Jeffrey’s “Export to Flickr” Lightroom Plugin

Jeffrey Friedl — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 19:31:05 +0000

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This Export-to-Flickr plugin has been completely rewritten for Lightroom 2.0 and later, and is not compatible with Lightroom 1.

Please see the known issues before reporting bugs. If this is your first look at my export plugins, please see the announcement post for an overview and some important information.

(See the old plugin page for a version compatible with Lightroom 1.x)

Version History

20081204.58	Try to work around a fairly rare Lightroom bug that sometimes causes large exports to fail with the note Whoa, exported image doesn't exist after waitForRender by pausing for a few seconds to see whether the image shows up. If not, then you still get the error and the export fails.
20081129.57	There have been a lot of spurious errors that some have seen that I think I've tracked down to a race condition at Flickr, where immediately after uploading a photo, the data hasn't propagated through Flickr yet, so when the plugin tries to set some metadata (add to a set, for example), it could see a "no such photo" error. I this version, I've added a retry ability.... I think. It's hard to test because I've never gotten the error myself. We'll see....
20081127.56	The counting of previous uploads (for the All/Update/New of the Upload Destination section) was not working right.
20081127.55	Added some extra debugging to try to track down networking errors.
20081125.54	Well, I've added something to the "Flickr Extras..." dialog (via the File > Plugin Extras Menu) that, in theory, should allow you to connect previously-uploaded images at Flickr to your Lightroom Library. Select the images you want to check and invoke it. I didn't spend much effort to make it efficient, so it may take a few minutes if you invoke it on 30,000 images at once. It also may not work well in various edge cases, such as multiple images taken during the same second (because neither Lightroom nor Flickr give easy access to photo times down beyond one-second granularity). Another fix for a bug that had disabled plugin presets (for captions, etc.). Anyway, it's a start... give it a try and let me know what you think.
20081124.53	Perhaps fixed a problem whereby the "Upgrade Now" button didn't work for some Windows users. We'll see whether it works when those users upgrade from this version to whatever version is next.
20081123.52	Fixed a plugin crash when using the plugin's built-in preset system.
20081122.51	No problems from the upheaval recently, so pushing back the expiration a bit.
20081118.50	Fixed (I think) a problem with tags that have embedded commas. Flickr's documentation of how to upload tags does not reflect reality (that is, it's wrong), so it's a matter of trying to figure out what works....
20081118.49	The same as .48, just to test whether the one-click upgrade stuff actually works in .48.
20081117.48	Oops, wouldn't let you log in / authenticate if you weren't already. Doh. Fixed.
20081117.47	No new functionality in this version, but a huge upheaval in the underlying code to repair an unfortunate design choice I made early on in the development that had limiting consequences I'd not foreseen. There are likely bugs introduced in this version, and as such, it has a short expiration date to encourage updates as those bugs are reported and fixed. If you do run into an error, please send (via email) the log referenced in the upper-right of the Plugin Manager. Thanks.
20081113.46	Fixed yet another list-of-upload-destinations bug. There are sure a lot of edge cases here. Also, deal with Flickr's roadblocks to geoencoding happiness. By default, Flickr ignores geoencoded information until you tell it not two, twice, in two separate places. See the bottom of the "Flickr: Metadata Management" section of the plugin for details / links.
20081111.45	Fixed a crash that happened sometimes when there are not yet any preexisting destinations at Flickr.
20081104.44	Perhaps squelch a spurious error dialog
20081103.43	I don't know what's causing the slew of networking problems that have been reported, but I've gone ahead and added a retry mechanism. It'll retry operations that failed due to network problems indefinitely, but you can cancel out of the retrys if you like. If the problems are some kind of flakiness on the machine (somehow introduced in LR2.1???) this may allow operations to complete.
20081031.42	Now works properly with the shadow GPS data maintained by my geoencoding plugin.
