Hi Jeffrey,

I think you swapped your description around between this and the folder publisher plugin. For this collection publisher it says:

This is a sister plugin to my Folder Publisher plugin, which does the same thing, except that it mirrors the images’ folder hierarchy instead of a collection hierarchy

which refers to the folder publisher and the folder publisher description refers to this one.

Thanks you for these plugins – they are great.

I think there was some ambiguity to the word “that”. I’ve rewritten that sentence to avoid the ambiguity. —Jeffrey

Jeffrey,

I routinely create collection sets of my kids or family activities. Within these collection sets are collections organized by game #, or day, etc. If I understand the way this plugin works, if I want to duplicate an export of the collection hierarchy, I must duplicate the collection hierachy in an instance of the Collection publisher. Is that correct?

For example, I have a collection set Basketball, and within that set Game 1, Game 2, etc. If I want the export to duplicate that, I must create the same thing in the publisher.

Is there any difference, or advantage, in using Collection publisher vs. Folder publisher? Or, even Tree publisher?

Ken…

Yes, you’re correct… you’d have to duplicate (or, more likely, transition) the non-Publish collections to the publish service. Had this plugin existed from day one, you would have just created the collections in it to begin with. The Folder Publisher is the same as the Collection Publisher except that one mimics the collection hierarchy on disk, while the other mimics Lightroom’s folder structure on disk. For any particular use in mind, one is an advantage and the other a disadvantage, though which is which depends on the use. My old Tree Publisher is no longer supported and offers a subset of features, so it’s at a complete disadvantage. —Jeffrey

There are no words to describe the joy of working with your plugins, you – Genius! Thank you!

Tell me, whether you can upload via FTP the UPDATED files to the Photo Manager Pro? I do not succeed. Ftp loader stops loading when it tries to re-create an existing folder: (
Maybe I’m using the wrong plug-in for FTP downloads etc? http://www.presetsheaven.com/2009/10/27/export-to-ftp-with-lightroom/

Forgive me for my English, I use a website translator

Use the FTP client built in to the collection publisher. I use it with Photo Manager Pro all the time. —Jeffrey

I am probably dense, but I can’t get rid of the “Choose a root folder for the publish tree” error, even when I chose a folder, and no matter where I choose it.

I have win 7, 64bit, LR4.0. Lightroom modules are on c:[long path here], my media is on f:\[various folders]

No matter where I pick a folder with “Browse”, the error stays and I cannot save my settings. The edit box shows the folder I picked correctly.

ideas what I am doing wrong? Thanks

If you could send a log after running into this, I’d appreciate it. I’ve had the bug reported numerous times, but I’ve yet to get a log for it. —Jeffrey

I too found I couldn’t save the settings because of the “Choose a root folder for the publish tree” error until I exited and reentered LightRoom 4.

I also found I couldn’t set up the ftp “path on server” in the plugin configuration until I stopped and restarted the file server in PhotoManagerPro on my iPad2.

Peter

Writing from Kingston Ontario Canada

Hi Jeff,

Longtime user of your plugins, great work! After a recent upgrade, not sure which one, I now get a series of popup progress dialogs whenever I start LR4.1RC1. The title of the progress dialogs is “Processing Updated Publish Criteria for info.regex.lightroom.export.collection-publisher”. Sometimes this takes a while before I can use LR as a series of these dialogs appear, go to 100% completion, and then close. Is this something that can be fixed?

Thanks, Dave

This is a bug in Lightroom that I think was fixed in 4.1RC2. It happens when you have more than one publish collection via the same plugin, but with different sets of will-mark-for-republish metadata. —Jeffrey

I use a plugin from Rob Cole to copy standard collections and collection sets into Publish Collections. When I do so the collections do not get marked whether the collection type should be “Part of its parent” or “Its own sub-folder”. When published the plugin treats all such collections as “Part of its parent” and dumps all images into the root folder.

In order to change this I have to individually edit each collection and set the collection type as “Its own sub-folder”.

Ideally I would like to be able to choose the default collection type in the plugin manager, but the next best would be to be able to select multiple collections and change the collection type for all of them at once.

Thoughts?

The problem with a fourth-party plugin like that is that it doesn’t set the plugin-specific internal data that might be needed (and, in this case, is). It’s really dangerous because it can create data skew that the plugin writer should never have to code for (because the plugin writer normally has complete control over how collections are built). I strongly recommend against using that kind of plugin unless you know it’s compatible; otherwise, all bets are off. I hope to add a collection-import function to the plugin, but with 30 plugins the todo list grows a bit faster than I can attend to it… —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey,

Thanks for this great plugin. However, one bit of it prevents me from using its full potential. As part of my workflow, I start new Lr catalog with personal pictures for every year. I have a collection set named “Albums” and below it — the hierarchy of collections with all worthwhile pictures I want to keep. My idea was to have this collection set configured once and then export it in any format I might need. For folder on a HD, for iPad, for printing, for a photoframe etc.

Your plugin seems to support this model perfectly, but. It requires that I create all my collections inside the publish service. And I cannot reuse it if I want to create several publish services. Is it possible to define a target collection set as part of publish service internal configuration? Just plain text box, so I can have a reference to one collection set from all my publish services?

Thanks a lot again for your great work!

Lightroom doesn’t allow for that, but you can simulate it by creating in this publish service a smart collection with a “member of collection” rule that points to your master collection. —Jeffrey

Is there a button that will republish all collections? Instead of doing them one at a time.

Thanks

You’d think there would be, but no. However, you if you select all collections and click “Publish”, they’ll each go one by one. —Jeffrey

Hi, hope everything is ok with the family and maybe you’ll get this when you get back.

This is related to the Plugin above, I’m looking for something similar.

