About Me

me

I played drums in 5th-grade band, but if you're looking for the Jeff Friedl who plays drums for ASHES dIVIDE, that's not me.

What is me is...

Random data points about Jeffrey Friedl
  • I currently live in Kyoto, Japan.
  • Son Anthony born October, 2002.
  • Have studied the following languages in school: English, Spanish, German, French.
  • Can actually speak the following languages: English, Japanese.
  • Languages I apparently wasted a lot of time on for nothing: Spanish, German, French.
  • Born in San Diego, California.
  • Raised in Rootstown, Ohio.
  • Bachelor of Science in Math / Applied Computer Science: Kent, 1987.
  • Master of Science in Computer Science: University of New Hampshire, 1988.
  • Have been in a couple of big earthquakes (Loma Prieta '89, Kobe '95).
  • Spent 2.5 painful years writing the first edition of Mastering Regular Expressions (O'Reilly Media, 1997).
  • Spent 2 more painful years writing the second edition (O'Reilly Media, 2002).
  • Spent only 9 months updating for the third edition (O'Reilly Media, 2006).
  • Catholic.
  • Have programmed in C since 1981, Perl since 1990. Don't know C++.
  • Have used jfriedl@yahoo.com as an email address since before there was Yahoo! Mail. Still use it.
  • Wrote these blog posts.
  • Took these pictures, and these, too.
  • I lurk on Google Plus and Facebook.
Employment
  • Adobe Systems, Inc 【アドビ システムズ】 (10/2007 — 8/2008, and again 12/2009 — 5/2010)
    I consulted on issues related to Lightroom.
  • Peak Web Consulting (2007 — 2008)
    I worked on back-end infrastructure tools for top-tier bandwidth users (big Big players on the Internet, whose names I'm not allowed to mention).
  • Yahoo! 【ヤフー(アメリカの本社)】
    Sunnyvale, CA, USA (1997 - 2005)
    Architecting and engineering on the Y! Finance site, using mostly Perl/MySQL to fold, spindle, and hopefully not mutilate reams of financial data. I was employee #192. When I left )-: I was the 30th most senior (by time, certainly not influence) employee.
  • Omron Tateishi Denki 【オムロン立石電機】
    Nagaokakyou, Japan (1989-1997)
    Mostly kernel work on a four-processor symmetric shared memory system that Omron was developing. While at Omron, spent about three years as a “visiting scientist” at Carnegie Mellon University (and was mostly unimpressive to the superbly smart people there).
  • Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine (NEOUCOM)
    Rootstown, Ohio (1981 - 1986)
    Worked with a first-run IBM-PC with DOS 1.0. (Unfortunately, Microsoft has not improved on their software much since then). Washed a lot of lab equipment. Did a lot of programming, including some really advanced flow cytometer control software in FORTH.

I enjoy researching a subject of personal interest, and then, because I occasionally stumble across an ability to write well, sharing the results. Examples include my long writeup on digital image color spaces, the auto-focus test chart that I developed, and a detailed Analysis of Lightroom JPEG Export Quality Settings. (See all in my list of geeky photo-tech posts.)

I also seem to have become the main provider of plugins for Adobe Lightroom, such as my plugins that allow direct export to Zenfolio, Flickr, SmugMug, PicasaWeb, Facebook, and more: see my Lightroom Goodies page for current details. I develop these on my own time, as a hobby, which is perhaps a bit odd because I don't actually use most of them in my own photo workflow. In case it's of interest, I've written up a story on how I fell into this line of handiwork: “Road to Now: My Long Path To Lightroom Plugin Development

For comments specific to a blog post, feel free to leave a comment on the post. Otherwise, feel free to send email. (Plugin logs should be sent as per this FAQ.)


The 30 most-recent comments (out of 356; see all), most recent last...

Hi Jeffrey, your blog brings lots of information about Japan ( I return in Kyushu in October) and photography, and I love both. Thank you!
I’m using Lightroom and I’m looking for a metadata comparison tool between metadata in xmp files and metadata in LR database.
I would like to be able to select which metadata to keep based on the 2 sources.
You have very valuable plugins to view metadata, but no one provides the feature I need.
Do you think this is even feasible through plugin, or this is a feature to add to LR itself.

