins.
The SDK is helpful to create plugins, but is not required to use plugins, so the SDK itself is not something that most Lightroom users would be interested in. However...
Export Plugin for Flickr
The SDK zip file also contains a sample “Export to Flickr” plugin, allowing users of Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing site to easily send their images to their Flickr accounts.
If you're a Flickr user, you'll probably want to get the SDK zip just for the Flickr export plugin.
Adobe, Lightroom, and Me
I've been an enthusiastic user of Lightroom for a long time, and a volunteer tester of development releases since last December. I've written about Lightroom enough over the years that I have a whole category dedicated to Lightroom posts on my blog.
However, during this 1.2 → 1.3 cycle, I upgraded to consultant, doing some paid work on testing and debugging the export-plugin support.
Since I got to know the export-plugin programming interface fairly well, I put that to use and created export plugins for two photo-hosting sites popular with those looking for something a bit more polished than Flickr: Zenfolio and SmugMug.
Export Plugins for SmugMug and Zenfolio
First, here are links to the per-plugin pages, from which you can download them:
- Lightroom Export Plugin for SmugMug
- Lightroom Export Plugin for Zenfolio
- Lightroom Export Plugin for Flickr ← added after this post was originally written
- Lightroom Export Plugin for Picasa Web ← added after this post was originally written
Installing a plugin involves unzipping a folder to a specific location on your machine, and the links above will have details once I'm allowed to provide the plugins.
You can install the plugin without having an account at the related service, but it won't let you do much until you get an account and log in via the plugin.
I do not really use any photo-sharing site, but I have liked the polished look of these two services whenever I have come across them in viewing others' photos, which is why I chose them. If you don't already use one for your photos, I suggest taking advantage of their free trials to see how you like them. I think both are excellent, yet they're quite different in their vibe, so try them both to see which one fits your style.
Since I created both plugins, and they both do pretty much the same thing (upload to a photo-hosting site), they look almost identical. The first time you select one, you're prompted for your login credentials:
(Update: since first writing this post, I've added Flickr and Picasa Web plugins...)
There's a lot more to these export dialogs, but most of it is disabled until you are authenticated to the photo-hosting service.
Once you log in, the export dialog then looks something like this:
Several of the sections (“File Naming,” “File Settings,” and “Metadata”) are the same as the standard Lightroom export dialog, so to save space, I have those sections closed in the view presented above.
Export-Dialog Details
Once you log in, you're presented with buttons that bring you to your page at the photo-hosting service, and to log out.
Once I log in, I generally leave that section closed. Your username/password are saved in the Lightroom database, so be sure to [Logout] if you don't want them to be saved there.
“Image Settings”
The “image Settings” section of the dialog is the standard Lightroom one, except that the “resolution” option is removed, since that makes little sense in this context.
“Upload Destination”
The top of this section indicates what gallery the images should be uploaded to.
As a convenience, the plugin also provides a way to create galleries on the fly. After creating a gallery, it automatically becomes the default destination.
“Upload Management”
The upload-management section offers a number of options related to the upload...
Both plugins offer the “Visit destination gallery after upload” option, which brings up the destination gallery in your browser after an upload.
Both also offer the ability to automatically delete previously-uploaded versions of the same Lightroom photo (at least, those that had been uploaded with this plugin). Enable this option to affect a “replace” operation. However, if you're uploading several different copies of the same image (such as different sizes, or with different develop settings), leave this option off so that new ones won't delete the old ones.
The two collection-related options are available only for the Zenfolio plugin because SmugMug does not have a collection-like functionality. These options allow you to keep a collection of all images you've exported from Lightroom, as well as a “most recent export” collection. I'm not sure how useful these will be in practice, but they were easy enough to add, so I did.
“Export Plugin Info”
This section offers basic info about the plugin: its version, a link to its home page, and a version-check option...
I expect a fair amount of version churn early on for a number of reasons...
- They have not yet been widely tested yet, since the Lightroom pre-release community is fairly small.
- They were written by someone who does not use any online photo-hosting service, so perhaps the guesses as to what would be useful and/or convenient are off the mark.
- These plugins are my first foray into Lua, a programming language that seems to me to be designed explicitly to create error-prone code, and I'm sure I've lived up to its full potential in that regard.
This section also contains a note about what metadata is sent with each picture over and above what might be included within the exported image itself. For SmugMug, that list is Caption, Keywords, and GPS Location/Altitude.
Colorspace Warning
Both SmugMug and Zenfolio convert non-sRGB images into sRGB for display, but it's probably best to export them as sRGB directly unless you have a specific reason for doing otherwise. Thus, if the color-space setting is not sRGB, a warning shows up in the upload-destination section:
Clicking on the [more info] button brings up a dialog in which you can turn off the warnings...