I’ve found that Lightroom is unable to export multiple, nested or hierarchical collections as a catalog. It looks like (at least from my attempts) that it can oly export one single collection at a time. I run a massive archive through one catalog on my desktop with the folders stored on a Drobo.

What I’d love to be able to do is export only my working collections, in their original hierarchy structure, as a catalog, to use on an external drive, via my laptop, when travelling. I can export them all as single collections (takes a while) but there would be many duplicates, as the same file sometimes appears in many collections.

Hope that makes sense, I would gladly pay for such a plugin!

Cheers
Nick

I’d just make a copy of the catalog (the *.lrcat file) and use that, but perhaps you can go the “export catalog” route by selecting all the images you want via the various collections, then switch to the all-photos grid view, then export-as-catalog? —Jeffrey

Hello,

It looks like the {LUA= if WIN then return “J:\ec\Exports\iPad” else return “/Volumes/NTFS-320-USB/ec/Exports/iPad” end } syntax is not allowed int the “Root of the publishing tree” … the plugin refuses to save the settings.

I’d like to use my catalog and all the setting on two computers: my windows desktop and my macbook pro.

The photos and the catalog is stored on an external drive.
Any idea ?

Thanks in advance
Etienne Charlier

Yeah, sorry, my token-template stuff is recognized only where explicitly stated. Sharing the same catalog across two separate OSs seems to me, in general, to be fraught with peril… I would not do it. I use Dropbox to share settings and presets for Lightroom between two computers of the same OS, but even with the same OS I don’t share the same catalog. (BTW, having the catalog itself on a slow drive will destroy any sense of performance.) Anyway, to answer your question, I don’t see a way to accomplish what you want with the publish-root setting, sorry. —Jeffrey

I was having this same problem, after I read this statement and reloaded LR it worked correctly.

“I found I couldn’t save the settings because of the “Choose a root folder for the publish tree” error until I exited and reentered LightRoom 4.”

Thanks for all you do Jeffery

Can’t get publisher to rename collection. Tried ‘Rename’ got your msg about cant do it there. Tried ‘Edit Smart Collection’, it changes the file folder name, but not the LR publisher name, gets error msg: “Can’t rename the published collection. An internal error has occured: ?:0: attempt to call field ‘getProgressScope’ (a nil value)” any suggestions? Thanks, George

I pushed a version of the plugin that works around that Lr4.2 bug a few hours ago… upgrade and you should be fine. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey,
I write to you from Versailles-France…;>)
I love your plugin and I’m presently recording a video to explain in French how to proceed and make good use of it and Photomanager Pro…
Could you tell me if you know of any Android Photo gallery application that would support FTP transfer like Photomanager pro or WidePhotoViewer.
Thanks a lot.
JCV

I’ve never used an Android device, so don’t know anything about them, sorry. —Jeffrey

BTW, I found a workaround regarding “maintain an ordering within a collection” – if you change Lightroom’s File Naming template, and republish all, lightroom renames all the files with the current order. I simply duplicated our preferred naming template (ie, CollectionPub01 and CollectionPub02) and just toggle between the two. It’s not pretty, but it works!

Jeffrey- can Zenfolio be used as an FTP site for the sync between a Mac Desktop and Photo Manger Pro. On the Zenfolio site they credit you as the author of their Lightroom to Zenfolio transfer plugin and I already have a registration for that plugin. Sure would make it convenient if Photo Manger Plus could access selective folders on the Zenfolio site.

You’d have to ask the folks at PMP to support interaction with Zenfolio. —Jeffrey

I am assuming that choosing “original” for the upload image format will not upload any develop changes made within Lightroom. If that’s the case, would it be possible to have the option to also upload modified photos (jpeg) along with the original?

In Lightroom’s world, “Original” actually means “original pixels, with perhaps metadata updated within Lightroom” (which seems really odd to me, but they didn’t ask my opinion). To get what you want, you could set up two publish services that are identical except for “original” vs. “jpeg”. —Jeffrey

Thank for this and your other great plugins, Jeff!

Here’s my situation: I have already invested in creating many nested non-published collections. My target device is a Digital Photo Frame (DPF). The only way to get images to it is an SD card or a USB drive.

So here’s what I’ve done: The target for the export is a directory on the SD card. To organize the images on the SD card, using your plug-in I first created a set of sub-folders, and in those I created sets of smart folders with rules so that they’d mirror my non-published collections’ contents.

These questions arise:
1) Is there an better organizing method to reflect my nested non-published collections (than the sub-folders containing collections)?
2) So that I could work without the SD card present, I wanted to make the target for the publish export a Windows 7 briefcase on my hard drive. I assume the briefcase would serve to sync the targeted folder on my hard drive with a folder on the SD card. However, when I tried to do that, I got that “Choose a root folder for the publish tree” error that others have mentioned above, so I published directly to the SD card. Is there any way to change the root folder now to a briefcase folder on my hard drive?
3) Is any enhancement in view that would enable copying non-published collections over to the publish services? You mentioned above that you might work on that.
4) Is there any enhancement in view that would mirror/copy whole nested trees of non-published collections to your plugin?

I’ve been thinking how to do a “mirror” thing… still no easy/natural solution presents itself. I don’t know what a “briefcase folder” is, but it seems easiest if you just export to a folder on your local disk (e.g. “DFP Pics”), then copy it to the SD card whenever you mount it. This is what I do for my iPad pics (though I use the plugin’s FTP feature to do the copy, the idea is the same). —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey,

Many thanks for some great plug ins.

One task I am trying to do, so far unsuccessfully, is to publish JPGs of my catalogue with IPTC date and captions visible on the actual JPG image. Given other people look at my (family) photos using all kinds of viewers, many of which don’t show IPTC info and seemingly every one uses a different field for date 🙂 the only reliable way I have of providing this info is putting in a label at the bottom of the image.

