I popped up to Kyoto's Shogunzuka Overlook (将軍塚) today for the first time since March, hoping for a nice sunset.

As you can see above, I didn't get it.

However, due to my blog's proximity search feature, we can follow the “nearby photos” link under the photo to see other shots from Shogunzuka that I've posted over the years, including:

I added the proximity-search feature to my blog several years ago, and I use it often in various ways because proximity search can be extremely useful, but my blog proximity search is obviously limited to photos I've actually published on my blog. My full catalog of photos in Adobe Lightroom is much, much bigger.

Over the years I've written a bazillion (~45) plugins for Lightroom that supports a photographer in all kinds of helpful ways, but one of the first (already five years ago!) was my Lightroom catalog Proximity Search plugin.

To take advantage of proximity search, your photos have to be geoencoded to begin with (that is, each photo must be associated with latitude/longitude coordinates of where it was shot). At the time I first released the plugin, there was no way to geoencode photos within Lightroom, so one had to somehow take care of it before importing photos into your catalog. It was a pain.

But, while working on that plugin I figured out a tricky way to build another plugin that allows you to geoencode within Lightroom, and my Geoencoding Support plugin was released a couple of weeks later; it remained the only way to geoencode within Lightroom until Adobe introduced the Map Module last year. (My Geoencoding Support plugin is all the more useful now that Lightroom supports location editing, because it extends the usefulness of location information far beyond what Lightroom provides.)

Anyway, I was happy that I could do a proximity search on my photos, but the unfortunate reality was that Lightroom's catalog interface for plugins was simply too slow, creating a high barrier to use: I'd use it sparingly, only when it was worth the several-minute wait for a result.

Still, even today it's better than what Lightroom itself now supplies, at least on my machine. If I set Lightroom's Map Module to an area I'm interested in, then switch to Library and select “All Photographs”, then go back to Map to see which ones show up, Lightroom completely locks up for eight minutes. Locks up. Eight minutes. Painful.

(I hear that Lightroom is faster in this respect on Windows; someone who tested my catalog said the lockup was only two minutes there.)

I don't understand why plugin access to the Lightroom catalog is so slow, but to gain some insight I tried accessing the Lightroom-catalog SQLite database directly. The results? The same search that locked up Lightroom for eight minutes took 0.6 seconds.

Even though the very first Lightroom-related article on my blog was a post in 2006 about accessing the Lightroom database directly, I've purposefully stayed away from doing so within my plugins as a matter of principle, keeping instead to the official plugin infrastructure.

But come on, an 800-fold speedup is just too much to pass up, especially for a feature that blooms in usefulness when you can use it on the spur of the moment with little friction. So for the first time in my plugin-development life, I did an end around Lightroom's interface, adding a “Fast Full-Catalog Proximity Search” plugin-extra feature to my Proximity Search and Geoencoding Support plugins last week. This is the fast search that I mentioned on my previous post.

The search is nominally invoked from the “File > Plugin Extras > Geoencoding Support > Fast Full-Catalog Proximity Search” menu, but on my system I mapped it to a keyboard shortcut, so while looking at an image that's geoencoded, a quick tap brings up this dialog:

Upon activation, the plugin goes outside of Lightroom to grab the data, then import just those results back in, creating a collection with them. It took just a few seconds to isolate the 548 photos from that general area over the years.

(Update: in modern versions, it works on Windows as well.)
One bummer about the workaround that achieves this: it doesn't work on Windows, nor on Lr4 or earlier, so in those situations the “Fast Full-Catalog Proximity Search” plugin-extra item reverts to the slower, official, much-less-compelling method. )-:

Still, if you're using Lr5 on a Mac and find this useful, please let Adobe know; perhaps they'll add this kind of thing directly into Lightroom.