Jeffrey Friedl's Blog » Jeffrey’s Lightroom Goodies (Plugins and Tools)

Jeffrey’s Lightroom Goodies (Plugins and Tools)

My Tech-Related Photography Posts

This page lists my Lightroom-related plugins and posts.

Note: everything here is for Adobe's venerable photo-workflow desktop application started in 2006, named at various times “Lightroom”, “Lightroom CC”, and now “Lightroom Classic”.

Nothing here applies to Adobe's new desktop app, debuted in Oct 2017 and given the original application's “Lightroom CC” name.

Plugins for Lightroom: (All-Plugin Update Log via RSS )

Export & Publish:

Export Plugins:

Export to Google Photos
Export to Tumblr
Export to Twitter
Export to Photobucket
Order Prints Locally — Upload to LifePics for printing and pickup at a local retailer
Export to Expono

Other Publish Plugins:

Collection Publisher — Replicate a collection heirarchy to local disk
Folder Publisher — Replicate images to local disk in their Lightroom folder heirarchy

Export Add-Ons:

Metadata Wrangler — Control what metadata is/isn't included during any export
Creative Commons — Inject Creative-Commons license data into exported images
Run Any Command — Custom process each image during an export
Snapshot on Export — Develop-setting data backup, sort of
Smart-Preview Support — Avoid unintential low-quality exports
Crop for iPad and other Devices — Device-specific cropping on export

Geoencoding Plugins:

Geoencoding Support — Geoencoding, and working with geoencoded photos
Proximity Search — Search for photos taken near a location

Utility Plugins:

Data Explorer — What the Library Grid Filter should have been.
Smart Collection Sync — Allows smart collections to sync with Lightroom Mobile (sort of)
People Support — How old are people who appear in photos?
Folder Status — Track your personal workflow on a folder-by-folder basis.
PhotoSafe — Protect selected photos from accidental deletion
Collection Mechanic — A collection of tools relating to collections
Bag-o-Goodies — A collection of various small tools
Timelapse Support — Fade develop settings across a large set of images.
Workflow Delete Options — Lightroom sometimes deletes more than you ask for; this helps.
Metadata Viewer — See all metadata within a master image
Bulk Develop Settings — Context-based develop settings (noise reduction, etc.)
Metadata-Viewer Preset Builder — Configure Lightroom's metadata display
Photoshop Layers — As close to non-destructive layers as Lightroom allows
JPEG Quality Tester — Experiment and learn about JPEG quality settings
Folder Watch — Auto-import from select folders, auto processing, and auto export
Megapixel Sort — Add an ability to sort by post-crop image size
Focal-length Sort — Add an ability to sort by focal length
Data Plot — Plot lens and exposure settings across your library
Extended Search — Some fringe catalog searching
Video-Asset Management — Manage videos along side photos in Lr2
Preview-Cache Image Extraction — Extract preview images from a Lightroom catalog.
System Info — Info about Lightroom and the system it's installed on, for debugging.
iPhoto Collection Fixer — Fix the silliness that the iPhoto import creates with respect to “Event Photos” collections

Plugin-related Info:

Tools for Lightroom:

Jeffrey's Lightroom Configuration Manager

Etc...

Old Plugin Resources for Lightroom 1 (no longer supported)

Other notable sources of Lightroom plugins include:

You can submit a comment below | Comments via RSS | Trackback

The 30 most-recent comments (out of 592; see all), most recent last...

Will there be an update to metaviewer for LR9? I have cash 🙂 Thanks

It was updated the same day Lr9 was released. —Jeffrey

— comment by Ronald J Ceton on January 7th, 2020 at 3:29am JST (1 year, 11 months ago) — comment permalink

First of all I wanted to say, “Thank you” for sharing your knowledge of photography and everything that is associated with it.
My knowledge of for instance, Metadata viewer, is very slim. I am trying to learn by reading your blog and trying to make sense of it but it is so much information to remember lol.
I have some very old pictures of my ancestors and I was wondering if there was a way to get any date stamp or GEO coordinates of any of them?

Thanks Again!