I can partly do this using the slideshow function of LR but this doesn’t handle (re-)publishing and has very little flexibility (eg none of your preset templates). Do any of your plug-ins (or your plug ins together with others) provide a way that I can do this?

Many thanks

John

My plugins don’t, but this plugin does exactly what you want. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey,

I’ve been trying to figure out a complex workflow for events. I have a watched folder that brings in images to the catalogue. Collection Publisher then uses already generated keywords and labels to bring them into their folders… this all works great.

The problem is on export of the collection. I want to be able to export a filtered selection of the photos not all the photos in the collection. You can filter in contact sheet window and it gives the appearance that this is what will happen, but when you hit export all the files from the collection export regardless of what is shown on the screen.

cheers,

While in a publish collection, hold down the Option/Alt key and the [Publish] button becomes [Publish Selected], so that’s one way to control things. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey 😀

Things used to work but now something is probably wrong.

Before I used the Folder Publisher to put my images in a subfolder by referring to a LUA script name in the “Enhanced File renaming”. It worked great. Now I can’t seem to get that to work after upgrading from LR4 to LR5. So I decided to try out your Collection Publisher instead since it seems more fit to do the job. However I can’t get it to work using an external LUA script file name. It seems related to whenever i use {LUA= ….} in the text boxes. I have a smart collection related to the jf Collection Publisher and if I for example enter {LUA=return YYYY} in the “Sub folder is named as follows” text box LR stucks on “Updating published Collections”. If i just enter {YYYY} in the same text field it works.
Entering {LUA=return YYYY} is just for test purposes. What I really want to do is to make it run my external script by entering {LUA= return load(“D:/SkyDrive/LightRoom/FolderDestination.lua”)} but it will freeze on on “Updating published Collections”. Any ideas? Thanks

I’d think what you’re showing here should work. You don’t happen to have a long video in the collection, do you? They can take a long time for Lightroom to render. If not, perhaps after it gets stuck for a bit, send a log and I’ll take a look… —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey

I am currently publishing several thousands of images to a WebDAV drive on my PC. From time to time I am getting the following error – than the publisher stops but can be restarted.

Message: “Collection cannot be refreshed” German text “Sammlung kann nicht aktuakisiert werden”
“jf Folder Publisher”: size differs after move (c:\…. xxx.jpg, b:\… xxx.jpg): 1.093.985-> 0 bytes.

The WebDAV drive is permanently online. After restarting the publisher the transfer goes on. Looking if that particular file (xxx.jpg) is transferred I notice that it is a 0byte file on the server but it does not exist in the source directory! All other files in that directory have been transferred without problems.

I am confused now 😉

I use this to create a tree with photos I want to have on on my iPad – the plugin writes to my synced Google Drive folder. I was looking at the Mosaic application/plugin that works in a similary way (but with direct upload to Google Drive) – but I like yours better. However, one thing Mosaic has is an automatic Publish – it detects changes periodically and performs the sync automatically. Is that something you have thought of? I think that would be very convenient, especially when one have many collections set up that now needs to be checked and re-checked for changes to publish.

I don’t have any kind of automatic sweep for items that need to be published, sorry. If you have many collections, you can select them all and [Publish] and Lightroom will publish them one by one. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey,

I (with 90% support of a great apple forumer…) wrotte a script that “sync” my folders (exported with your plugins collection & folder) with iPhoto albums.

Currently, I have to launch the script manually after each export.

Would it be possible ( or is it already possible) to get an option in the export plugin that could launch an AppleScript at the end of the publish task?

If it makes sense for some of you, I’m pleased to share the link of the script. ( in progress)

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6423480

Cheers,

Lot of thanks for your great job,

Fabrice

My run-any-command plugin should let you do this. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey,

Fixed the problem by moving the plug-in home folder to a real Windows folder instead of a samba share. Running jpegtrans from a samba share seems to be the problem.

Thanks
Jos

Jeffrey, I’m a huge fan of your products. While you track down the “move” error in jf Folder and jf Collection publisher, why don’t you change the error warning box so that it doesn’t require the user to press Enter … that way other publish runs could continue running as opposed to waiting for the user to press Enter.

Fundamentally the “move” error should not happen except in extraordinary cases (target disk full, target disk no longer present, etc.), so it makes no sense to try to continue in those situations. It’s possible for the error to come back for other reasons (perhaps unlucky timing somehow?), but as you mention in another comment elsewhere, it’s a huge can of worms to try to figure this stuff out, for little global benefit but some data-loss risk (and a lot of productivity risk on my part), so I’m inclined to leave it as it is, sorry. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffery,
Congrats and thank you for your great plugins set.

I have just found a problem with the Collection Publisher, once you have created the path initially there is no way to change it because the Lightroom Publishing Manager window does not allow you to go wider. So the “Publish Tree” button is not accesible (if) because the root is quite long…

Just let you know to see if can be fixed.

Thank you (and please excuse my english)

Good catch, thanks. Fixed. —Jeffrey

I must admit I’m disappointed. The name “Collection publisher” and the first paragraph of the the page (“… that mimics the collection hierarchy you built within Lightroom”) is building false expectations.

Now that I searched the comments and reread the sparse examples (at least 3 times), I understand.

It is not mimicking the collection structure that I carefully built in the “Collections panel of LR. Instead, I’d have to recreate this same structure in plugin’s Publishing panel! Were’s the logic in that?

I understand that it’s a limitation of Lightroom, but I do believe that you should document this limitation clearly on top of this page! Tell the people what to expect and what not.

