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
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:

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The 30 most-recent comments (out of 561; see all), most recent last...

Hi Jeffrey,

I wonder if there is there a way to get the photos which have “the most” of certain criterias. For example, I search photos with some among 10 people (keywords). It’s easy with a smart collection to find those with all the 10 keywords, but I also want those with 9 or 8…
Do you know a plugin or an other way to do that ?

Thanks from France for all the great job !

The “count of people” item in my Data Explorer plugin sounds to be exactly what you need. —Jeffrey

— comment by Jean-Claude on January 29th, 2019 at 5:00am JST (9 months, 20 days ago) — comment permalink

Hey Jeffrey, ever thought about creating a Plugin to (automaticly) speed up LR by renaming the Main RAW Folder? Together with creating Smart Previews it gains a lot of Speed, as it doesnt read the original Files (can’t find it :-p), but the Previews instead. By now i do this all the Time manually, but wouldnt it be awesome to do this under the Hood, the User even not realizing this niffty trick?
I think it should just recognize whenever one’s importing/exporting, and rename the Folder to the original State – oh and yeah of course, an Startup/Closing automatism 🙂

— comment by Dan on February 3rd, 2019 at 1:19am JST (9 months, 15 days ago) — comment permalink

I got nearly the same problam as Jeff emntioend here: http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies#comment-58764

Is there any way after finding the unremaned files to remane them in one go, using the informations __>OLD_FILE_NAME> read out from the Image?

Regards

Ulrich

Unfortunately, no, because Lightroom does not allow plugins to rename files. —Jeffrey

— comment by Ulrich on February 3rd, 2019 at 7:47am JST (9 months, 15 days ago) — comment permalink

Hi Mate, as far as I see, you are one of the most experienced LR developers. I have a question. If you answer it, I would be appreciated.

I created a plugin and want to upload it to “adobe exchange” but I didn’t find any document. Do you have any idea how I can publish my plugin?

Thanks in advance..

When Adobe Exchange came out, I found it to be way too much hassle to want to bother with, so I don’t know much about it, sorry. Probably best to ask on the Adobe Community Forums. —Jeffrey

— comment by Micheal on February 21st, 2019 at 10:55am JST (8 months, 25 days ago) — comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey,
I’m a big fan of your plugins and use your folder publisher and Zenfolio plugins on a daily basis. Thank you for the hard work you have put in 🙂

I am currently looking for a way to specify a MINIMUM size for images during export. At present I can only specify a set dimension (eg 2475 X 1650) or a long-edge/short-edge etc, but, if the image is already at a larger size I do not want to reduce the image dimensions during export.

Any ideas?

Cheers, Michael

I don’t know of a way to do this, sorry. —Jeffrey

— comment by Michael Daniel on March 4th, 2019 at 10:07am JST (8 months, 14 days ago) — comment permalink

How can I remove the submitted tag from the metadata, that has been added by the lightroom alamy bridge plugin

I don’t know anything about this “lightroom alamy bridge plugin”, so I don’t know what it is that you want to remove, nor where you want to remove it from, sorry. Need more information. —Jeffrey

— comment by Georg Berg on March 28th, 2019 at 6:51pm JST (7 months, 20 days ago) — comment permalink

Turlock, California
How do I get authorization from Facebook to post to my Business page?
I have used your Facebook plugin to post to Russellreno Photography for years. It was working two months ago.

I installed your Export to Facebook today. I use Lr8 Lightroom Classic 8.2.0
As I am writing this I discovered a workaround. I created a new album on my page then exported to Facebook.
I was presented with the new album and started the upload.
So my photos were uploaded.
How do I get Facebook to authorize so I don’t need the workaround?

As best I can tell, Facebook is just letting this rot and fall apart. I’ve seen no developer notes about business pages getting cut off from non-browser third-party apps in the same way that personal pages were officially cut, but I’m seeing the same errors you are. I guess they want you to use their tools to upload, for whatever reason. This plugin is more or less dead, practically speaking. )-: —Jeffrey

— comment by Russell Reno on April 4th, 2019 at 8:59am JST (7 months, 14 days ago) — comment permalink

I have just made a clean install upgrade of windows 10 from win7 and have reinstalled lightroom cs6 and installed and re-registered your Flickr plugin. Now most of my published collections are empty, about 1000 photos missing. I can’t find where how I might retrieve the missing information.
Thanks for any help and thanks for a great plugin I have enjoyed for years.

I’m a bit confused… if you copied the catalog file (the *.lrcat file), nothing at all should have changed, except perhaps the ability to export/publish/develop photos whose master file Lightroom hasn’t been re-pointed to on the new system. If you didn’t simply copy the catalog file to the new system, then whatever you did do (what?) probably explains the discrepancy… —Jeffrey

— comment by Hans Erken on April 25th, 2019 at 8:25am JST (6 months, 23 days ago) — comment permalink

Writing from the UK.

Please, can you let me know if all will work if I update my Jeffrey Friedls Folder watch into ftp folder on desktop – Nikon D3 and WT-4 wireless transmitter – images go wirelessly onto ftp folder on my apple laptop desktop.

Adobe CC
Nikon D3 Camera
WT-4 Wireless Transmitter
OS X El Capitan

Ftp folder on desktop

Will everything talk to each other if update to the latest fireware, updates etc?

