This page documents plugin version 20100715.194 as of July 15, 2010
This page describes the Publish aspect of my export-to-Flickr plugin for Adobe Lightroom. The "normal export" portions of the plugin work in all versions of Lightroom from Lr 2 on, but its Publish features work only from Lightroom 3.0, and do not work in Lr2 or the Lr3 betas.
Warning: The idea behind Publish is simple enough, but if you hope to avoid unpleasant surprises, you must understand important details before getting started with it.
Basic Premise of Publish: Ongoing Relationship
The premise is simple: drag a photo to a special collection in Lightroom, and voila, it's sent to Flickr. From then on, changes that you make to the photo in Lightroom are automatically kept up to date in the copy at Flickr.
Ah, but the devil is in the details...
First of all, Publish is an extra feature in addition to the “normal” export offered by Lightroom via this plugin (and earlier versions of this plugin all the way back to Lightroom 1). Publish allows you to set up an ongoing relationship between specific images in your Lightroom catalog and their appearance at Flickr. This kind of ongoing relationship makes a lot of sense for some situations, while the normal export we've had since Lr1 makes more sense in others.
Here's a hint: if it's a situation where you'd consider setting up an export preset that you'd use via “File > Export with Preset”, Publish is worth a look.
Because Publish involves setting up an ongoing relationship, it's more complicated than simply firing off an export. The length of this document, which covers only Publish and assumes you're already familiar with normal export, attests to the extra complexity. But once the initial up-front fee has been paid with your time and attention, you'll reap the benefits from then on.
Publish functionality is new in both Lightroom and this plugin. Both are exceedingly complex under the hood, and Publish should be considered beta. Especially with these early releases of my Flickr plugin with Publish support, MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR CATALOG, or better yet, play around with Publish in a temporary catalog.
I very much hope things go well... I have been working on this night and day for months... but it's possible that there are sufficiently major bugs that I might have to make changes that are not backwards compatible with this initial version.
Introduction and Important Definitions
Generally speaking, Publish functionality is provided by a Publish Service Provider. Lightroom 3 comes with two publish service providers: the built-in “Hard Drive” provider and a bare-bones Flickr plugin. You can add additional publish service providers by installing appropriate plugins, such as this fuller-featured Flickr plugin. (I have plenty of other publish plugins available on my Lightroom Goodies page, and there may well be other Publish plugins available on Adobe's Lightroom Exchange site.)
After installing the Flickr plugin, you
can configure your publish service
Before you can use Publish to send images to Flickr, you must first configure the particulars about how the exports are to be done, such as deciding on the size and quality of the exported images, and the details about which account at Flickr they should be sent to. This configuration, which you generally do only once, creates a Publish Service in your Lightroom catalog.
You can have multiple Flickr publish services (all provided by the one plugin), but it makes sense for most people to have only one. However, if you have multiple accounts at Flickr that you'd like to send images to with Publish, you'll need to configure multiple Flickr publish services.
Important details about creating a publish service are covered below, but for the moment, let's wave our hand and say that the publish service has now been set up as you like.
After you've configured a publish service in your Lightroom catalog, it is represented in your Lightroom library as one or more publish collections, each holding a group of photos that are to be sent to Flickr. The standard publish collection, “Flickr photostream”, holds photos to actually be rendered and uploaded, while any other publish collection you might configure represents Flickr photosets and/or group pools to add those photostream images to.
Several publish collections in a
Flickr publish service
For example, you might create a publish collection named “Vacation 2010” that you configure to send photos to your “Vacation 2010” photoset, but another collection named “B&W” configured to send photos both to your “My Best B&W” photoset, and to Flickr's “Black and White” group pool: if you drag a new photo to the “B&W” publish collection then press the “Publish” button, it is uploaded to your Flickr photostream, added to your “My Best B&W” photoset, and added to the group pool. (Just like on Flickr, all photos added to any collection in the publish service automatically get added to the Flickr photostream collection, and any photo deleted from the Flickr photostream collection is removed from all other collections in the same publish service.)