P.S. Your photographs are just gorgeous

— comment by ALEXIS on January 11th, 2020 at 12:47pm JST (1 year, 11 months ago) — comment permalink

Flickr plugin not working. I reauthenticate my login successfully just in case but still getting error during export: Unexpected reply from Flickr.
No specific message is displayed 🙁

Flickr seems to be sporadically down a lot more these days. In your case (thanks for the logs), the connection to Flickr just died with no response from them. In fairness, this could be anything between Lightroom and their server…. your router, your ISP, etc., but it’s probably just them having “issues” that will eventually go away. Not much we can do about it. /-: —Jeffrey

— comment by Mauro on January 20th, 2020 at 2:54pm JST (1 year, 10 months ago) — comment permalink

Bonjour,

Je suis sur Nantes en France.
J’ai téléchargé ce Plugin car je souhaite connaitre plus de détails sur mes photos.
Mais je n’ai pas trouvé le nombre de déclenchement de mon Canon EOS80D ?

Merci à vous de votre réponse,
Laurence.

That camera does not include the shutter count in the image metadata, sorry. —Jeffrey

— comment by Laurence J on February 4th, 2020 at 2:14am JST (1 year, 10 months ago) — comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey,
i am looking for a way to compare the development data of two or more photos inside LR.
There is a plugin from 2014 on Bitbucket (lrdevsettingscompare), but it is not supported anymore and does not work correctly in LR 9.2 (Windows 10). Do you have an idea?

Thanks and many greetings, Ulrich

I just tried the copy of LrDevsettingsCompare from here and it seemed to work. It wouldn’t have support for develop settings added since then, but it’s something. Have you tried reaching out to the authors? —Jeffrey

— comment by Ulrich on March 9th, 2020 at 12:59am JST (1 year, 9 months ago) — comment permalink

First, thank you for all that you’ve done for the photography and Lightroom communities Jeffery!

Long story short I think I need a way for Metadata Wrangler (or another tool) to also write the Caption field data to the IPTC:Caption-Abstract field in addition to the EXIF:ImageDescription field. I think I’m observing that Google Photos only looks at the IPTC:Caption-Abstract field so trying to use Metadata Wrangler to modify the photos’ description field only works for Google Photos if Metadata Wrangler is also writing to the IPTC:Caption-Abstract. There’s a note about how Metadata Wrangler works in this regard on the change log, reproduced below.

Is there a setting or way to force Metadata Wrangler to also overwrite the IPTC:Caption-Abstract field even if there was no text in there originally?

Best regards,

R. Moore

“20190817.180 – Added “Artist” to the “Add/Overwrite” section, and updated the internals so that when overwriting an item, it overwrites all copies of that item in the metadata (e.g., when updating the “Caption”, the tag actually filled in is “EXIF:ImageDescription”, but if “IPTC:Caption-Abstract” and/or “XMP:Description” exist, they are also filled in). Also fixed the “Speed” item in this area.”

This ended up being a minefield, so I’m reticent to change semantics now. Consider instead using the Run Any Command plugin to invoke ExifTool to copy the metadata fields as you like on each exported copy. —Jeffrey

— comment by Richard Moore on March 16th, 2020 at 7:27am JST (1 year, 9 months ago) — comment permalink

Regarding “lrdevsettingscompare”: No I didn´t try to reach the Author as I don´t know how to do it @ Bitbucket. Sorry.

— comment by Ulrich on March 18th, 2020 at 3:19am JST (1 year, 8 months ago) — comment permalink

Hi from Belgium,

I saw your geocoding plugin for lightroom (v4 for me)> Unfortunately Icannot geocode from GE. As Google has change the way to works with maps years ago, is it in your pkan to move from google to openstreetmaps for getting info for geocoding ?

Thanks,

You can use Google if you get your own API developer key and enter it into the Plugin Manager. The plugin also already lets you use OpenSteetMaps. —Jeffrey

— comment by Fabrizio on March 22nd, 2020 at 7:06am JST (1 year, 8 months ago) — comment permalink

Hello there from Alabama,

Is it possible to hack a Lightroom 6 (and newer) plugin to work with Lightroom 5? I have a Loupedeck+ that I’m trying to get to work on LR5 and so far I’ve just modified “Info.lua” to say “LrSkdMinimumVersion = 5.0” and Lightroom went from saying it wasn’t supported to it is enabled, but has encountered some problems. Upon exporting an error report, the only errors (3 of them total) are relating to “Could not find namespace: LrApplicationView”

The Loupedeck requires features not available in Lr5. Most of the “control Lightroom from another app” features came in Lr6 and Lr7…. —Jeffrey

— comment by Karry Jones on April 4th, 2020 at 9:51am JST (1 year, 8 months ago) — comment permalink

Hello there from HK,

I am going to geo tag my old Nikon DSLR (D7000) photos taken in past 10 years. Over 20,000 of them. Your Geotagging plugin for LR is really a time saving tool. Wouldn’t even think about this daunting task without your tool. 100% well worth for the denotation I made in registration!

