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 app started in 2006, named at various times “Lightroom”, “Lightroom CC”, and now (as of Oct 2017) “Lightroom Classic” or perhaps “Lr7”.

Nothing here applies to Adobe's new desktop app, debuted in Oct 2017 and given the old app'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 577; see all), most recent last...

I am wondering if it is possible with one or more of your plugins to do the following:
1. Determine HDR and possibly other modified images imported from iPhone Xs. Apple uses a custom metadata field “Custom Rendered” to indicate if the iPhone made an HDR file. It may also indicate Portrait mode. I have a hard time determining this processing in Lightroom. Your Metadata Viewer sees this tag. I would like to somehow get that tag into the Library metadata view. I don’t know if it is possible with your custom presets plugin.
2. Similarly, since Facebook no longer allows direct export from Lightroom, I can’t easily tell which images I have uploaded to Facebook (or Instagram, or my WordPress blog) within Lightroom. Is it possible to use the custom presets plugin to do this?
Thanks.

For the first item, use “EXIF:CustomRendered” with the “User-Specified Field” item in my Data Explorer plugin. For the second, see this blog post. —Jeffrey

— comment by Andy on June 25th, 2019 at 3:47am JST (11 months ago) — comment permalink

Jeffery, I am looking to solve a task. Your lightroom goodies comes close, but I still do not have a solution and thought you might have a suggestion or idea. It relates to batch editing image titles.

I use Lightroom to catalog and edit my image files – raw, psd, etc. I have a systematic convention for naming the actual files. The raw start with YYMMDD-jobcode-nnn where nnn is a sequence number. When I construct a master psd file I append -mv1. Then when I construct a print file from this master I add -p22x28@360 for example. In summary my file naming convention is cryptic but useful to me and it indicates the relationships between the original raw and derivative files and keeps them together by name.

I would like to also assign a simple but useful title to a set of images. For example I may have 100 images of the Grand Canyon in a folder. I would like to name these Grand Canyon #1, Grand Canyon #2, etc where the sequence number cycles by file. In this way I will have simple titles that an end client can see when I post to a gallery and the titles are also actually in my image files back here on disk.

Your export to Zenfolio allows me to perform such a title assignment when publishing to Zenfolio, but this does not update the original disc file embedded Title (do not want to use the file name).

Do you know of any method to assign sequential titles to the actual files in my catalog?

Thanks, Mark Muntean

I don’t understand what relation the filename discussion has with your actual question, so maybe I don’t understand your actual question, but you can use the “Write Field” feature in my Bag of Goodies plugin to update the Title field within Lightroom, and can then use Lightroom’s write-back-metadata-to-disk feature to get it into the master file (or its sidecar). —Jeffrey

— comment by Mark Muntean on July 1st, 2019 at 5:11pm JST (10 months, 24 days ago) — comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey, I’ve been using your fab Folder Watch for many years, however do you have a plug-in (or would consider making one)that will enable a number of prints to be made from a single click in the print module? I’m really looking for a print package system where I can pre-select what is in each package – effectively selecting a number of prints in different sizes from different printers (i..e like school photo packages). A single click on the package name will then automatically print the entire package. There are applications for this is the event photography market too.

Sorry, Lightroom offers no plugin support within the Print module. —Jeffrey

— comment by Chris Nutt on July 7th, 2019 at 8:24pm JST (10 months, 17 days ago) — comment permalink

Can no longer use my Zenfolio App. Error message is as follows:

Can’t upload: Zenfolio says that you don’t have permission for some aspect of the upload

Any help would be appreciated.

Bill

I just pushed out a new version of the plugin that should provide a better error message. If that doesn’t clear things up, please send a plugin log. —Jeffrey

— comment by William P. Levin on July 22nd, 2019 at 5:34am JST (10 months, 3 days ago) — comment permalink

I changed my Zenfolio name (not the username or password) and now I can’t create an album under the Zenfolio plug in in Lightroom. It continuously says “initializing”. If I exit Lightroom I lose the work that I did under that album such as culling photos. I have tried uninstalling, unregistering, and setting it up all over again and it is still not working.

Please check out the “Plugin Extras > Zenfolio Extras” dialog… there’s an “Zenfolio Username Change” item there. It’s been so long since I looked at this part of the code that I don’t remember whether it handles publish services… please give it a try, and if you get the hang at “initializing” again, please send a plugin log. Thanks. —Jeffrey

— comment by Kelsey on July 27th, 2019 at 8:12am JST (9 months, 29 days ago) — comment permalink

Hi Jeff,
I’ve not been terribly impressed with the facial recognition built into LR6 (maybe it is better in later versions?). Have you ever thought about writing a program that would allow users to user AWS Rekognition?
Josh
Not really. That would require uploading every photo, and somehow mapping the results back in Lightroom, but Lightroom doesn’t allow a plugin to create face regions, so it’d all feel very klunky. The face-recognition engine changed from Lr7, and seems to me to be much better, anyway. —Jeffrey

— comment by Josh on August 2nd, 2019 at 3:12am JST (9 months, 23 days ago) — comment permalink

Hi Jeff,

Do you have a plug in that will force a keyword & Location info sync from LR Classic to LR Cloud?

What it would need to do for each selected image is:
a) see what synced collections the image is in.
b) remove the image from the “All Synced Photographs” standard collection.
c) if the image has a user created smart preview discard it,
d) wait for sync to complete (don’t know if this step required?)
e) if image had a user created smart preview, re-create it
f) re-add image to synced collections it had been in before.