I sometimes refer to the publish-service's Flickr photostream collection as the local photostream.
Just like regular Lightroom collections, a publish collection can be either a regular publish collection that holds whatever photos you manually add to it, or a smart publish collection whose list of photos is computed by some criteria that you set up (e.g. “all five-star photos taken this year”).
A published photo is a photo that's part of a publish collection. At any particular time, a published photo is in one of four publish states:
New Photos to Publish — photos that have been added to the publish collection, but have not yet actually been sent to Flickr. They'll be sent to Flickr the next time you launch Publish (via the “Publish” button).
Published Photos — photos that have been sent to Flickr and have not been modified in your Lightroom catalog since.
Modified Photos to Re-Publish — photos that have been sent to Flickr, but which have been modified in Lightroom since. They will be re-sent to Flickr the next time you launch a Publish action.
Deleted Photos to Remove — photos that have been ostensibly removed from the publish collection, but have not yet been removed from Flickr. (Whether to actually remove a photo from Flickr when it is removed from your publish collection is controlled by publish-service options, discussed below.)
Segmented grid showing photos in a publish
collection in various states of Publish
When viewing a publish collection in Grid mode, you can see the photos partitioned into their various states in the segmented grid with headers as listed above (and illustrated in the screenshot at right).
You can add and remove photos from a normal publish collection as you like (and they are automatically added and removed from smart publish collections as per the criteria that you've set up), but nothing is actually done with them until you launch Publish, via the “Publish” button. The Publish button appears in the lower left of Lightroom, in place of the “Export” button, when viewing a publish collection, as in the screenshot at right.
There's also a “Publish” button in the upper right of the segmented grid.
When you actually launch a Publish action, Lightroom fires up an export under the hood, and photos are rendered as per the various settings configured when the publish service was created (the details of which follow in the next section of this document). As each photo is uploaded to Flickr, it's moved to the “Published Photos” section. You can click on each segmented-grid section's header to expand and collapse it; if they're all collapsed you can watch their photo counts, shown at the right side of each segmented-grid header, update in real time.
Creating a Flickr Publish Service
Let's look in detail at configuring a publish service to export to your Flickr account. Make sure that the Flickr plugin is installed and enabled, then click on the “Set Up...” of the Flickr header in Library's list of publish services. (Take care to differentiate between Adobe's built in plugin and mine.)
This brings up the Lightroom Publishing Manager, a dialog that looks like a cross between the normal export dialog and the Plugin Manager...
Items show up in the list of Publish Services (highlighted in the upper left) when their plugin is installed and enabled in the Plugin Manager. Old Lr1 or Lr2 plugins won't provide this new feature, of course, but most of my “export to...” plugins, including Flickr, do.
If any of the plugins you have installed provide export filters, they are listed in the middle-lower-left section of the Publishing Manager, just as they are in the normal export dialog. Lightroom does not come with any export filters built in, but they can add powerful features to your exports — both normal and publish — so it behooves you to know what's out there. Popular ones include my Metadata Wrangler for controlling exactly what metadata is included in exported copies, my geoencoding support shadow injecter for ensuring that the geoencoded location is properly included, and Tim Armes' LR/Mogrify plugin for advanced watermarking and image borders.
The main panel of the Publishing Manager shows the export/service settings for the Publish Service that's about to be created (an export-to-Flickr service in the example above). Like the normal export dialog, it has numerous sections; let's look at them in detail....
The first section allows you to give your export service a name, so you can keep them straight if you have more than one.
If you have only one Flickr account, you probably want to leave it at its default of “jf Flickr”. It looks ugly in this dialog, but when left at its default it won't even be shown in the list of publish service in Library, as seen in the screenshots above. If you set your own name, such as “My Flickr Stuff”, it shows up in the Library list as “jf Flickr: My Flickr Stuff”. So if you need just one Flickr publish service, it's cleanest all around to just leave the name at its default. You can always change it later.
