I am stuck however at the simplest of steps, I can’t seem to figure out how to install the Lightroom 3.0 SDK. I have the LUA pluggins in eclipse but can’t for the life of me figure out or find info on how to install the SDK. DO you have a link or any help you could provide?

The SDK is just documentation, and samples. There’s nothing to install. —Jeffrey

Once you start accepting money then how committed will you be to supporting the products? Will that commit you to tackling all the emails? What about phone support? How much does someone have to pay to get telephone technical support? If necessary, will you be willing hire someone to help with the support? And how will you handle all that if your average donation is only $4? If one customer donates more than another, does that give them any sort of priority for feature requests, beta access, support turnaround, and the like? How will you be able to take a vacation?

If you have a full-time job right now and aren’t considering a career change, then I guess you can go whichever direction you will. But if you are serious about making these plugins commercial and doing it full time, then you should figure out what you think they are worth to people, charge a little more than that, have consistent and “serious” pricing, and plan on re-investing some of that money into advertising, learning materials, employees, and the like.

I can’t guess what might account for the angst in your note, but your interchangeable use of “donation” and “payment” indicates that you clearly don’t understand my position. This is not a commercial endeavor and I do not accept payments. If someone wants to send a gift in appreciation for what they already have, that’s fine and I appreciate it, but you can’t purchase anything from me (a plugin, support, commitment, photos, etc.). —Jeffrey

I donated for a few reasons. Firstly, I’ve found the stuff you make really rather useful. Secondly, I’ve just been been paid and think I must be feeling the fuzzy glow of being in the black and thirdly (probably the most important part) I liked you, your blog and the way you articulated your reasons for setting up the donations in the first place.

Best of luck with it all…

On another note, have you ever thought of teaching others how to develop some of these presets. Certainly in all of your work, you’ve gained significant knowledge that would benefit other Lightroom developers. I’m not sure if the weekend workshop format would work, but anyway to share that knowledge (and help you get paid) would probably reduce your workload.

Haven’t thought much about it, but I do answer a fair amount of email from other developers, so that’s a start. But it’s important to understand that my “workload” is not “anything possible with Lightroom plugins” because others can and do write them. My workload is exactly what I choose to take on. The problem is that I choose too much… —Jeffrey

To be honest,I was miffed when the frequent updates caused my installed copies to become donation/payware. I didn’t really mind paying a token fee but felt like I was not informed in advance that the software would soon become commercial in nature.

I do not believe that the Facebook plug-in should be commercial in nature because Facebook is a very low-end picture sharing site that ruins any pictures you upload to it. I like to use your plug-in for facebook uploads simply because it works well with my Lightroom workflow. However, I still paid for your facebook plug-in.

Like others have suggested, you need to work with the Owners of Flickr, SmugMug and Zenfolio to make sure that you are fully compensated for the incredible value you are adding to their services.

Fact is that Adobe should have provided build in exporters for the main picture hosting sites along with their software. They didn’t and I think they would have no problem fully funding your efforts to make seriously improve Lightroom’s export functionality.

Again, as others before me have said, as you start requiring donations, you may find that you are even more stressed with the demands of “paying” customers and the need to provide technical support. This may cause the cost/benefit assumptions you’ve made to go against you.

Anyway, good luck on your plug-ins and I hope that you will be able to keep on working on them in the future. Also, please help Adobe improve their export/plug-in hosting implementation so that better plug-ins and export features come in the box.

In particular I would love a feature that automatically (overnight, scheduled?) processes all my pictures that have not yet been exported or have been edited since last export to my traditional “My Pictures” folder so that I can grab my snapshots from the file-system always knowing that they reflect any cropping or post-processing I’ve done to them in lightroom. This is especially important when I’m shooting raw and cannot quickly grab pictures to email or copy to usb stick because they are still in RAW format and do not have the adjustments I’ve made applied to them as JPG.

Perhaps you meant Extortion rather than Blackmail. I’ll leave it to you to look that one up yourself, but I’ll tell you here that either one of them requires an illegal act. Jeffrey is simply providing a service that you can choose not to take adavantage of. Furthermore, he is continuing to provide Free versions of all of his products, and you only have to “donate” if you want to upgrade them in order to get a little bit more functionality.

So while “Donation” may not be the perfect term for essentially paying for an upgraded product, Blackmail is far worse. The product is still freely available if you decide not to donate (although somewhat restricted in its use), and there are no negative repercussions to you if you choose not to pay.

If you are really trying to say “Gee Jeffrey, I’d really rather not have to pay to use your products” then say it. But don’t accuse him of doing something illegal. That’s just crazy.

For some strange reason, James, you believe that those of us who use Jeff’s software have a fundamental right to continue to do so, regardless of what it means for the person who creates and maintains it.

If you really don’t have the time, advertise it on the Internet and let one of your fans take up the cause. The users of your software should not have to suffer. You will loose the faith of the people who trust in your leadership. You’ve just lost an ardent fan because of your lack of long term thinking.

maybe an own Section in LR-Forums for Jeffreys plugins would help.
If then Jeffrey would link directly to it, he’d save a lot of work.

Greetings,
Hendrik