Thank you again for your huge work!

Whether it’s feasible depends on the specific fields you’re interested in, as Lightroom supports the reading of only some fields, and the writing of an even smaller set. But frankly, it seems like it’s a very narrow kind of thing that most Lightroom users would have no use for…. the common use case just doesn’t seem to be there, so I it strikes me as something that wouldn’t be made as a general tool….. (sorry) —Jeffrey

Denis

— comment by Denis Pacquier on July 28th, 2019 at 8:07am JST (4 years, 8 months ago) comment permalink

I’ve updated my JF LR Classic plug-in for uploads to Flickr to current version, but the plug-in is greyed out in LR. I’ve disabled and enabled it twice with no change. Any idea how I can get back to using the plug-in? LR is uptodate (8.4 release).
Please see this FAQ about bad installs. —Jeffrey

— comment by Stephen Jacoby on August 17th, 2019 at 7:24am JST (4 years, 7 months ago) comment permalink

JF: Belay my last. I figured it out. I can’t invoke it from available plug-ins in LR CC. When I go to export images, it is there. Thanks. PS – LR now offers their own plug in for Flickr. Have you had a chance to compare. I suspect that when I was offered that, I somehow prefered yours. Also, do the reasons that used to require your Photosafe still apply (in which case I’ll have to upgrade that)?

I haven’t paid attention to their plugin, but I’m sure it’s simpler in every respect, which may be good or bad, depending on your needs. Lightroom still doesn’t allow one to protect a photo from accidental removal, so yeah, I still use PhotoSafe. —Jeffrey

— comment by Stephen Jacoby on August 17th, 2019 at 11:53am JST (4 years, 7 months ago) comment permalink

Hi, I’m a registered user of your metadata_presets plugin (latest version 20190616.98, LR classic 8.2). On the plugin’s maintenance page, where I create and edit presets, the scroll bars on the left (‘build your preset here’), and on the right, where you select the metadata fields to add to the preset, are missing. So I can’t see all the fields in my preset, or scroll through all the available metadata fields. Can you help please. Thanks, John Yugin

Perhaps you have a bad install? Lightroom doesn’t actually support scrollbars like that, so I build them myself from images. If you look inside the plugin, there’s a folder of images (“i”) that should have about 77 different images. Perhaps they got lost on your system(?) If that’s not it, please send a screenshot (jfriedl@yahoo.com) —Jeffrey

— comment by John Yugin on August 24th, 2019 at 5:04pm JST (4 years, 7 months ago) comment permalink

Hey Jeffrey! Writing from Malibu CA. USA.
Great plugins in general but I’m having a bear of a time trying to use the gps and gps proximity. I’m trying to use my historical data from Google Timeline. I’ve been able to download the file using TakeOut. I’ve found sites on line which will convert the file to GPX format but they don’t seem to be read by the plugin. Upon opening the files with BBEdit I see that the file covers 2014 to present day BUT I don’t see any time/date stamps. Is there any way to make this work? Desperate to pair up my history to my images in LR Classic.

Thanks

Not without timestamps, no, there’s no way to automate it, sorry. —Jeffrey

— comment by Jonathan Selig on August 27th, 2019 at 8:30am JST (4 years, 7 months ago) comment permalink

Is there a SIMPLE way to change or remove the orientation tag in a .jpg file.
Thanks from Red Sox Nation (Boston),
Jeffry (Spelled without the unnecessary second e)

ExifTool seems pretty simple to me, but YMMV. —Jeffrey

— comment by Jeffry Wisnia on October 2nd, 2019 at 1:40am JST (4 years, 6 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey,

Writing from Finland. I have been using your fantastic Bulk Develop Settings for a long time in Lightroom. Now, the plugin has suddenly disappeared. It worked fine only a couple of days ago. Tried to install again, but it appears in the Plugin Manager list in red, with a note, “Installed but not working”. I am using Lightroom 5.7, and have not updated anything lately. Any ideas of how to fix this?