Thank you!

— comment by HL Cheng on April 9th, 2020 at 10:14am JST (1 year, 8 months ago) — comment permalink

Hi Jeffry, I’m looking for a plugin helping me to stack photos in lightroom with more detailed options than lightroom does by itself. Lightroom could stack photos automaticaly, but it will stack them with “more or less” the same creation time, means if make a lot if photos in burst mode it may put them all in one stack. I often create dng files out of the raw files. Ok wasting some disk space but I like to stack these dng files with the associated raw file(which have exactly the same photo creation time as the raw file) and only those. When using the automatic stacking option in Lightroom it often creates stacks which contain more photos than I like to have in a stack (for example because I shot in burst mode).
Are you interested to build a plugin which could handle that?
Best regards
Stef

The “Find Next Photo Group” feature of my Bag-o-Goodies plugin can help, but it can’t actually make the stacks, as Lightroom doesn’t allow a plugin to create stacks. —Jeffrey

— comment by Stefan Weber on April 22nd, 2020 at 3:45pm JST (1 year, 7 months ago) — comment permalink

Hi from Sedona, USA,

Any chance you’ll develop an export plug-in creating webp files, with improved browser support I’m think of serving these up instead of jpegs for browsers that support them.

Thanks, I use your geocoding plug-in all the time

No, sorry, Adobe will have to add it to Lightroom natively. —Jeffrey

— comment by Bill Belvin on April 27th, 2020 at 11:33pm JST (1 year, 7 months ago) — comment permalink

Hello from Italy,

firstly thank you for all the great plugins you produce, they are very useful!

In the past I have created smart collections with “companion” normal collections for syncing and then I manually update the normal collection when required. Only now I’ve noticed you have a plug for syncing smart collections 🙁

My question(s) are:
1) how does you plugin handle custom order in the synced companion collection:
2) is there any way to integrate my custom order if I implement your plugin or would I need to manually custom order them again, given I could custom order them (see question 1).

Keep up the good work, it is most appreciated!

Saluti

Walter

— comment by Walter Bof on May 4th, 2020 at 5:25pm JST (1 year, 7 months ago) — comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey,

I wrote to you earlier today asking about custom orders in synced collections. Anyway, I decided to try it out for myself (with success) and confirmed the following (FYI):

1) you can create a custom order in the resulting “companion” collection which doesn’t change when you sync updates from the smart collection. New photos are placed on the end:

2) I was able to maintain my custom ordered collections I’d already made by giving the smart collection and companion collection the same name:

3) the plugin doesn’t “companion” subfolders from a parent folder, I had to “manage” each subfolder individually (no big deal):

4) consequently the companion set doesn’t divide into subsets… I had to place all the companion collections into one folder (again no big deal).

Thanks again for they great work.

Walter

— comment by Walter Bof on May 5th, 2020 at 1:48am JST (1 year, 7 months ago) — comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey, I’m writing from San Antonio, TX USA. Staying isolated and trying to organize my lightroom. I hope you’re healthy and practicing safe isolation!

I’m wondering if you have a tool and/or have at least investigated a way to copy the configurations of “Publish Services” into a separate catalog.

My catalog theses days loads very slowly (yes, I know some people think Lightroom should be able to handle any size catalog, but, alas, it just doesn’t) so I started separating out various topics into their own catalogs (ex: sports, wildlife, junk). Today I tried to use a publish service on one of these new catalogs and only just came to realize all my publishing services need to be set up. While I can swap to the old monolithic catalog and take screenshots of all the settings in each publish service, it donned on me that you of all people might have figured out a way to copy the configurations. Even if you just have some insight as to where in the catalog these might be saved, that would be really helpful.