However, if you have multiple accounts, you'll want to name them, e.g. “Flickr Work” for one and “Flickr Play” for another.
The next section is where you authenticate to your Flickr account. (Before starting the authentication, be sure that you are logged in to Flickr in your system-default web browser, to the Flickr account that you want to use with this Publish service.)
Once the publish service has been created, you can not change the associated account for the publish service, and this section becomes deactivated during a publish-service edit. (You can make another publish service for use with a different Flickr account, or even for use with the same Flickr account but with different export options.)
The next section is also available only at publish-service create time: setting the export location:
Most people leave the export-location setting at the default of “Temporary folder”, but you might set it to some specific named folder if you want to keep a local copy of all the images that have been published to Flickr. Again, Lightroom does not allow this setting to be changed once the publish service has been created.
Various Standard Lightroom Export Settings...
The next sections are all the same as in the standard Lightroom export dialog...
These settings, such as the image size and quality, can be changed later, but doing so means that you have to re-publish (re-render and re-upload) everything you'd already sent to Flickr, at least if you want the setting changes to be reflected in the images already at Flickr. More on this later, but it's best to pick the settings you want up front, so you don't have to change them later.
The next sections are for export filters you have installed and enabled, if any. Here's an example illustrating what some sections from Metadata Wrangler, Run Any Command, and LR/Mogrify might look like...
The blue rectangle marks Lightroom's controls for adjusting the order that the filters are applied, and for removing them altogether.
Each section can be opened to reveal the filter's particular settings, of course, but the filter details are not relevant to this overview about Publish, except to note that like the standard Lightroom settings (image size, etc.), changing these filter settings after a publish service has been established means that you have to republish everything if you want the changes to be reflected in images previously published to Flickr.
Options for Deleting from Flickr
Moving along to the next section, we have three photo-deletion options that allow you to decide which kinds of local Lightroom deletions should result in something actually getting deleted at Flickr.
The option first concerns straight-up removal from the main “Flickr photostream” publish collection. If you remove a photo from this collection, it is automatically removed from all the collections in the service, but should it actually be deleted from your account at Flickr? You decide:
If you delete a photo from Flickr, you can always upload it again, but all its “value add” at Flickr will have been lost forever — notes, comments, inclusion in photosets and group pools, etc. — will be disassociated from the photo and lost. On the other hand, if you don't delete it at Flickr, it's still there, which is perhaps not what you want if you're deleting it from your local photostream collection.
I strongly recommend that you leave this option at “Ask” until you're so comfortable with the idea that photos at Flickr will be deleted when you delete from your local photostream collection that you become annoyed at the “Ask” dialog.
This automatic deletion is not something yet familiar in the Lightroom world, and just a bit of forgetfulness about these new things can lead to a very unpleasant sinking feeling.
Actually, to be clear, when a photo is removed from your local photostream collection, it goes into the collection's “Deleted Photos to Remove” section, as mentioned above. It's only when you then initiate the Publish action on the collection that this option comes into effect, and that photo copies at Flickr are deleted (if you've so instructed).
Moving on to the second option, we have the less-drastic case of simply removing a photo from one of the other publish collections in the service, which represent photosets and group pools at Flickr. Should a removal here result in a removal from the associated photosets and/or group pools at Flickr?
Finally, we have an option that covers the most drastic case, of a photo that happens to be published via this service being deleted from Lightroom altogether.
If you want to protect photos that have been published at Flickr, choose “Disallow”.
For a more general way to protect images from deletion from the catalog, you might also want to consider my PhotoSafe plugin, which allows you to specify specific photos that can't be deleted from Lightroom, and/or rules describing the kinds of photos that can't be deleted (e.g. “all five-star photos”). You have to explicitly remove the restriction to remove a protected photo from the catalog, making it highly unlikely to do accidentally.