Did you delete the plugin files? Unlike normal install operations, “installing” a plugin in Lightroom merely tells Lightroom “uses these files for the plugin”, and copy isn’t made, so you have to keep the files there. Try downloading again, unzipping, then moving to where you want them to live, then install into Lightroom. —Jeffrey

— comment by Ile on October 14th, 2019 at 7:01pm JST (4 years, 5 months ago) comment permalink

Hello Jeffrey, I’m thinking about switching from Lightroom6 tot the new monthly subscription. My question is: Will my Lightroom still look the same and will the plugins still work? Will my Lightroom6 be untouched and still work after I decide to stay with the old Lightroom6?

Thank you for your time

All my plugins that work on Lr6 also work on the subscription Lightroom (currently Lr8). As far as the plugins are concerned, you can use both at the same time, but frankly, I don’t know whether installing the subscription version of Lightroom overwrites the non-subscription version, or how any of that works. But my plugins don’t care. —Jeffrey

— comment by Jielus Hendrik Kuijntjes on October 20th, 2019 at 7:23pm JST (4 years, 5 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey,

Thank you, all is well now!

Br, Ile

— comment by Ile on November 2nd, 2019 at 6:57pm JST (4 years, 5 months ago) comment permalink

Dear Jeffrey, I work with lightroom for years…. the last years with ce4 gallery from the turning gate…. but since google maps needs api-codes, nothing works anymore…. now I want to invest some dollars in a good weg-gallery-plugin to show my images and when they click on an image or a gps-sign-button near that image, that a map shows where that image is taken….. Do you have such a gallery plugin for sale? thnx in advance, grtz Ronald

No, sorry, I don’t have any Web Gallery plugins. —Jeffrey

— comment by Ronald Bohm on November 29th, 2019 at 5:41pm JST (4 years, 4 months ago) comment permalink

Hi, I haven’t used the Lightroom plugin in a while. I updated to Lightroom Classic 9.0 and the plugin keeps giving me an error. Says “Installed but not working”. Closer look shows Last Message: “An error occurred while attempting to load this plug-in. The plug-in description script (Info.lua) is missing. This is a clean install on a newly reset laptop so I don’t have old versions. Any ideas?

Something went wrong with the install… either the plugin files were deleted after install, or Lightroom was pointed to an empty folder. Please try re-installing. —Jeffrey

— comment by Daniel on December 30th, 2019 at 2:52pm JST (4 years, 3 months ago) comment permalink

I’m in the Pacific Northwest, and I’m looking for any easy way to publish from Lightroom to Instagram. Are you considering an Instagram plugin?

No, they explicitly disallow it. That being said, I have seen a Lightroom plugin that somehow seems to do it, so a search for it may be fruitful. —Jeffrey

— comment by Don on January 15th, 2020 at 3:53pm JST (4 years, 2 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey,
As the 3rd edition of your book, Mastering Regular Expressions was published in 2009, I was wondering if you’re planning a new edition.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Jay
(Melbourne)

No, sorry, I just don’t have the energy for such a task. —Jeffrey

— comment by Jay on March 5th, 2020 at 8:59am JST (4 years ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey – I’ve used your jfflickr plugin with Lightroom for several years. My publishing needs have slowed considerably, but I’m resuming now. Last time I tried, uploads to Flickr took forever – like 3-4 minutes for 1 photo. That’s SIGNIFICANTLY slower than my earlier experience, in which speeds were much faster – 10+ photos per minute. I upgraded to the newest version today. Do you have any suggestions I might try? – Thanks,
Derek

I don’t think that Lightroom is any faster/slower than before, so either the network connection is slower, or you’re trying to upload more than before. Are the export settings (particularly size and quality) the same as before? —Jeffrey

— comment by Derek Marsano on March 17th, 2020 at 5:39am JST (4 years ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey – I’ve tried reducing image sizes from 2mb to 1mb to 768kb with only a small difference in upload speeds – when the uploads actually complete. I am typically uploading 100-200 sports images, which start out as 8mb JPGs from a Nikon D850. I can sometimes upload 6 to 8 images as a batch with a reasonable upload time, but clearly this method is cumbersome. I have Comcast which has gotten only faster since I began using jfflickr with Lightroom several years ago, so I don’t suspect the connection speed as the culprit.