Thanks,

Sharon

I can’t speak to Nikon’s firmware, but I imagine that updates wouldn’t break things that currently work. —Jeffrey

— comment by Sharon on May 19th, 2019 at 11:38pm JST (5 months, 29 days ago) — comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey–Longtime user of your plugins, thanks. Having an issue with the Zenfolio plugin. I’m setting up the plugin for a new catalog but when I publish I’m getting the following error: “attempt to index field ‘tag’ (a nil value)”. Any idea what the issue is? I have the most up-to-date version. Thanks!

This sounds like a plugin error… would you mind sending a plugin log immediately after encountering the error? Thanks. —Jeffrey

— comment by Ian W Douglas on May 22nd, 2019 at 11:26pm JST (5 months, 26 days ago) — comment permalink

Is there a limit of how many Tumblr accounts I can use with your plugin – I have the latest update and I am using LR Classic 8.3. Presently I have 9 Main Tumblrs authorized, but it won’t let me add additional auths

There’s no limit on the number of accounts the plugin can remember, but when it comes to Publish Services, each is associated with exactly one account, so if you want to use Publish with multiple accounts, you’ll need multiple publish services. —Jeffrey

— comment by Scott Rogers on May 24th, 2019 at 11:48am JST (5 months, 24 days ago) — comment permalink

I’ve been a happy UK user of your Flickr plugin for several years.
But Flickr’s new owners Smugmug have just migrated Flickr onto AWS servers.
After a period of instability, Flickr seems to be up and running on the new infrastructure, but I cannot publish from LR6 to Flickr using your plugin.
So I tried reauthenticating to Flickr. I got as far as receiving an auth code from Flickr which I pasted into the plugin. Then after a delay the plugin showed the following error message in a popup window. This is similar to the error messages received when I try to publish.

Unexpected HTML reply from Flickr

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<HTML><HEAD><META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<TITLE>ERROR: The request could not be satisfied</TITLE>
</HEAD><BODY>
<H1>504 ERROR</H1>
<H2>The request could not be satisfied.</H2>
<HR noshade size="1px">
CloudFront attempted to establish a connection with the origin, but either the attempt failed or the origin closed the connection.
<BR clear="all"/>
If you received this error while trying to use an app or access a website, please contact the provider or website owner for assistance.
<BR clear="all">
If you provide content to customers through CloudFront, you can find steps to troubleshoot and help prevent this error by following steps in the CloudFront documentation
(<A href="https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/http-504-gateway-timeout.html">https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/http-504-gateway-timeout.html</A>).
<BR clear="all">

Yes, lots of folks are running into this, including me. Hopefully, the folks there get a handle on things sooner than later….—Jeffrey

— comment by Adrian Walmsley on May 25th, 2019 at 6:22pm JST (5 months, 23 days ago) — comment permalink

The publish to Flickr plugin seems to be working again, I’m pleased to say.

— comment by Adrian Walmsley on May 27th, 2019 at 1:59am JST (5 months, 22 days ago) — comment permalink

I just came back from a trip to Africa and somewhat I managed to accidentially delete between 1000 to 2000 raw Images (out of 13.000) but they are great pictures anyway. Luckily I still have most of them as previews in LR. The catalog is Version 8.3 and as I read and as I discovered your tool does not support Version 8.3, or vice versa LR does not like the version of your Plugin.
Is there any chance you are planning to do an update for your plugin to support Version 8.3.1?
Maybe we can work something out?

best regards, Heinrich (from Austria)

The latest version (from last October) should work in Lr8. If it’s not working for you, I’ll need more info. —Jeffrey

— comment by Heinrich on June 1st, 2019 at 6:02pm JST (5 months, 16 days ago) — comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey – I was looking for a password protect plug-in for photographs of a sensitive nature and wondered if you’d come across this issue, or had a workaround?

I photographed my child’s birth and there are a number of images which I want to be part of the collection, however that there are unviewable without a password (or other means of protection).

Apparently someone had done this, however, the links are now dead:

https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/lightroom_hiding_sensitive_photos

Many thanks,

Dale.

Yeah, oft requested, and equally-often passed over by Adobe. I think the root of the problem is that many would take such a feature much more seriously than it could possibly be, and then be shocked that locked photos were actually accessible (e.g. via Finder or Explorer, via backups, etc). It’s probably just too big of a can of worms for them. Unfortunately, Lightroom lacks the hooks needed for a plugin to do anything useful here. )-: —Jeffrey

— comment by Dale on June 8th, 2019 at 7:13am JST (5 months, 10 days ago) — comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey!

Do you know of any way to ‘publish’ or ‘export’ to a local Apple Photos library? This process seems clunky right now.

Thank you!
Patrick

No, sorry, I don’t know anything about Apple Photos. —Jeffrey

— comment by Patrick S on June 25th, 2019 at 1:08am JST (4 months, 23 days ago) — comment permalink

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 (4 months, 23 days 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 (4 months, 16 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 (4 months, 10 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 (3 months, 27 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 (3 months, 22 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 (3 months, 16 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 (2 months, 30 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 (2 months, 15 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 (1 month, 25 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 (1 month, 22 days 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 (1 month, 13 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 (1 month, 12 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 (2 weeks 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 (1 week, 5 days ago) — comment permalink