Best,
Diana Ost
pixelcat photography

How about a renaming plugin that can do string replacements? Is there anything technical in LR that stands in the way? The time I waste renaming image files externally and then re-importing is frustrating. Doesn’t Adobe use some of its own products?

Greetings from Germany!

Eric

I don’t quite get what you’re referring to… Lightroom has ways to rename, but since you mention search and replace, perhaps this plugin is what you’re looking for? —Jeffrey

I’ve no plans for one, sorry, but I’m sure Adobe has this on their mind. —Jeffrey

I have been told that parsing HTML with regex is a bad bad thing and that I never ever should do it. (I’ve been told so in the #regex channel on freenode to be exact). However, I noticed that you use HTML-examples all over your book and so far I couldn’t find any hint that it is a bad idea. Quite contrary, I feel encouraged by your examples to do exactly that.

Could you please clarify if parsing HTML is really a bad thing and if so, why are there HTML-examples all over your book?

Do you use regex to parse HTML yourself?

Thank you
Lex

Playing with fire is a bad thing, and you should never do it. Unless, of course, you know exactly what you’re doing. HTML can be ridiculously complex and impossible to parse properly with regexes, and in many cases regexes are a horrible screwdriver to use on that nail, but for many simple or quick-n-dirty situations where you treat a specific known set of HTML not as a expressive language, but as a hunk of bytes in which to search for specific known patterns, it’s just fine, and I do it all the time. Something as simple sounding as “identify all links in any valid HTML” would be an impossible nightmare with regular expressions, but “check out this page and nab all its links” would likely be trivial for most pages you might come across. —Jeffrey

Cheers
Ian

If you don’t mind doing the heavy lifting in a script, you could use my “Run any Command” plugin to process the image, passing in the temporary export filename and info that you want to key off (e.g. keywords), and have it invoke the appropriate mogrify commands…. —Jeffrey

First off, thanks hugely for the plugins. I’m currently trialling a zenfolio site with your plugin and am pleased with how things are going. I did find one thing that I’m missing and looking over your blog posts and list of plugins, it’s clear you know your way around lightroom so I hope you don’ t mind my asking…

Is there any way to run a post process action conditionally or to somehow apply a post process preset on an image per image basis?

I’m definitely looking at making the zenfolio plugin a part of my workflow, but I’ve also been looking at using mogrify for borders/text annotation. I’m finding though that I don’t want borders on every image, or that some images work best with black and some with white etc. So far, I’ve only been able to apply a single post processing configuration to each publish service (and thus all collections under it).

I realise I can create a second zenfolio service with a different default, but if I understand it correctly that would mean having to target a seperate gallery on zenfolio so that the two services don’t wind up competing to track images.

An obvious solution (to me would be to create a post process plugin that does nothing except check for say a keyword on an image, and then runs (or skips) the normal post process plugin action.

so for example, a “black border” keyword tag would run mogrify with a ‘black border’ preset configuration and so on.

Obviously, this extends to any post process plugin action , meaning that there’s an easy way to customize the post processing per image by simply adding flags or keywords to the image.

Do you know of any existing plugin that can do this? (or indeed a way to achieve the same result without it?) If not, any chance you might be inclined to add a feature to your plugins or create one?

[ I'm a competent programmer and may well get to create one someday, but I'm going to acknowledge that my time isn't well spent on this authoring plugins right now, so I figured I'd throw it open to anyone else who might feel inclined ]

Cheers
Ian

A plugin can’t do what you want (it can’t control other plugins), so the best that could happen here is each export filter is updated to handle keywords as you like…. something that is unlikely to happen. However, it’s fine to have multiple Publish Services pointing at the same albums in the same Zenfolio account… the only issue would be if you were to try to “claim” photos in your catalog… you’d get all of them in an album, not just the ones that aesthetically you think belong. If you use them only to push new photos, you’ll be just fine. —Jeffrey

In one of your future blog posts, I’d love to see one of your technical reviews of the Adobe Lightroom lens profiles. Your technical / calibration posts are some of the most balanced (between pragmatic reality and exacting pixel pinching) and informative that I’ve read regarding Lightroom. They’ve finally got Lens profiles for my Pentax lenses so I’ve been trying them but am not sure if I’m using them correctly. I’d love to see what your experience has been using the adobe lens profiles and some of your good glass.

Regards. Ron Evans

I don’t have anything technical to say about them, but on the practical side, I like them, but often don’t use parts of them for artistic reasons (such as wanting to keep the natural vignette). I don’t have a profile for most lenses I shoot with, though, and have been too busy to make them myself, despite a desire. —Jeffrey

I just bought the 3rd Edition of MRE, and it truly is one of the best technical books of all time (no exaggeration). I haven’t read it ALL the way through yet, but I particularly found the chapter on Perl to be immensely helpful. Plus, the book is loaded with wonderful amounts of Perl-ism.

Are you thinking of writing a 4th Edition in the near future? There are alot of new things going on with PCRE and Unicode, and was hoping that you may include some of your wonderful insights in your next book.

- Corey

No, I won’t write another edition, sorry. I’m sure O’Reilly will have someone do it, though. —Jeffrey

I have a nice workable import routine set up for the files that are imported from my Canon 7D with the following points:
The Canon utility brings the images from the 7D to my HD
Folder name created by Canon’s import utility is YYYY_MM_DD
As the files are already where needed I use an “ADD” style of import into LR, (so the files don’t move)

I have just bought a Fuji X100, but its import utility (from camera to HD) creates dated folders of YYYY-MM-DD, and this means that when I go to import X100 images on a day that I have already imported Canon 7D images, (or vice versa) I get TWO sets of identically dated folders because they have the different style of date ( _ versus – )

All other issues appear OK (file names, presets applied on import etc)

I cannot find a way to streamline this either in the import utilities, or at the Lr Import stage, and this is a really annoying problem that seems so easy to put right, if only I could!!

Many thanks for any suggestion you can offer on this.
Regards
Edward
Perhaps forgo the camera import utilities and import directly from the camera (or mounted camera card) via “Copy”, where Lightroom creates/maintains the dated folders for you. —Jeffrey