If I completely uninstall jfflickr and then reinstall it, will I lose connectivity to the Flickr albums I’ve already published?

Anything else I could try?

Uninstalling and reinstalling the plugin won’t have any effect on your data, but it also won’t have any effect on upload speeds. The plugin merely presents the data to Lightroom, which presents it to the OS, which presents it to your router, etc. etc.. Networking problems are notoriously difficult to track down because they can stem from anywhere along the line from the app on your system to the app on the receiving system, included. It could be as simple as Flickr not dedicating as many resources to third-party uploaders like the plugin. I don’t know. It’s frustrating. —Jeffrey

— comment by Derek Marsano on March 19th, 2020 at 4:36am JST (4 years ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey

Have you a plugin that will find all Saved Prints or all Saved Books or all Smart Collections? Is searching for such collection types possible?

A plugin understands the difference between Smart Collections and regular collections, but a plugin doesn’t know anything about prints or books…. —Jeffrey

— comment by Sam Cox on June 29th, 2020 at 7:29am JST (3 years, 9 months ago) comment permalink

hi, Jeffrey!
Is there a way to convert WEBP files to JPG? I’ve come across some forum software that won’t accept WEBP, which has been copied off the net (legally, I think).
Thanks,
Ken
I’m not familiar with WEBP, but it seems that Google is familiar with a few conversion sites that look promising. —Jeffrey

— comment by Ken on July 4th, 2020 at 3:09pm JST (3 years, 8 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey.
I have used your “google photos export plugin for Lightroom” with my old lightroom 5.7 for a few days, and exported 2200 photos as of today. About 2-300 000 to go. When exporting a collection with 561 photos it stops after 159 with the error message: “Couldn’t render image: readNegative: dng_error_end_of_file” Are there any way to see if it is a specific photo that gives the problem? What else can it be?

Thanks or your effort, appreciate it.
Rgds and Sayōnara.
Lars Liljegren,
Västerås, Sweden.

PS. I cannot see that my Google drive used storage changes when upploading photos to google photos with your tool as out state inside the tool. Which is good!

That error indicates that your DNG file is corrupt. If you inspect the plugin log (or send it to me), you can tell which image exactly it is. —Jeffrey

— comment by Lars Liljegren on August 2nd, 2020 at 7:11pm JST (3 years, 8 months ago) comment permalink

Hi, Jeffrey. I’m writing from Tampa, Florida. I just retired from being an application developer for 44 years and was *thinking* of creating a small, stand-alone app allows a user to select a geo-encoded photo and display it on Google Earth. Gee! Exactly what your LR plugin does (although the plugin does way, way more stuff). Really all I’d like to know is which language you coded the plug-in in (I’m hoping C#) and did you use any 3rd-party libraries? Any API calls to the Earth engine? All I will need is a way to extract the location data and then create a kml or kmz file. C# is not my forte, but I need something to learn while I’m quarantined at home.

Hope you’re safe over there,
Larry

Lightroom plugins must be written in Lua. See the SDK. The SDK includes LrShell.openFilesInApp(), which, as the name implies, lets you open a file in an app. —Jeffrey

— comment by Larry Molter on August 8th, 2020 at 5:59am JST (3 years, 7 months ago) comment permalink

Hello from Finland!
I was very Happy when I found your plugin for face-data transfer from Picasa to LR, because I have thousends of photos in Picasa and it look’s like the end of Picasa is near :(. I bought Lightroom Classic from Adobe and started to learn LR and test metadata plus face-info transfer from Picasa3 to LR. Then suddenly LR started to crash my PC totally and did not leave any info of the reason to boot my PC. I contacted Adobe helpdesk, and they updated Nvidia sw (Graphics card) by remote connection, but it did not help. Next day another helpperson asked my Win10 version, which is 2004 and then said that this version of win10 causes problems with adobe sw, and said that I shoud return to previous win10 update (1906 or something). When I looked how to return I saw that win10 config says the return is possible only during 10 days timeframe, not after that!!!