For me it’s too late; I’ve registered for a plugin which I cannot use – I guess I can mimic the folder structure, but I had registered that plugin already.

Cheers,
Peter.

First – thanks for all your LR plugins!

2 Questions –

1) I’m using LRCC and have a massive organized SM site (currently published using the SM branded plugin) that I now need to ‘mirror’ on a shared network drive. Would this plugin work for a) the initial setup / mirror of at least the structure and images and b) for future folders and galleries?

2) I have an additional ~40k image archive organized in LR but not published to SM – same questions as above would this plugin work to allow me to ‘click and drag’ the folder hierarchy and images over to our new network drive as a published collection?

Or…. is your other ‘folder publisher’ the way to go for either of those?

For issue #2, Folder Publisher could indeed solve the problem… just create a single smart collection that refers to whatever you want to be sent to the network drive. In testing it as you set it up, take advantage of the fact that you can hold the option/alt key down to turn the [Publish] button into [Publish Selected]…. trying to invoke a publish operation on 40k photos may crash Lightroom before the plugin ever gets control. For the first issue, unfortunately I don’t have a good solution… lots of folks want to mirror their collections, but I just can’t think of a way to do it with the slim pickings that Lightroom supplies for plugins in this area. )-: —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey,

It will be great to have the option to export multiple resolution images (web &v devices) from Collection Publisher.

Is there any alternative way to do that please?

I´m working with a very large collection of images using the collecion publisher plug in and i need to export all of them on several different sizes…

Any clues please

Thanks a lot in advance

Unfortunately I don’t have an easy answer for you. The best idea I have at the moment is to have the plugin export the largest size you want, but as part of the “Post Processing” (perhaps via my “Run any Command” plugin) invoke an external command that will take the newly-exported version and produce the smaller versions you want. —Jeffrey

Should the LR6 new “Duplicate Smart Collection” work with Collection publisher? I get assertion error

Yikes, I hadn’t noticed this addition. I would expect it would not work, since it doesn’t know about plugin-specific collection data, and what can and can’t be duplicated. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey,

I’m coming from Germany – between Hannover and Bielefeld…
I’m working with LR (current version: CC) for a few months and I have created many collection sets with sub-collection sets. Now I was looking for a tool to export my collection sets to my disk.
So I found your 2 tools: “Folder Publisher” and “Collection Publisher”
I tried the Folder Publisher – and it works fine, all folders and subfolders were published.
But with the Collection Publisher I’ve my problems.
I follow your instructions on your homepage and I create a new collection with “Part of its parent” – but the collection only published the fotos and not the structure of my collection set.
Then I tried “It’s own sub-folder” – the folder with the name of the collection was created but in this folder are only the fotos…

Hope you can help me
Thanks a lot in advance
Wolfgang

Collection Publisher doesn’t work that way, sorry… it lets you set up your own collections for publish to disk, and doesn’t have anything to do with non-collections in your library. You’re not alone in wanting to do what you suggest, but Lightroom’s plugin infrastructure doesn’t make it easy. —Jeffrey

UPDATE: I’ve given a try to fitting this into the plugin, despite Lightroom’s plugin infrastructure making it really uninviting. See here. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey,

Awesome to suggested features implemented! Totally understand the limitations.
Thanks, again

Hi Jeffrey,

i’ve tried to “Refresh and Publish Mirrored Collections” in “File > Plugin Extras” – everything works fine!!!
Thanks a lot

Jeffrey

Do you have any suggestions on how to handle file sequencing? I’m scanning old photos in fairly random order with no particular file naming conventions. I then put them in collections and use drag and drop to put them into some sort of chronological or other logical sequence. Before starting to use your publisher, I would export and use LR file renaming to add a sequence number to the exported images so that they can be displayed on a website sorted by filename.

Using Mirrored Collections, the publisher collection looses the sequence worked out for the original collection.

I’ve had some success with re-ordering the images in the publisher collection, but it only seems possible for images which have been published. Dividing the display into images waiting to be (re)published and published makes sorting difficult.

I don’t have a warm feeling that any manual sorting I do will be preserved when selected images are modified and queued for republishing. Am I right to be worried – or do you think that any manual sort order will be retained during republish cycles.

I also see problems when adding new images and changing the sort order after images have been published. I suspect that I should manually delete all images in the target folder before doing a republish to make sure that any LR sequence numbers in the filename match the manual sequences in the complete collection of images to be published.

I’ve also had problem with virtual copies where LR doesn’t seem to put them in the same sequence as the manual sequence I use in a collection.

Does LR give the plugin/template access to a sort sequence number for an image within a manually sorted collection which I could use in the renaming section, rather rely on LR export sequencing.

Appreciate any thought you may have.
David. Harwell, UK

You’re certainly tickling a lot of spots where Lightroom doesn’t shine well, combined with the concept of sequence numbers, which are much more full of pitfall than one might at first imagine. For example, if you publish a bunch of images and then delete one, do you expect all the (perhaps hundreds of thousands of) other images to be renamed to fit? What if you then add a photo somewhere in the middle? It’s a huge can of worms. That being said, I’ve just pushed a new version of the plugin that has some support for sequence numbers…. see the “sequence numbers” link in the “Enhanced File Renaming” section of the dialog, and give it a try. Do be sure to keep fingers crossed and lucky socks on. —Jeffrey

My collection publish works as excpected except it doesn’t publish video files that I shot on my iPhone. I get this error report:

An unknown error occurred. This photo was not rendered. (5)
/Users/thomas/Pictures/Lightroom managed/Tom’s iPhone/IMG_1569.MOV
/Users/thomas/Pictures/Lightroom managed/Tom’s iPhone/IMG_1572.MOV

The plug-in worked in the past but doesn’t anymore. I do have the include video files checkbox selected, I’ve tried both original files and H.264 format, the files requested are on my local drive.