Then we have some huge sections allowing you to configure various Flickr-related metadata options, just as in a “normal” Flickr export.
Populating Your Local Photoset With Prior Uploads
Finally, we have a section that deals with populating the “Flickr photostream” publish-service collection that the plugin will make with photos in you Lightroom catalog that are already at Flickr.
This is a fairly complex section, so let start out with these points:
If your Flickr account is not a Pro (paid) account, you can ignore this section.
If you want to use this publish service for only new uploads, and not re-uploading photos already at Flickr, you can ignore this section.
If you don't want to deal with this section now and don't mind using the publish service for only new uploads for a while, you can ignore this section and come back to it later.
This section deals with two very different — but directly related — issues:
Getting Lightroom to understand which photos in your catalog are which photos at Flickr.
Claiming those photos for the specific “Flickr photostream” publish-service collection being created now.
Let's look at them each in turn...
Step 1: Connecting Lightroom Photos to Copies at Flickr
Step one is not specific to creating a publish service. Generally speaking, if you do any uploads with this plugin — publish or “normal” export — you want the plugin to know whether the photo is new to Flickr, or should replace some copy already there. This first step is about teaching Lightroom about the photos you've already uploaded to Flickr.
This all assumes that there's at most one copy of a Lightroom photo at your Flickr account; if multiple copies of the same Lightroom image exist at Flickr, tread very carefully. I have not tested this situation.
There are two ways to teach Lightroom photos about their counterparts at Flickr, but you might not even need to....
Were they uploaded from this catalog with any version of this Flickr plugin, any time going all the way back even to Lr1?
If so, voila, Lightroom knows. You can confirm this by looking at the “All Plugin Metadata” metadata-viewer preset, as illustrated by the yellow arrow at right, to see that the Uploaded-to-Flickr information is present, as highlighted with the blue box.
Actually, there's one potential gotcha here, for those who use more than one Flickr account: the data shown in the Uploaded-to-Flickr plugin-metadata area is that for the most recent upload to Flickr for any account, but all the image-reconnecting stuff talked about in this section is handled on a per-account basis. So it's possible that data is shown there even if the photo was never uploaded to the current Flickr account in question.
If Lightroom doesn't already know about it, we have two options...
Were they uploaded from this catalog with Adobe's Flickr plugin?
If you'd uploaded them with Adobe's simple built in Flickr plugin, we can copy that data over. In the dialog screenshot above, the “1)” section shows the situation when the Adobe Flickr plugin is not enabled, or is enabled but has no collections.... unfortunately, the plugin can't tell the difference. If indeed this catalog has no Adobe Flickr collections, there's nothing to do here, but if you'd simply disabled the plugin, you'll want to dismiss enable it before continuing. (To avoid having to re-fill in this entire dialog, go ahead and save it without doing anything in this section, then after enabling Adobe's plugin, return back here via the “Edit Settings...” context-menu item.)
If there are collections in the Adobe Flickr publish service that relate to this Flickr account, the dialog becomes:
Click on the “Import data from Adobe's Flickr plugin” to launch the data copy; it should be fairly fast.
Once you've imported data from Adobe's Flickr plugin, you probably want to disable it in the Plugin Manager so that two publish services aren't trying to upload the same photos to the same Flickr account. Later, after you're satisfied that you want to use this plugin for your Flickr publishing needs, you can go ahead and actually delete the Adobe Flickr publish service from your Lightroom library.
Try to match up photos via image time
You can have the plugin scan all your photos at Lightroom and Flickr, looking at photo capture times and linking photos when it finds a one-to-one match.
This method is not sure-fire, but can be quite successful for many people. However, it fails for photos that were uploaded to Flickr without metadata, and for groups of photos taken during the same second (such as a group of photos taken in burst mode, or one photo for which you've made virtual copies in Lightroom or have multiple copies at Flickr).