After some thinking I decided to test more LRC by deleting the sw and installing it again. In first attempt I did left all data as is, but it did not work, LRC crashed again. Then I deleted LR totally and reinstalled it. Now the installation sw said there is a new version of LRC, and I choosed it. Then the installation sw said I have one unsupported plug-in in my configuration (the one for Picasa transfer ofcourse), and asked to say ‘yes’ to remove it. The insatllation went succesfully to the end and now LRC seems to work ok! No crash yet after several hours up-time!

I have now to ask you, is it possible that you could fix your plug-in so, that it works ok with win10 vers. 2004 and the newest LRC (Release 10.0 build 202010011851-ef6045e0)? If you can do it, I’m ready to donate some euros for your project.

WBR Juha Kari
Vantaa, Finland

As for the plugin, I’ve pushed out a new version that should work. Lightroom will need to be restarted after the upgrade. As for Lr crashing, I suppose Adobe Support suggested that you disable GPU acceleration? That’s the only thing I can think of…. other than that, I can only say “good luck!” 😉 —Jeffrey

— comment by Juha Kari on October 22nd, 2020 at 1:25am JST (3 years, 5 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey – greetings from Gex, France!

I have been happily using your Smart Collection Sync plugin for several years, with single-way sync. As I upgrade my Lightroom and plug-in setup to V10, I’m pondering the benefit of switching to dual-way sync for my particular use case: I can live without changing sync’ed collection contents (i.e. adding or removing pictures) from my iPad, but occasionally need to adjust Develop settings for selected pictures in my sync’ed collections.

If I do so with dual-way sync enabled, will my Develop changes be propagated back to the Lightroom Classic source on my Mac?

Thanks for clarifying,
David

I believe that develop changes are always propagated both directions, regardless of any plugin settings. (The plugin merely moves photos around among collections; all the actual syncing of all types is just core Lightroom.) —Jeffrey

— comment by David Cremese on October 31st, 2020 at 9:56pm JST (3 years, 5 months ago) comment permalink

Hello Jeffrey, from the green city of Milton Keynes in the UK.

I wonder if you know of or have heard of a plugin that does what Sync Metadata does but actually covers all the EXIF and IPTC metadata? I have a lot of scanned images from a previous lifetime shooting transparencies. I still do this occasionally when either I go off on a little adventure with my old film camera or I re-scan some pictures that I hadn’t taken as much care over as I should have – that generally arose when scanning batches of 50 slides via the Nikon Slide Feeder. I used to have to enter the Date Taken but somewhere along the line Adobe let you edit that. Now I’m left having to manually enter the camera Make and Model which is mildly tedious. There are a couple of plugins that let you enter those data (including a good one from Beardy) but it would be helpful to be able to copy the values around.

Thanks for a really useful set of Plugins and for your interesting insights into Japanese life.

Kind regards, Mike

I’m not quite sure what you’re asking (I’m not familiar with many of the products you’ve mentioned), but Lightroom doesn’t allow one to update many of the metadata fields…. they’re read when the file is first imported, period. Make and Model are among them. So, you’d have to update these values in the image files before importing. (You can do them in batch with the command-line ExifTool, though I imagine that there are many graphical apps that would let you do it as well.) —Jeffrey

— comment by Mike Newman on November 17th, 2020 at 2:12am JST (3 years, 4 months ago) comment permalink

Your extended search plugin is great !!! Well done. Yes, I have contributed $, it’s worth it.

— comment by Don Mayer on December 14th, 2020 at 6:30am JST (3 years, 3 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffery,

I lived for five years in Kyoto in the late 1960’s and knew Fr. Graham McDonnell when he was running the English school at Kawaramachi/Shijo. We were both so young then. I am a 82 yr old retired American lawyer and came across your photo of you and Fr. McDonnell having lunch in Kyoto. I would be grateful if you could tell me how get in touch with Father. I often wondered what became of him after I left Kyoto.

Perhaps you could give him my email address. I don’t know if he still remembers me by name, but tell him I was the one who took him to see the Godfather movie when it first came out. He also joined me and my parents for dinner when they visited me in Kyoto so many years ago.

Thanks for your help.