Any ideas what’s not working?

Could you try the same export using Lightroom’s built-in “Hard Drive” export/publish? I suspect it’s a Lightroom issue unrelated to the plugin, and this would shed some light on that. —Jeffrey

I tried completely deleting the publish service and creating a new service that seemed to fix the problem. Working fine now.

Hi Jeffrey,
I’ve been very happy with your Collection Publisher and the way I’ve been syncing my LR collections with my iPad thanks to your blog post http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/ipad-howto2.

Now I have to relocate the root of my collection tree to a new folder on my hard drive. Can I feel pretty confident relocating the tree that won’t make a mess of all that I’ve already published to my iPad? Do you have any warnings or suggestions about a best way to do it to minimize potential problems?

Thank you,
Julliette from Belmont, Massachusetts

I don’t see much potential for a mess from the Lightroom side… at worse, you just have to republish to refill the local folders intended for your iPad, but I’d expect the plugin to handle the relocation fine. How it reflects on your iPad is dependent upon how you get them there and what app you use, but in general I’d think that no matter what method you use, the moved photos will appear on the iPad as different photos (and the old ones either deleted or left lying around), so any kind of work you’d done there (adding comments, etc., or whatever the app allows) would be lost. In my case I use the iPad only for display, so this wouldn’t bother me because I have no “value-added” data added on the iPad. —Jeffrey

Jeff,
I have a feature request for MIRROR support in your Collection Publisher plugin. I would like to create a “Smart Mirror Collection Set”. What I mean from “Smart” is that in addition to doing the normal Mirror operations I would like to filter the images that get mirrored (in my case I want to mirror only the photos in each collection that have a particular star rating). I wonder if it would be possible to leverage Lightroom’s existing smart collection filtering dialogs? The icing on the cake would be a way to integrate the collection publish plugging with smugmug. I might be able to use the ftp sync option but haven’t fully explored it yet.

Thanks,
Aaron

Jeffrey,

How about WordPress library management as a Publish relationship? Does your collection tool allow “relationship” with the WP Media Library?

I have a few of your plug-ins; thank you for all the work on both the code and your effective customer service. I am working on a new template for my WordPress(.org) website so have to repopulate what will be a “big” Media Library just to re-collect them into galleries. All those images go “loose” in there, forget easy searching… whatever management/maintenance might be needed after the loose images are identified to WordPress as belonging on a page. I found one gentleman’s plug-in that manages the Library from within Lightroom, but I thought I should ask you about WordPress Publish support first. Once I collect in Lightroom a set of images that is a demonstration of a professional photography skill I can offer, I want to maneg that going forward within the easy interface of Lightroom.

I realize that image changes of any kind will still require that I go in and update the page on the web server through the WP dashboard. But I want tags to make it through to the Library. The keywords?

Thanks for thinking about this — Jonathan

I don’t have any blogging-specific plugins, sorry. I use an Export Preset to dump images for my own blog, the writing of which is still a fairly manual process. —Jeffrey

Hi,

i have the same wish as Aaron http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/collection-publisher#comment-54859
i would like to export only images with a rating or a minimal rating of x

Thanks you!

For this your best bet is to us a Smart Collection, using one of the rules to name the source collection you want to mirror. For me to add it to my mirroring stuff would require me re-inventing the wheel, so to speak, about smart-collection dialogs, rules, and actions. That’s a bit much. —Jeffrey

Hello Jeffrey,
I can succeed to export a collection using the button “Export”.
But in can’t find the button “Import” when i try to create a new service of publication vie Collection publisher – I can only see “export” event the service is not yet registered.

Could you please check if the fonction has not deasapear in the new version of your plugin ?

Thank”s

One doesn’t “Import” into a publish collection… just drag photos from the Library Grid into the collection. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey, as a long term user of your fabulous collection publisher plugin I have just a simple
question: I was doing some picture renaming in my catalog and was hoping collection publisher
gets notice of this activity and automatically selects all photos for re-publish. Unfortunately
this did not happen and I needed to manually select the photos with the changed names for
publishing again. I had selected all options which lead to a re-publish in the collection
publisher settings under the section “Metadata that Triggers Republish”.
Would this be possible to introduce such a behaviour in the plugin ?
I personally think this would make much sense.
Thanks a lot for your awesome plugins and best regards,Heiko

Sadly, Lightroom doesn’t include filename or folder location among metadata that causes a republish. —Jeffrey

Jefferey,

Your plugins are impressive!! I’m wondering if one of them offers a feature I need…

I have thousands of photos across a set of Lightroom collections. In order to track changes and ensure that none are missing/accidentally deleted from the collections, I would like to export a list (ideally CSV or text file) from lightroom that shows which photos (folder/name) are in each collection. Alternatively if the collection names could be copied into the metadata, I could extract the info with exiftool.

Any suggestions/advice would be much appreciated!

Thanks!

Unfortunately, nothing comes to mind. The first idea (dumping data to a text file) would be possible with a custom plugin; I don’t think Lr/Transporter can work with collection data, but you might ask the author. The latter idea (writing collection names) would be more difficult because Lightroom doesn’t let you list all collections a photos is in… you have to walk every smart collection and accumulate data for all the photos. —Jeffrey

Thank you! I updated and tested it. Thank you again for the quick response and all your hard work.

Is it possible for a mirrored collection to take the same order as the source collection? I have a collection set up with a custom order, and I want to replicate this order on disk. At the moment the order is completely separate, so I have to repeat the custom ordering and clearly have no automatic way to keep them in sync.

