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I've never used Tumblr, but it's apparently popular. They recently changed their API in a way that apparently rendered other Lightroom plugins useless, so I wrote a simple one: Jeffrey’s “Export to Tumblr” Lightroom Plugin
Since I know nothing about Tumblr, I'm not sure how well it'll fit with a Tumblr's workflow, so let me know how it can be improved.
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Thanks so much for taking this on.
Right now when I try to publish an image the progress bar gets about half way, then Lightroom seems to lock up and I get the spinning beach ball for a cursor. To regain access the LR I have to Force Quit the Application and restart it.
UPDATE: I tried again, and this time I typed up this while I was waiting, forgetting about the post for a bit, and it completed. Not sure how long it took though to post a single image, but it seemed longer then I would have thought, about 6 minutes.
As for how to improve the existing options (not sure what options you have from the API standpoint).
So when you post a photo to Tumblr you get the following options:
Caption
Set a Click-Through link (so that when the image is clicked it takes you to a specific URL
Specify the content source
Tags (Hash tagging)
Let people photo reply (not sure what this is, i have never used it)
Social Networks:
Twitter On/Off
Twitter Message (The [URL] is already in there, and you can add to it)
Facebook On/Off
Publish options:
Publish now
Add to queue
Publish on… (gives a Publish Time that appears to be just a text field)
Save as a Draft
Private
I would use this for immediately posting single images with simple text as the caption, posting images to the drafts so that I could go back and add HTML to the caption if I wanted to include links to other images from my website, as well as queuing up a series of images like a photo of the day. On pretty much all posts I would set a Click-through link to my site as well as specify my site as the content source. I would normally use the Facebook and Twitter options to that there would be a post on my FB wall and a tweet with a link to the Tumblr post sent out.
Hope this helps.
Hi Jeffrey,
Thanks for this plugin! I have a simple request for an addition – a publish state option as detailed here: http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/api/v2#posting with the option to choose the state of the photo upload: published, draft, queue, or private.
Like the poster above mentioned, I’d be using this to queue photos rather than to have them post live immediately.
I’m in San Diego, CA 🙂
Thanks for your work on this plugin!
I just pushed a new version with this functionality. —Jeffrey
Hi,
Tried the Tumblr plugin, it worked fine and one of my fireworks pictures was published swiftly (http://nilsohman.tumblr.com/image/39499632175). But the plugin does not show up as a service in Lightroom. Shouldn’t it?
The plugin has a green light in the Plug-In Manager in Lightroom. And I can make presets in the Export dialogue.
Tried to restart Lightroom and reload the plugin several times. Didn’t help.
Regards, and thanks for your work!
Nils from Stockholm, Sweden.
It shouldn’t show up… it’s an Export-only plugin. I’m not sure how appropriate Publish would be for Tumblr, but in any case I’d like to know it’s popular enough a plugin before I even consider spending the time to extend it to Publish… —Jeffrey
OK. Thanks for your answer.
The reason for making it a Publish Service would be to see what I’ve published in my Tumblr account. And maybe be able to change the picture to a better processed one.
But I found out that it’s possible to keep track with a Smart Collection (Uploaded to Tumblr=Yes).
Hi Jeffrey:
I just downloaded and installed the Tumblr plugin. Great! It should save me a lot of time. One thing though (and forgive me if it’s somewhere in the documentation) I can’t work out how to add a caption. I’m a bit confused about “Image Caption” and and presets and all that as well as “Photo Link”. Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks!
For the caption you can just enter what text you want, though you can create presets that can be reused (that create the caption based upon image metadata, for example). The Photo Link is a Tumblr thing…. you can have the image on Tubmlr link somewhere. It’s optional. —Jeffrey