The [visit here] button takes you to my writeup on Digital-Image Color Spaces.
The Lightroom plugin support is just getting started, and is nowhere at all near the breadth and sophistication of Photoshop's, but it's a good start and I'm sure we'll see it expand greatly as new versions of Lightroom are released over the next few years.
I’ve been using the trial version of LR on my PC on vacation. I like it a lot. I think I just like the feel of it better than Aperture. Now I wish I were using it even more because then I could say “Hey, I know the guy who did that” whenever uploading to Zenfolio from the program.
By the way, did you create that flower/magnifying glass graphic? It’s pretty cool.
Heh, thanks. Yeah, I made the magnifying glass thing from scratch in Photoshop. —Jeffrey
This is really exciting. I can’t wait to update and try it out. Rendering 1:1 on import will save a lot of time!
Wow, when I read about 1.3 this morning, I was kind of thinking that I’d see a Smugmug export plugin within, oh, say a few weeks. I even toyed with the idea of working on one myself this weekend. But you’re already there! Thanks greatly; this is going to be hugely useful.
It’s great to meet the man behind the great plugins!
I use a service called “ExposureManager”
They have an FTP server to which you can upload photos, which then you can further process from their main interface.
All that is needed is the AccountName and Password, and it just places the images in a drop-box type folder.
The sample FTP module loads OK, and accepts all the parameters. Browsing the remote FTP server folders works fine from within the module.
The problem is that I’m getting an “Assertion Failed” as soon as I click “Export”
Any ideas?
Windows Vista
Lightroom 1.3
Jeff,
I look forward to this becoming a reality. Thanks for all the work on this.!
Any chance you can enhance the Smugmug plugin so that it will allow for the addtional metadata stuff like you have for the flickr plugin?
Added in version 20071123.3 —Jeffrey
It would be nice to be able to set the various other options.
Thanks in advance, good job.
Hey Jeff
I’ve been working on a Zenfolio one myself. Shoot me an email if you’d be interested in joining forces.
Having a problem after installing the Smugmug plugin, it’s described here: http://www.lightroomforums.net/showthread.php?t=522
Help appreciated!
TIA,
Bill
Jeffrey, when I export a CR2 file to Zenfolio in jpg format, is a copy of that jpg file left anywhere on my computer? I’m using OS X Leopard. Thanks… chas
Added in the 20071125.* version of each plugin —Jeffrey
Thanks, Jeffrey. I wouldn’t mind if it was an option, but if the choice is one or the other, I vote for delete. Thanks again… chas (written while exporting 90+ photos to Zenfolio)… chas
Hi Jeffrey,
Thanks for working on the Zenfolio plugin for Lightroom.
fyi… I’m running LR 1.3 on a Windows XP (SP2) machine and so far the plugin has not been able to complete the export. I get a message saying: An internal error has occurred: Win32 API error (unknown error – FormatMessageW failed when calling HttpSendRequest form private_AgHttpClient_post_L .
I’ll keep checking back here for updates.
Hi Jeffrey!
What a dream!!
But as Stephen , I have an Win32 API error(_AgHttpClient_post_L) when exporting to smugmug (LR 1.3 – XP SP2) and the latest version of your plugin (1124).
Any idea?
Best regards,
Stephan
I’ve heard a number of reports about this type of error. I must consult with Adobe after the holidays about it. —Jeffrey
Superb! Thanks so much for releasing these. This will make my life orders of magnitude easier.
Hi Jeffrey,
Thanks so much for this plugin.
One problem is, using LR 1.3, the login button does not highlight once the info is entered.
Even tried logging on at Zenfolio, still no help\
Thanks…
@Ken: It seems that you have to use your nickname as login not your email @
It was my pb with smugmug.
An email address should be allowed with both of them now (as of version *.9 for Zenfolio, and *.5 for SmugMug) —Jeffrey
Hi Jeff,
Just readin your plugins page and I’m impressed. I was thinking I should create an export plugin for the site I use most – PBase.com. I have programmed Windows in C/C++ for years and could dig into this. Then I though I’d likely be starting from scratch and I wondered if you distribute the source code for your plugins and whether it could be used to create new ones with similar features without having to begin at the beginning? Or maybe, since you seem very hot on making these, you’d want to create one for PBase? If you don’t know about PBase then you may want to look at it. The file upload is a simple http type process. The site is very popular – I don’t know how many users they have now but it’s a lot and I’m sure there would be a lot of enthusiastic support/thanks for such an export plugin. I know I’d love to have one.