Unfortunately, no, Lightroom doesn’t provide hooks to let plugins adjust the order. —Jeffrey

Currently in Portugal, but full time traveller and might be anywhere tomorrow!
Trying to get a file name in Collection Publisher unique to the collection name. My problem is when using mirrored collections I get the MIRROR: collection name when I only want the collection name. Tried several versions with After= with no luck. Wondering if the : after MIRROR is causing my problems?
Any suggestions to stripping out that MIRROR: ?
Thanks
Dennis

The colon used after “MIRROR” is not the normal colon character you can type with the keyboard, it’s a double-wide Unicode character, so the one you were typing didn’t match. If you copy-paste from here, you’ll get the proper character and it should work: “{PublishCollectionName:After=MIRROR：}” —Jeffry

Collection Publisher now has a significant delay from the time I right-click to “Create Collection or Mirrored Collection” or “Edit Collection or Mirrored Collection” and release the mouse to when the dialog box appears. The delay is typically about 15-20 seconds.

This started a while back (months) so I can’t pinpoint the version at which this began. Prior to that the delay, if any, was quite short.

(I upgraded to the latest version of the plugin yesterday, and this happens on LR CC 2015 and LR CC Classic)

I tested it and found the same long delay, so I started to look at the logs and that seems to have magically fixed it for me… further tests were all quick. It could be related to a Lightroom restart… perhaps something internally got bogged down? I’m at a loss to explain, but I imagine it’s something out of the plugin’s control. I’ll keep an eye on it. —Jeffrey

I’m hoping you can advise me on the best way to set this up: I currently use Smugmug’s plugin to upload/sync photos to Smugmug and I would also like to have the same photos (including folder structure) synced or mirrored to Dropbox. What would be the best way to do this? Thanks for all of these plugins!

Unfortunately, I don’t see an easy way to automatically mimic their remote hierarchy locally. )-: —Jeffrey

Folder Publisher works great for me, but no matter what I try, the Collections Publisher just keeps dumping all exported photos into a single folder on my disk. I can’t get it to replicate my collections hierarchy that I’ve set up in Lightroom. I must be dumb or missing something… why would Folder tool work fine but not Collections tool?

Collection Publisher doesn’t mirror your Collections in the same way that Folder Publisher mirrors your folders. What it does do is documented on the same page that you downloaded it from. —Jeffrey

First off… brilliant plugin!

here’s the major question… is there ANY way to preserve the custom order while creating the mirror the FIRST time?

The custom order is such an important part of the process for delivering large galleries, that frankly, I don’t even care about the “mirror” part, so much as I want to just be able to export the hierarchy, just once, with my custom order preserved into folder structures on disk.

It would also be really helpful to turn off the automatic adding of “mirror” to the file name on disk for us advanced users. 😉

thanks again for a brilliant step in the first right direction, hopefull theyre’s a way to make this work for the many of us who need custom order more than we need a “mirror”

thanks!

When the mirrored collection is created, it should be populated with photos in the exact same order as the source collection is at that time. Lightroom doesn’t give a plugin this kind of control, but it seems to happen that way. I just did a test and it worked that way…. —Jeffrey

Collection Publisher:
I have a Smart Collection with “Keywords” “contains words” “2018 Jun 18” and images with “2018 Jun 18” as keywords. Collection publisher will not find them. If I change the Smart Collection to “2018 Jun 19” and the image keywords to “2018 Jun 19”, all works well. Seems like Collection Publisher has a problem with both 2018 and 18 being used at the same time.

A quick and dirty work-a-round is to add a “+” to the Smart Collection keyword search parameter (“2018 Jun 18+”) and leave the image keywords as “2018 Jun 18” .

Am I missing something?

Thanks, George

If you’re referring to the rule used to populate the collection, that’s all done by Lightroom before the plugin has any access to it (and the plugin has no influence on it). So whatever it is is either a bug in Lightroom or in your understanding. I’m tempted to say it’s a bug in Lightroom, but given that I’ve never been able to understand Adobe’s idea of keyword-search, it’s probably a misunderstanding of what they intend “contains words” to mean. We look at “contains words” and intuit it to mean “contains words”, but they could well have some wild meaning in mind that has nothing to do with “contains” nor “word”. /-: —Jeffrey

Hi,
I am using the plugin extensively. I found that the option to ‘explicitly set date/time of newly exported pictures to photo’s capture time’ is not working reliably and it is setting most pictures’s modification date etc to the date of the export. I had to resort to alternative tools, i.e

– Include the photos capture date/time in the filename of the exported file
– then use a tool like advanced-renamer on windows to write the correct time stamps on the files based on the file name content.

I am happy to provide more info to get this resolved! Best, Maik

Could you please send a plugin log immediately after an export that you notice didn’t work properly? Thanks. —Jeffrey

Hi, I have been using this great plug-in (ond others) for some time, though once per several months. I have noticed that the current version have problems with LUA when using Enhanced File Renaming.

It worked perfectly, I did not change my LUA code, but it now fails every time. Currently it is enough to put any LUA expression there, like
{LUA=Filename}
and during publishing the following error is shown:
An internal error has occurred: Spec:867: bad argument #1 to ‘?’ (number expected, got nil)

This doesn’t seem to be an issue on my end, but if I do something wrong, please let me know.

Could you make sure that you have the most recent version of the plugin, and then if you encounter the error again, please send the plugin log. Thanks. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey. First, thank you so much for your work : it makes LR much more valuable !! I have a minor issue with the Collection Publisher.

Situation :
– One sub folder
– Inside the sub folders, several smart collections of the “Part of its parent” type : the smart collection use “AND”, so the folder gathers Smart Collections with a kind of “OR” and I get a disjuntion of conjunctions, which is extremely valuable
– Let’s assume a picture which appears in several Smart Collections

Clicking on the sub-folder lets the common picture appear only once, but when publishing, the common pictures appears multiple times, with “-2” ou “-3” suffixes.