Publish services simply can’t be copied, but you can make a copy of the catalog (a copy of its LRCAT file brought to an empty folder), open that catalog, and then remove all the photos from it. (Be sure to “remove” and not “delete from disk”!) You then have an empty catalog with all the publish services set up, though empty. —Jeffrey

— comment by David H on May 11th, 2020 at 4:17am JST (1 year, 7 months ago) — comment permalink

I can’t get the “Smart Colection Sync” plug-in to work. I just get the message “The catalog has no smart collections to be processed by this plugin.”. What am I doing wrong?

You have to be sure to mark the smart collections that you want to work with. The default is with “<!>” in the title, but it can be changed in the plugin settings. See the docs on this page. —Jeffrey

— comment by David Brandon on May 31st, 2020 at 5:42am JST (1 year, 6 months ago) — comment permalink

I know the Facebook is DOA in terms of LR Plugins, but I am upgrading from LR8 to LR9 and even though I can’t use the plugin to manage images on Facebook site, I do still want to use the Publish Service collections as a reference to what I had uploaded there prior to their trashing their API.

On LR9, your Facebook Pub Service is dimmed. I know I can still open the collections and see them but it is very hard to read which instance of the Facebook Publish Service to go to as it is so dim I can’t read it. Do you have a way to activate this PS on LR 9 even though it can no longer be used to interface with Facebook? I guess what I’m looking for is an update where the code doesn’t complain about running on a newer LR version. Maybe just disable the version number check

Thanks — Dan

Fair enough, I’ve just pushed out a new version that should work. —Jeffrey

— comment by Dan hartford on June 11th, 2020 at 6:59am JST (1 year, 6 months ago) — comment permalink

Hello hello Mr Friedl;
Hoping all’s as well as can be with you & yours.
I have enjoyed your Flickr photo sync tool greatly over the years and have watched with pleasure and & joy as you continue to improve it. Thank you.
I have begun to integrate Capture One (version 20.0.4) into my photo workflow and am really enjoying the multitude of differences between it and LR CC. Tho it has a scripting function I am extremely loath to try my hand as those tasks end poorly for me, always. I wonder if you might consider the challenge. I’d be (and likely there’d be others) happy to pay for your fine work, along the lines of your current LR plugins.

Best regards,
Michael Mazzola
Lighting Designer
Portland, OR, USA
IG: mjmazzola

Thanks for your kind words, but I won’t be expanding to anything beyond Lightroom. —Jeffrey

— comment by Mazzola on June 17th, 2020 at 3:13am JST (1 year, 5 months ago) — comment permalink

I am using the bulk develop setting and have been for quite a few years, all of a sudden it is removing my radial tool and altering my exposure in the latest version of lightroom. Please let me know what to do.

Thanks

Please send a plugin log after experiencing the issue, with details about exactly which settings were changed in error, including their exact values before and after. Thanks! —Jeffrey

— comment by Jerry Rizzo on June 24th, 2020 at 5:53am JST (1 year, 5 months ago) — comment permalink

Do you know of any way to export a text file of your Collection Set/Collection tree?
I’m just looking for something that looks like the output of “dir > tree.txt /a” but for Collections…
I’ve used a number of your plugins over the years, and I know how useful and skilled as a programmer. My scripting days/programming days died in my brain many years ago.

Thanks in advance.

I’m afraid that I can’t think of any way to do this, sorry. —Jeffrey

— comment by Robert Weintraub on August 5th, 2020 at 3:00pm JST (1 year, 4 months ago) — comment permalink

Hey Jeffrey – I hope you are well! I saw on a “recent” post that you had not gone to the cloud version yet. I made a partial move due to the pandemic since I was away from my desktop computer for about 9 months. Curious about your thoughts on the Cloud version these days? I am in purgatory between the two versions and trying to decide how to use the two together or go back to Classic. The cost to go full cloud is a bit crazy and I miss Classic features such as your plugins, Compare, etc…. Thoughts appreciated. Jonathan

I’ve not looked at the cloud version since. It’s just not for me, so I’ve no further opinion on it, sorry. —Jeffrey

— comment by Jonathan on January 1st, 2021 at 10:56pm JST (11 months ago) — comment permalink

This is some excellent work. I just registered and donated $25 for your Collection Publisher. It’s kind of mind-blowing that this functionality is not part of core Lightroom. You’re doing work Adobe can’t be arsed to do and ask for essentially nothing in return. Amazing!