I’ve never understood the attraction to PBase. Every time I look at it, I feel I’m looking at something that was frozen, web-design-wise, circa 1995. It’s a lot better now, at least, than it was a year ago. Anyway, it turns out that they don’t have a public API, and judging from this thread they aren’t even sure what one is. I suppose I could give it a try if PBase itself is okay with scraping their pages. Have them set up an account for me to test the thing with, if they’d like a Lightroom plugin.
While I’m here I thought to mention one other thing. I don’t know if your plugins do this but one thing that would be very useful for me and maybe for others would be a web gallery “sync” option. I currently add all images on some particular site to a Light room Collection. That way I can always see in Lightroom what images I have on each site. And I can drag images to that site by adding them to the collection. I’d love to be able to “sync” a collection with the site though, so that any changes to the images in the collection could be updated on the site. Maybe the export SDK doesn’t allow for that? Or you would have to select the colelction’s images and then run the export function. The plugin could compare the current selected/collection images to what is already on the site and then just upload images that are new or remove those no longer present. I know all this export plugin support is very new – so I’m just throwing this idea out there as something that would be very nice to have in the future to make managing web galleries that much easier from within Lightroom.
Chris 🙂
Those ideas are all good, and some of them may be possible, but that’s out of the realm of what the current beta export API was designed for. I’m working on some ideas to use some of the components in slightly underhanded ways to allow for some limited “sync” capability, but it remains to be seen whether I’ll actually get it working…. —Jeffrey
Hi
thanks for the great flickr plugin
i’m looking for an email plug ins
is there one?
I’ve been uploading pix from Lightroom to Smugmug using your tool, and have checked the box to add a copyright watermark. The problem is that the watermark is itsy-bitsy and can hardly be seen. Here’s an example:
http://bettyr.smugmug.com/gallery/2132897#230910525-L-LB
Is there anything you can do to enlarge the watermark?
Thanks! And great job on this, by the way!!
The watermark stuff is all a standard part of Lightroom, completely out of control of the plugin. Personally, I have never used it, so your best bet are the normal help resources (such as the Adobe forums). —Jeffrey
Just added the plug in to my new Imac running Leopard, and run perfect, thank you
many thanks for your plug in efforts. I’m a big fan of LR and Zenfolio but the export process
has always seemed cumbersome.
thanks
brad
Thanks alot for the Zenfolio plugin! You definately rock, and you have some great articles on this site as well.
I get the standard “Win32 API…” error every other time I use the plugin. I’ve tried you’re checkbox work-around. Any ideas on why this is happening? Could it be a firewall issue? I’m using Symantec Endpoint Protection.
I got the windows Format error. I found out that when I resize the foto’s (in this case from long edge 3072 to 3000) the error dissapears.
Jeroen
Thanks billions! what a concept! woot woot!
Found my way here from a reference on Lightroomkillertips.com. What exactly will this plug-in do? Wiil it allow me to export a Lightroom slideshow, in Lightroom format, onto Smugmug, so that it looks the same on smugmug as in Lightroom? Or is it just another export/import engine; an alternative to what they have on smugmug?
Thanks,
Cynthia
The latter, only integrated into Lightroom —Jeffrey
What can I say but… wonderful! Thanks! Just what I needed and been looking for…
I have both lighroom 1.3 and a zenfolio account.
Tried installing the plugin but get an internal error.
Specifically I choose export and it gives me the choice to export to disk or zenfolio.
Then, when I choose “export to my zenfolio account” a message comes up” can’t use plugin’: the plugin had an internal error”.
Help!
Sorry, I had some bad builds out there for a bit. The most recent releases should fix it. —Jeffrey
Is the a plug-in to export images from CS3-Bridge into Zenfolio?
I get an error message “Win32 API…” when trying to upload images. Please help.
after upgrading to the latest build (33) of the SmugMug uploader, I keep getting the following error.
The error didn’t make it into my last post.
An internal error has occurred: [string “LrHttpDebug.lua”]:138: attempt to index local
,’ReturnHeaders’ (a nil value)
I can’t seem to get the plugin to work. Every time I can login fine, but it always says I have no galleries. It does create them though, I see them on the SM page. But they never show up in the plugin and therefore I can never click the Export button.
Any ideas?
I have the same issue as Ryan. I have galleries but the pugin doesn’t find them. Actually, more to the fact. It did, but something happened and how it does not anymore. Any ideas what has happened?
Matt
Hello Jeffrey,
Thanks for the efforts, but as with the last two comments, whereas 2 weeks ago I was able to successfully upload to SM via your LR plugin, now no existing galleries are being recognized as download destinations, and an error message indicates no gallery can be created after trying, even though one actually was created. But still no destination option means no ability to export with the export button unavailable to execute. I appreciate any feedback.