Ron Sokol

I’ve passed along your message and contact info to Fr. McDonnell —Jeffrey

— comment by Ron Sokol on January 5th, 2021 at 3:02pm JST (3 years, 2 months ago) comment permalink

Is your Blog built with your own code? Doesn’t look like WordPress or Joomla.

And the Photo Map and Search?

I know Apple and Google have similar, but do you use an API from them, or another product?

Great work.

Cheers

Jay

I hacked it up long ago, from a WordPress base. The Search is mine, and the Map is mine on the backend and Google on the front end. —Jeffrey

— comment by Jay Galvin on February 21st, 2021 at 4:26am JST (3 years ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey, I’m writting from Spain, Andalucia region. I’m currently semi-retired so I can dedicate quite a bit of my time to nature and wildlife photography.

I discovered your site a few days ago looking for a way to see focus distance in some bird photos, as it’s a bit buried into the exif and depending on the Lightroom version, this specific parameter dissapers in the exif.

I wonder if you have something to see the focus point in a RAW picture. As an Olympus user, I can see it on camera browsing the photos (so the information is there…), but I did not found any way of seeing it in my PC.

Thanks, Good job!

Lightroom used to include focus distance, but the rumor is that camera manufactures asked for it to be removed because it’s so incredibly inaccurate. In any case, if it’s in the master image, you can see it via my Metadata Viewer plugin, or in bulk with my Data Explorer plugin —Jeffrey

— comment by Juan Guerrero on April 1st, 2021 at 7:26pm JST (3 years ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey,

Hope you are doing well. I saw this article in NY TIMES and thought I’d send it your way. Not sure if/when you’d ever be back in the New York area but this might be up your alley.

There’s a New 750-Mile Bicycle Route in New York. Take a Look.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/11/05/nyregion/ny-empire-trail.html

— comment by Ron Evans on November 6th, 2021 at 1:26am JST (2 years, 4 months ago) comment permalink

Hello, Jeffrey!

First of all, i must say I love your work, it’s amazing! Both photographs and plugins. I just discovered your map with that ton of geolocated photos. It’s so great. I’m using an iOS app called PixTrack to log geolocate my images, what do you use? Just curious!

Keep it up and thanks for sharing your work!!

Fran

Photos I take with my iPhone are geoencoded natively in the phone. Otherwise, I use a GPX track and my plugin. (Most often, I record the GPX track with Guru Maps. —Jeffrey

— comment by Fran Velasco on November 15th, 2021 at 6:10pm JST (2 years, 4 months ago) comment permalink

Jeffrey,

I was wondering if you had given any thought to creating a Lightroom Classic Plugin to publish to Instagram.

There was a plugin ( LR/Instagram ) that did this, but as noted here this plugin no longer works and seems to be abandoned by its creator.

A LR plugin for Instagram would be greatly appreciated.

Matt

PS I recently started reviewing your LR plugins and find many of them to be really helpful.

PPS We may have met (or at least I attended a regex talk at one of the first early Perl Conferences back around 1996). Your books helped me get a firm understanding of regex’s that has served me well for decades of programming. Millions of thanks!

I spoke on regexes at the first two Perl Conferences, so we probably did meet. “Hi” again. 😀 As for Instagram, they are clear that they don’t want this kind of app. Facebook is infuriatingly difficult to work with even when they do allow you. Not worth the pain, even if I could get it done (which I doubt). —Jeffrey

— comment by Matt Martini on March 11th, 2022 at 2:41pm JST (2 years ago) comment permalink

Hi,

I wanted to use Metadata Viewer on the laptop as well so sent another $5 donation for another code but the code doesn’t work for some reaosn? Registration failed.

What’s happening?

Thanks!

Alex

The same code should work on two installs under the same account, so you shouldn’t need another code. As described on the registration page, sometimes PayPal inexplicably puts a bogus code on the confirmation web page, but the proper one is sent in the confirmation email, so perhaps check there. When you find the code, you can email it to me and I’ll PayPal return it to you, since you don’t really need the new code. —Jeffrey

— comment by Alex Treadway on March 28th, 2022 at 3:57am JST (2 years ago) comment permalink
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