Is it a bug or feature ? If it is a feature then what would be your recommendaton in my case ? I’d like to publish every picture only once per subfolder, subfolders agregating different criterions.

Thanks for your help,

I hadn’t thought of that situation, but now that you mention it, I see what you mean. Unfortunately, at this point it would be difficult and risky to try to update that code to handle that… the name-generation code is already a really dicey area. Sorry. )-: —Jeffrey

Jeff, I am having problems with collection publisher .

“nl”. component has not been installed or does not work.
HELP!

iMac, 1o.12.6
I have backup copies of files but cannot delete the older images to replace with copies.
I guess I am losing my mind.

Vincent L. Solomito

thanks!!!!

The error message doesn’t ring a bell; I don’t think it’s from my plugin. Perhaps send a screenshot, or, immediately after encountering the problem, send a plugin log…. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey. Great plugin. Am (In Singapore) trying to replace Rob Cole’s Treesync with your Collection Publisher for future exports – mainly because I’m worried Treesync will break in a future LR version. It’s been amazing but has now been unsupported for several years. I structure my collections under My Pictures\Year\Year-[Subject]\. So it’s Collection Set\Collection Set\Collection in LR. I don’t want to mirror all of My Pictures\ because there’s legacy, missing photos, and it’s too much risk for me to overwrite a good old copy with a preview with an accidental click. I have a CF publish service for My Pictures now, and only want the one mirror in it for 2019 as everything else still has Treesync publish services; and in a year or so once 2018 is totally complete I can remove Treesync. So I am only mirroring My Pictures\2019 but the problem at the moment is it titles the output folder as My Pictures-2019. Is there a way of avoiding it mentioning the name of the parent collection set(s) when it exports to disk so it just exports as General 2019? Thanks!

Hi Jeffrey,

Is there any way to apply a filter to the images that are published? For instance, only published flagged images and ignore everything else? If not could this be incorporated into the plugin or is this functionality not possible?

Many Thanks.

Josh Noble

As with any publish collection, you can use whatever means you want to select the images that you want to publish (e.g. use the Library Grid Filter to show only flagged images, then select them all), then hold down the option/alt key to convert the [Publish] button into [Publish Selected], and there you go. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey,

I have a huge collection of bird photos in Lightroom. I use keywords with bird names. All bird name keywords are children of Birds keyword.

I am using the Collection Publisher to export bird photos to a /Bird directory where I create a separate sub-directory for each bird name (keyword).

Collection Type: Its own sub-folder
Token for dynamic sub-foldr names:
{Keywords:ChildOf=Birds}

Some photos have more than one bird in it and more than one keyword assigned to them.
As a result, sometimes I have sub-directory names like:

/Crow, Sparrow, Pigeon
/Sparrow, Crow, Pigeon
/Duck, Crow
etc.

But I don’t really need sub-folders for any possible keyword combination (which is the case now).
I just need a subfolder for each particular keyword (bird) so that an image with three keywords Crow, Sparrow, Pigeon is copied to three separate directories /Crow /Sparrow /Pigeon rather than one like /Crow, Sparrow, Pigeon.

How can I dynamically create sub-folder names for each keyword assigned to an image?

Thank you.

Dima
Australia

There’s no easy way to do what you want, unfortunately. One way would be to create a smart collection per bird type, using a rule that matches the bird name within keywords, but this might be onerous if you have a lot of birds types. Another idea might be to use a Post Process Action that invokes a program on your system that looks at the final path, and recognizes the multi-bird situation and copies the file appropriately. This would be fairly simple for someone to develop… if you’re not a programmer, perhaps try to get a student programmer to whip it out for you. —Jeffrey

Hello

I’m new to your plugins. I’ve installed the Collection Publisher.
Is it possible to publish only a subset of a LR catalog’s collections? How do you select what is to be published while leaving out the rest of the collections?
Thank you for your help.

Ygal Leibu

Select the collections that you want to publish and hit the [Publish] button. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey,
Just wonder if you plan to implement a way to schedule automatic re-publishing of collections in this plugin? Would be marvellous, and fill a missing link in my setup… 🙂

Reason/background for my request:
I have a media server at home with LR Classic, and two Android devices (phone and tablet) that I use in the field. Photos are imported from camera to LR CC and synced to the media server. Your Smart-Collection Sync plugin syncs selected smart collections back to LR CC on regular intervals. This supports my initial culling of photos in the field. Pictures marked as candidates for publishing (to e.g. Facebook) are watermarked in low right corner with a PNG file containing my signature. This can (as of now) only be done in LR Classic. To support that, I use the Collection-Publisher to export the pics to local disk OneDrive folder, which in turn is synced back to my mobile phone by OneSync from MetaCtrl.com.

BUT: In order to get the selected pics exported I have to remote into my media server at home (using TeamViewer) and trigger the re-publish in Collection-Publisher manually…. Would be SO neat if this just happened – let’s say once every hour…. 🙂

Jørgen Dahl

Automatic publishing in Lightroom is somewhat of a can of worms, but you can use my Folder Watch plugin to auto-publish a collection on a regular basis. The main point of that plugin is to scan a folder looking for new images to import, which you don’t need, but if you point it at an empty folder, it won’t actually import anything, but you can have it publish a collection as a side effect of the scan. Have it scan every 3600 seconds, and publish your collection even if no photos were added. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey,

Thank you very much for adding {AbsSequenceFirst} and {AbsSequenceAppend} – it works exactly as I hoped it would do. Thank you for solving a big problem!