If not, is that something you’d consider adding to your portfolio of wonderful plugin’s

Thanks — Dan

The answer is “no”, but I’m not quite sure what the question is. Plugins have no interaction with the Cloud stuff, except the brute-force method of adding/removing photos to/from a collection that has been marked to Sync with the Cloud. Smart previews have nothing to do with keywords or other metadata… they’re created from the master file, and that’s that, so I don’t understand what you hope to accomplish in deleting and recreating them. I don’t use the Cloud sync stuff personally, so maybe I’m rusty, but isn’t “All Synced Photos” an automatic collection that can’t be modified directly? —Jeffrey

— comment by Dan on August 19th, 2019 at 1:17am JST (9 months, 6 days ago) — comment permalink

In the Boston area. Have used your Lightroom smugmug export plugin through many iterations. It has recently started to fail. It will randomly not upload the image to the website, although within Lightroom, it looks like it is working fine. Reloading the plugin and restarting Lightroom, but that has no effect. The only way I could get it to work again was to uninstall the plugin and reinstall it. That worked for about half a dozen photos, and then it failed again.

I am using the most recent version of the plugin with the most recent version (8.4) of Lightroom classic.

Is there any way for me to fix this?

thanks very much.

Please send a plugin log after you encounter this, and I’ll take a look. Please be sure to mention in the log comment exactly which image didn’t get uploaded (and what URL Lightroom thinks it’s at). —Jeffrey

— comment by Dan Koretz on September 3rd, 2019 at 1:07am JST (8 months, 22 days ago) — comment permalink

I have used the geocoding support on my desktop for a while, it’s really wonderful. I have tried it on my laptop and cannot get it to load. In the plugin manager when I go to add it I get a dialog box error message “There is something wrong in CryptUnprotectData”. The repeated error message in the geocoding folder log is:

Error 1

Could not create info sections for plug-in.
There is something wrong in CryptUnprotectData.

I get this four times. I didn’t find anything useful on the web. Any idea how I may get your geocoding pluhin to work? Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic, version 8.4.1.

Thanks!

I’ve never heard of this before (I don’t know what “CryptUnprotectData” might be), but perhaps try downloading with a different browser, or unzipping with a different zipper. I’ve heard that some utilities corrupt during the download/unzip…. —Jeffrey

— comment by Don Smith on September 23rd, 2019 at 9:04am JST (8 months, 2 days ago) — comment permalink

Do you know a tool to batch merge multiple catalogs into one? Now it’s just one by one, which is taking a lot of time and effort.

No, sorry. —Jeffrey

— comment by Wiebe Terpstra on September 25th, 2019 at 6:24pm JST (8 months ago) — comment permalink

Hello everyone is mainly Jeffrey!
I am studying photography school in Paris, France.
(Sorry for my pitiful English)
I’m going to post a message because I’m looking for a LR plug-in that does not exist … and I really need it
I explain myself, I reproduced family photographs, all the photos of my childhood and that of my brothers and sisters. To do this I photographed on white background, many silver prints. For the moment, I am in the presence of more than 6000 images to treat. And the fastest and the redrawing and every time.
I think I can do it via Matlab, but I would like to stay in LR because I do not have to manage TIFF three times bigger in volume.
I am looking for a plug-in that will automatically straighten and crop my photos with a batch function …
Here you go

Sorry, I don’t know of anything that will help. —Jeffrey

— comment by aurentin on October 5th, 2019 at 2:28am JST (7 months, 20 days ago) — comment permalink

Hi there,

Would LOVE to see some type of plugin that could export a CSV (or better yet, a KML) or similiar of image names and their GPS coordinates – not from the file itself, but from what Lightroom has. I’d like to then map this data. I can do this with exiftool, but then I would have to re-write the metadata in files. I’d rather not do this which would cause thousands of my photos to have to be backed up again. Thanks for great work!

The Lr/Transporter plugin should be able to do the CSV export, but FYI, my Geocoding Support plugin allows you to export a KML file of photos (with data and/or thumbnails) and their locations, so that it can open up directly in Google Earth. —Jeffrey

— comment by Michael J on October 6th, 2019 at 10:35am JST (7 months, 19 days ago) — comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey!

Huge fan over here. I use Folder Watch and Folder Publisher regularly and am so grateful to you for creating them. I’m on a Mac and planning to update soon to Catalina. I just wanted to confirm that these plugins are 64 bit and will run fine after the update.

Thank you very much!

Peace & Love,

David
I expect that my plugins will run fine, but I’ve not yet tested on Catalina. However, I’ve heard no complaints so far. —Jeffrey

— comment by David H on November 4th, 2019 at 6:34am JST (6 months, 21 days ago) — comment permalink

Hi, is each registration for one plug-in or one LR license?

For one plugin, for all the Lr installs that Adobe allows you. —Jeffrey

— comment by Scott on November 6th, 2019 at 2:54am JST (6 months, 19 days ago) — comment permalink

Hello Jeff,

Just updated to Lr9 and it says that the picasa-face-import-jfriedl.lrplugin isn’t compatible with Version 9.
I wet to your site and also it’s removed from your list of plugins.
This will disrupt my workflow since picasa still is the best face recognition application. Better than Adobe.
Do you plan to revitalize this plugin?

Regards,

Thales

I’d retired that plugin long ago, in response to Google retiring Picasa. I haven’t tested it recently, but I just built and pushed out a new version for Lr9, so go ahead and give it a try…. —Jeffrey

— comment by Thales on November 16th, 2019 at 7:58am JST (6 months, 9 days ago) — comment permalink

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 (4 months, 18 days 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 (4 months, 14 days 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 (4 months, 5 days 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 (3 months, 21 days 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 (2 months, 16 days 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 (2 months, 9 days 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 (2 months, 7 days 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 (2 months, 3 days 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 month, 21 days 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 month, 16 days 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 month, 3 days 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 (3 weeks, 6 days 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 (3 weeks 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 (2 weeks, 6 days 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 (2 weeks ago) — comment permalink