20081024.41	Added an option to not add Lightroom keywords as metadata when uploading images. This allows you to not send any keywords if you also have them stripped from the image itself, such as when enabling the "Minimize Embedded Metadata" option, or when stripping keywords with my Metadata Wrangler. This applies only to keywords in the Lightroom library that are marked for export; those not marked for export are never sent. (Also related, recall that due to a Lightroom bug, images in a catalog upgraded from Lightroom 1.x with Lightroom 2.0 lost the ability to export keywords until a fix is applied.)
20081022.40	Addressed (and perhaps even fixed) a bug introduced in the previous build.
20081021.39	Small update so that a stuck background version check does not disable the plugin. Added a message in the login area with instructions on how to use the plugin with multiple accounts. Added the ability to put the "select at time of export" item at the top of the destination list, as had been requested a few times. Added some items to the template language that had inexplicably been missing: {HH}, {MIN}, {hh}, {min}, {ss}.
20081015.38	Internal change to the user-agent string that the plugin sends when uploading, to better conform to web standards Added back the ability to set the print size via DPI and inches/cm. I think it's more confusing than anything (because it has nothing to do with what size something gets printed at unless you take care to set the printer DPI the same), but someone asked for it and I should really leave it up to the user. The plugin now allows you to use any color space registered on your computer when generating images to upload. I don't think this will be useful for very many people, but perhaps it might be a benefit when combined with some printing services(?)
20081007.37	Fixed a problem with the newly added "refresh tags" stuff: extra tags in the refresh dialog derived from template tokens were not being computed for each image, but instead, were being reused from the first image. Fixed.
20080929.36	I've included in this release a first try at a "refresh tags for previously-uploaded photos", added to the Flick Extras page (See `File > Plug-in Extras > Flickr Extras...`). Please note that this is a one-way refresh and not a two-way sync. All tags already at Flickr for the selected photos will be deleted, replaced by the current set of tags from the Lightroom library and/or the update dialog. Tags that had been manually added at Flickr will be lost.. A two-way sync is not in the cards because the Lightroom plugin architecture does not support the plugin adding/deleting keywords in the Lightroom catalog. The UI is pretty rough, and I'll likely move this to its own dialog at some point. Test it gingerly on a few images to make sure it works before using it whole-heartedly, just to be safe.
20080925.35	I've added a "Group Pools" section, to see how it works. It allows you to add the uploaded photos to a single group pool. I can expand on this with tag-based pool stuff if there's a demand...
20080924.34	Fixed a race condition that sometimes caused the export destination to not appear in the synopsis of a closed "Upload Destination" dialog section. Also fixed an issue whereby doing a "replace" would abort when the image previously uploaded to Flickr was no longer present at Flickr. Now, if the image isn't there anymore, the "replace" turns into a simple upload. (A "replace" goes to whatever the gallery the original was in; but a replace that turns into an upload goes to the export's destination gallery.) Moved the items in the "Upload Management" section into the "Upload Destination" section, since they are really quite related.
20080923.33	I created a "Metadata Management" section in the dialog, and moved some things into that from other sections. This prepared things for another big change that allows you to control some of the Flickr metadata via keywords. You can now configure the upload to work such that “images with such-and-such a keyword are marked private, while those with this-n-that a keyword are visible to friends only, while all others are visible to everyone.” You can do this with image visibility, the Flickr "safety level", the image type, and whether the image should be included in the Flickr image search. It's better to encode your intended status into the Lightroom database, via keywords, rather than something ephemeral like a changeable setting in a dialog.
20080923.32	Added a note to the export dialog that the “replace” option is meant to update the image only, and not the metadata. That's the whole point of Flickr's replace — so that you can update the image without diddling its caption, tags, etc., or removing it from whatever groups it's in. For the future, I'll work on something that allows one to update metadata separately....
20080923.31	Sigh, just realized that the "check for new version" stuff did break in 2.1. Totally my fault, sorry. Fixed.