I have little experience with writing plug-ins, but I suppose I “could” try it, but I was interested in getting a plug-in to upload to facebook. Although I despise facebook, I have a lot of friends who use lightroom and would it awesome if they could upload there images directly from lightroom to facebook, let me know.
Thank
Chris
I haven’t heard too many requests for a Facebook plugin (yours is the first), so I’m not inclined to drip everything for it :-), but I’m working on refactoring my plugins to make it easier for me to add new plugins and new features, so ping me again in a few months to see how that’s come…. —Jeffrey
I’d download a Facebook plugin. 🙂
Yes, same for me, it will be very valuable to have a facebook plugins (and a myspace one perhaps ?). Thank you for your greats plugins ! 🙂
I’d love to find a Facebook plug-in, too! You do great work, thanks!
me too. that would be great. I love your lightroom plugin
Tried it and love it! I appreciate your effort.
and yes, pelase add facebook plug in 😀
use bother the smugmug and flicker plugins extensively and they’re AWESOME!
a facebook plugin would rock.. drip everything for it 🙂
also what might be good is a Menalto Gallery plugin
It would be awesome to have a facebook plugin it would save me a ton of time. I noticed iphoto has a facebook export option that works really well.
I’ve found what seems to be a major bug in the Lightroom SmugMug Export plugin. I can consistently reproduce the problem. Please email me if you know of a resolution to this issue.
Steps to create the problem:
1. Upload Image-1.jpg to Gallery1.
2. Upload the same image with a different name, let’s say Image-2.jpg to Gallery2.
3. Go back to Gallery 1 and notice that Image-1.jpg is now gone.
4. Then go to back to Gallery 2 and verify the new image is still there.
I tried repro’ing the issue using SmugMug’s MacUploader, but it works fine. Please advise.
Thanks,
Jacob
(It turns out that Jacob had the “delete previously-uploaded versions of this image” option turned on. —Jeffrey)
i’d love a facebook plugin too!
Hey… How’s that Facebook plugin coming???
Haha – giving you a hard time. A Facebook plugin would make things so much easier.
I started using Flickr again after a couple years just because of your plugin! No more extra jpegs floating around in a folder on my desktop. And it is just so much easier to control.
I’m really appreciative of the effort you put forth to get these plugins out. You have reshaped the entire picture sharing community.
Hi. A Facebook plugin would be great please. Am searching the web for one now which is how I ended up here.
Yeah, I’ll probably be adding Facebook, and others, once 2.0 comes out. —Jeffrey
Another vote for a Facebook plugin, love your Flickr and Picasa plugins, so comprehensive,
thanks for your great work, Billy
Facebook plugin would rock!
+1 for Facebook plugin 🙂
Here’s another request for a Facebook plug-in. I’ll add that it’s not “just because it’d be cool” but a growing number of photographers are using Facebook in their marketing schemes. Oh, and their interface is generally a pain when uploading a bunch of images. I often end up exporting from lightroom and importing into iphoto. What a pain!
Anyway, Jeff – thanks so much for your work on these plug-ins in the first place. They’ve really enhanced the value of Lightroom for me.
Okidokie, I’m planning a Facebook plugin for when Lightroom 2.0 is released. —Jeffrey
Man… FACEBOOK!! 🙂 That would absolutely rock.
Hi, I’m trying to decide between Smugmug and Flickr and have tried your plugin with both. I think it’s great. However, I’ve noticed that the Flickr uploader uploads the full keyword hierarchy while the Smugmub one only uploades the keyword leaves. Is this sonmething I’m doinh wrong. Thanks
THANKS for picasa exporter!
it just made it possible for me to post pictures online. sometimes the threshold for not doing things is very low and exporting from lightroom without any intermediate steps make it possible for someone (me) who has another job.
it used to be an hassle to upload with the right tags (picasa can do it, bu you need to import your exports in picasa and use it to upload, and sometimes uploading via browser didn’t retain tags…)
priority for seting caption rocks!
dave
Jeffrey,
I have been trying to use the SmugMug export in LR 4.4.1 on my Vista Home Premium pc, but I get an error msg every time.
“An internal error has occurred: WIN32 API error (unknown error – FormatMsgW failed) when calling HttpSendRequest from private – AgHttpClient_post_L”
Thanks, Russ
I am getting “INTERNAL PLUGIN ERROR” — Status #500. Is there a solution to this? The file is not large but is a PSD.
Ron
Please ignore last comment – File is too big.
Sorry.
Your work is excellent, do you plan a WebShots plugin anytime?
Have not heard of WebShots… I’ve updated my todo list to check into it. —Jeffrey