Since you do not seem 100% convinced this is a great feature, let me explain why it is important to me: All I am trying to do is to create collections (i.e. exports out of LR) which can be consumed easily from within a file system. For this I am using a Synology NAS as a target which keeps the developed pictures and offers 2 apps for viewing pictures. When preparing the collection (e.g. all pictures from a trip) in LR, all the work should happen in LR and nothing in any apps which display the pictures. One result of processing the images can be that the sequence I would like to have for presentation is not necessarily the chronological order (or any other meta data-oriented criterion).

Therefore, I use the filename to indicate sequence. The standard export service can add sequence numbers, but the big problem with lightroom in the standard version is that the sequence number is not constant when you do multiple exports. Multiple exports can easily happen when I notice, for example, a typo in a caption, or I add tags later (people, places etc.). But LR will number from 001 on a new export, so a file which is number 20 in a sequence will not be 020_IMG1234, but 001_IMG1234 during the second export, therefore creating a duplicate, messing up the sequence, and the only way to solve it is to do a full export of the whole collection.

Your plugin nicely solves the problem, and the collection is keep intact. Thanks a lot for adding the new feature!
Christian

Hi –
Thanks so much for your great plugins! I recently ran into trouble trying to export a collection set, and tried your Collection Publisher, but I can’t figure it out. I have multiple collection sets with 10 collections in each, and I want to export those photos into folders that maintain the collection hierarchy…for example, create a folder “Collection Set A” with ten folders inside named “Collection 1, 2, 3…10”. I tried to publish using the Mirror function on your plugin, but when I go through the available collections to publish it’s only showing single collections, not sets. So instead of the option to publish “Collection Set A” I can only publish “Collection Set A>Collection 1”, “Collections Set A>Collection 2” etc. Am I misunderstanding the plugin, and is it possible to do what I want? Thanks again!

Unfortunately, I don’t see an easy way to do what you want. Had you created your hierarchy within the plugin’s Publish Service, it’d be exactly what you want, but at this point you’d have to manually replicate all the sets and collections, which could be quite the hassle if the hierarchy is large. )-; —Jeffrey

Hmm, there isn’t a change button. There are two buttons: Check target tree for missing published photos and recheck. I’m using Version 20200421.109.

Can I impose on you to send a screenshot? Thanks. —Jeffrey

Hi. Thank you very much for your program. I am currently using Lightroom 9.4, and the plugin is not supported. Is there a possibility that you update it? It is very useful!

Regards.

The plugin has worked with Lr9 since the moment Lr9 was released. If your version of the plugin isn’t working, be sure to upgrade to the latest version. —Jeffrey

Hello Jeffrey!

First of all　”心からどうもありがとうございます！” for all your work on the plugins!
Adobe just released a new major Version of LR (v 10.0) and this breaks compatibility with your Collection Publisher. Are there any plans to update the plugin for the newer version? 🙂

Kind regards,

Christian

Sorry about the delay… I pushed out new versions a few hours after Lr10 was announced. —Jeffrey

Testing this pluging and loving it so far. However, it seems “Explicitly set the date/time of newly-exported files to” option does not work for videos? Exported a small album of pictures and a single video from 2009. The pictures are exported using date captured, while the video comes out with current time and date. I’ve double checked the date on the video, and it is indeed set to 2009. Bug or am I doing something wrong? 🙂

Lightroom’s handling of video dates is abysmal, so even though it may display it correctly to you, it may not make that date available to a plugin. If you send a plugin log immediately after you notice a failure, I may be able to investigate…. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey
Thanks for providing this plugin, I am trying to get it to work. Everything works fine with one exception: The order of the images in the mirrored Collection Sets does not match the order of the Lightroom collections. What could be the reason?

Regards
Kurt from Switzerland

Unfortunately, a plugin has no ability to set image order in collections. —Jeffrey

Hi,
how can I preserve the original sorting (custom order) when mirroring a collection?
regards
Bernd

It can’t be done, sorry. —Jeffrey

Is there a way of using this plugin to sync a collection and a publish service like Facebook, Instagram, Pixieset, etc…?
eg: When a photo is added to or deleted from a collection, the publish service reflects that change

Hi Jeffrey thank you again for everything you do.

Could you please add a token for Week Number? The ISO standard is a two-digit number which begins as 01 with the first Monday in January. All days that week (meaning until Sunday) take the same week number, and then the following Monday starts with 02. The counter runs until Week 52 except on years that have a leap year. But it’s always Monday through Sunday.

It would be great if this token was available in Folder Publisher as well

All the best

Cris

I went ahead and added it, but could not test it on Windows. I also added DAYNUM, so if someone could test it on Windows and let me know how it works, I’d appreciate it. To easily test, {DAYNUM} for any photo in January should be the date (e.g. For Jan 19, {DAYNUM} is 19). —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey,
I have been using this plugin for god knows how many years – probably since it first came out. Needless to say, a *lot* of my collections were at one point or other, used this plugin to export to disk/my website etc.
Now I am trying to cull down my collection hierarchy in Lightroom, removing and archiving a lot of old collections. I think now I have found a bug in the plugin.

Right now, I have only one publish service set up with this plugin, Previously, I had several. That one remaining publish service just mirrors one collection set, which has a few collections.

Once I select “Refresh and Publish mirrored collections…”, it takes a *long* time for the next prompt to come up, and the next prompt says that it has finished looking 300+ collections for updates, and whether I want to proceed or not. I think it takes a long time because it is going through all the collections which used to be a part of a mirrored collection (but not anymore). I do not have 320+ collections using the collections publisher currently.
Let me know if you need any more information.

Thanks!

Can you send a plugin log after that long wait? Thanks. —Jeffrey