It’s also such a basic functionality, really… yet, here we are.

Your plugin allowed me to reach what feels like 90% automation in my flow: take new photos, import, edit, add to a new, manual collection. Then hit “refresh and publish” so that new collection is picked up by the mirrored collection from your plugin. This publishes it to the NAS, which my Nextcloud can access. Visit Nextcloud, hit “Share” on that folder, done. Takes seconds. Through your addon, I have constant peace of mind that full sync is reached (or know when it’s not). Through Nextcloud, I can track exactly what stuff is shared with whom, set passwords, expiration dates etc. All at full JPG resolution, too. No more duplicates, SSOT all the way. This is the world I always dreamed of, facilitated through your excellent plugin. Amazing what one can do with some spit and Lua, in the Adobe-constrained playground.

The only bitter pill in all this is that your work ties me down with Adobe even more, receiving my money that in fact you earned for a good part.

Greetings from Germany

— comment by A happy user on January 17th, 2021 at 4:29am JST (10 months, 16 days ago) — comment permalink

Just wanted to let you know that I appreciate your work on the free tool for viewing metadata.

Thanks a lot and have a good day.

— comment by Priyansh Dwivedi on February 13th, 2021 at 2:27am JST (9 months, 17 days ago) — comment permalink

Hi, do you do custom development for lightroom plugins?
I have specific needs if you’re interested. email me.
thanks!

No, sorry, I don’t. —Jeffrey

— comment by Chris on March 24th, 2021 at 1:42am JST (8 months, 9 days ago) — comment permalink

I’m using Metadata Wrangler with LR Classic and for years have used Metadata Wrangler without issue. Now it works as normal except it won’t give me italic text in the watermark. I’ve re-installed it but the problem persists. The italic box is definitely ticked. Any ideas, please? Anything else I could try?
Thanks,
John

I’m afraid I don’t understand what Metadata Wrangler has to do with watermarks. Are you confusing two plugins, perhaps? —Jeffrey

— comment by John Walmsley on March 26th, 2021 at 10:49pm JST (8 months, 6 days ago) — comment permalink

Hi, thanks for your geo plugin. After Adobe has stopped support of maps for LR 6 it helps me a lot. It’s much clever anyway. Do you have plans to develop any plugins for Capture One Pro?

No, sorry.—Jeffrey

— comment by phrank on April 12th, 2021 at 11:53am JST (7 months, 19 days ago) — comment permalink

Hi, Jeffrey,
This is a follow up to my query of 26th March 2021 about watermarks in Metadata Wrangler no longer showing as italics. You had responded that watermarks are not part of MW.
I’m not very technical and your response surprised me as I’ve always adjusted my watermarks from within MW (as I thought). I had no idea that watermarks are part of LR, itself.
Having Googled the problem, I see that Adobe has been advised of this problem many. many months ago but does not seem to have fixed it.
Sorry to have bothered you with this Adobe issue.
All the Best (from Surrey, UK).

— comment by John Walmsley on May 15th, 2021 at 11:19pm JST (6 months, 17 days ago) — comment permalink

Jeffry
Do you have a plugin for the capacity to Publish directly from LR to Instagram?
Thanks
Doug
dougtesta@comcast.net

Facebook doesn’t allow it, except for official Business accounts. (At least they allow that, now; for a long time, they required uploads to be from a phone.) I haven’t made a plugin for Business accounts, but I’m considering it…. —Jeffrey

— comment by Douglas Testa on September 28th, 2021 at 11:42pm JST (2 months, 3 days ago) — comment permalink

hi, Jeffrey how have you been? it seems like you just left the com

Just busy busy busy with things behind the scenes. —Jeffrey

— comment by dan ligino on October 2nd, 2021 at 4:55am JST (2 months ago) — comment permalink

Hello Jeffrey,

I’m Olivier from Canada, first thing first, thank you for your fabulous work in the photography community. I’m a big fan of the LR sync adon and I wonder if it will be available for the latest version of Lightroom classic ?
Thank you for your work again and have a great day

Olivier

I’m not sure what plugin you’re referring to, but it doesn’t sound like one of mine… —Jeffrey

— comment by Olivier on November 22nd, 2021 at 1:00am JST (1 week, 3 days ago) — comment permalink