20080921.30	There seems to be a bug in the Flickr API that disallows an empty title or description on upload. I now include a workaround that blanks out such a title/description immediately after the upload, when needed.
20080920.29	Enhanced the `{Rating}` token to allow `{Rating=}` to create "***" through "". You can put most anything instead of the asterisk, so you might consider `{Rating=great }` to end up with "great great great". Since these forms result in nothing for an unrated photo, you can use the "\|" pipe to provide a default "when empty" value, such as "rating": `{Rating=\|"unrated"}`
20080918.28	Added the ability to use template tokens like {Filename} in the "extra tags" input box.
20080916.27	Update an error message to reflect an apparent bug in LR that causes LR to hand off a file to my plugin for upload before the file is actually available. This seems to happen when using LR/Mogrify or other filters. Updated the url shown in the "status" section of the plugin manager
20080916.26	Finally have the upgrade button working on both Win and Mac. Since I returned home last week, I now have access to both kinds of machine for the first time since LR2 was released. I can sum up the 5 hours I spent wrestling with the unzip code in three word: I hate Windows. Microsoft owes me five hours of my life back. Note that you may have to install this one by hand in order to get the newly working upgrade button... it's the next upgrade that should be easy-as-click.
20080914.25	Added a few more descriptive tooltips to the example-token dialog
20080914.24	Oops, fixed a boo-boo introduced in the previous version.
20080914.23	Remember (again) the upload-destination across exports. It used to work, and I'm not sure when it stopped working, but it must have been really annoying while it was broken, sorry.
20080914.22	Fixed tokens "OriginalWidth" and "OriginalHeight" in templates. Added a bunch of new template tokens and a new token filter. Added a token-examples button, which brings up a dialog listing all tokens and their value for an example photo (the first photo in the export list).
20080905.21	Fixed an "undefined global: DestinationSynopsis" error that could happen when using a preset with a "select at export time" upload-destination setting
20080904.20	Added support for auto-generated destinations (see the "auto dests" button near the destination-photoset pulldown). Disable/ignore "replace" for non-pro accounts. No longer report "couldn't delete prior image" errors, since that's not really an error in the light of for our workflow.
20080831.19	Handle a race condition in the upgrade logic that sometimes results in a superfluous "You have version XYZ, but version XYZ is now available" message
20080829.18	Added a bunch of new items to the template language.
20080829.17	Oops, left some debugging cruft that results in an "empty" dialog if the logged-in-user has no galleries or the like. Fixed.
20080828.16	fix
20080828.15	Minor tweaks
20080828.14	A few more tweaks to report a failed upgrade attempt a bit more clearly
20080828.13	Whoo-hoo, finally figured out the "assert" problem that some people without photosets were having. When upgrading, ignore a status of “50” (which means “out of disk space”) from the unzip the plugin performs. It seems Windows often reports this status even when there's plenty of disk space left, so until I can understand it better, I'll just ignore that code.
20080827.12	Fixed the Caption {Filetype} token (was broken for DNGs). Layout tweaks in my preset dialogs. Made some Layout tweaks in my preset dialogs.
20080817.11	Lots of little tweaks as I cleaned things up. Added a bunch of stuff to the Plugin Manager, including a “What's New” button that shows up next to the “Upgrade Now” button when a new version is available.
20080814.10	Fixed infinite cycle of 'assert' messages one might get in odd situations
20080812.9	Fixes (I hope) a "bad argument #1 to '?' (table expected, got nil)" error
20080811.8	Moved and renamed the debugging logs to a temporary folder, and added log Show/Delete buttons to the plugin's custom section of the Plugin Manager.
20080806.7	Fixed {State} and {Rating} in preset templates.
20080805.6	Oops, the Windows versions had lost the ability to upgrade themselves. Once this version is installed manually, subsequent versions should be able to upgrade as discussed here.
20080804.5	Fixed "Access to undefined global: LrError" error that happens when trying to report a login-related problem.
20080804.4	Fixed a couple of internal errors related to the "choose destination at time of export" feature
20080804.3	Export Presets should now work.
20080731.2	Added the public/private/friends, etc., options that I forgot to include from the v1 plugin.
20080729.1	Initial public release

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Jeffrey’s “Export to Flickr” Lightroom Plugin