Pairing up the wrong photos could make for disaster, so the plugin is very conservative about it. Click on “Launch Deep Scan” to give it a try. It could take a while.
Step 2: Claiming Lightroom Photos For This Publish Service's Photostream
It's been a long haul, but we're getting close to the end.
Now that Lightroom knows which photos in your catalog also live at Flickr, the next time you do an export of the image, it'll be an image replacement rather than a straight-up upload, at least of you're a Flickr Pro.
If you'd like to pre-populate all those images into your publish-service photostream (get them added in there with an already-published state, so that they don't need an initial render/upload to make Lightroom happy), you can “claim” them to this publish service. This is not automatic because some users may want different export settings (image size, watermarking, etc.) for different photosets or groups or images, and that means creating multiple publish services with this plugin.
But if you want to do all your Flickr publish uploading with the settings defined for this publish service, enable the “claim” option...
If you don't do this, you'll start out with an empty photostream publish collection; photos will become part of it when you add them manually, though like all manually-added images, they'll be marked as needing to be re-uploaded.
I should point out that “claim” is not quite the right word, because a photo can certainly be part of multiple Flickr publish services. This makes perfect sense if each publish service is for a different Flickr account, but if you have more than one publish service trying to update the same photo in the same Flickr account, confusion and conflict will ensue.
Publish is all about maintaining a relationship between Lightroom and Flickr, and there should be only one relationship per image per Flickr account.
Phew !
Finally, you can press the “Save” button to create the publish service and the default “Flickr photostream” collection.
At this point you can drag photos to it and, upon invoking a Publish action (via the “Publish” button), photos are uploaded to your photostream at Flickr as per all the various settings configured above. Also, photo comments and ratings and pulled for each photo, appear in the “Comments” panel at the bottom of the right-hand-side set of panels.
If, after publishing a photo to Flickr, you make develop changes to it in Lightroom, republishing it uploads an updated version. NOTE: Flickr doesn't allow in-place replacements in free accounts... I haven't test Publish very much with a free account.
But the Flickr experience isn't complete without photosets and group pools...
The default “Flickr photostream” publish collection is created automatically and represents your photos at Flickr, but you can set up any number of extra publish collections to represet your photosets and group pools at Flickr. Any one publish collection can represent a single photoset or group pool, or any combination of any number of either.
Casual Flickr users may want a one-to-one correspondence between their Flickr photosets and the publish collections they set up, so, for example, 10 photosets at Flickr would mean creating 10 similarly-named publish collections in this publish service. You don't necessarily need to have every Flickr photoset represented in Lightroom... just the ones that you want to create an ongoing relationship with your Lightroom catalog, so that updates — additions and subtractions of photos, and developmental changes to photos — are automatically maintained. You'd still use a normal export for one-time uploads.
You create a new Flickr publish collection via the service name's context menu...
... which brings up a dialog like this:
Of course, your own photosets and permissioned group pools will be listed. (If you've recently added photosets or pools and they're not listed, click on the “refresh data from Flickr” button, but until I can push out a new version that works around some issues I've run in to, you'll have to then dismiss the dialog and bring it up again to see the changes.)
Pick any combination of photosets and group pools that you want this one publish collection to represent. Again, as I mentioned earlier, many users will want a one-to-one mapping between photosets and publish collections, so in that case:
Check the box next to one photoset.
Update the name at the top of the dialog to correspond to the photoset.
Make sure the “include selected photos” option is turned off, unless you really want to add the selected photos to the photoset.
After I Created Four
Extra Publish CollectionsClick the “Create” button.
The new publish collection will now appear under the publish service's “Flicker photostream” collection, as with the four collections illustrated at right.
Astute readers will realize a few shortcomings of this situation:
- There's no way to automatically have one-to-one publish collections made for all your photosets and group pools... you have to do each. one. manually.
- There's no way to create a new photoset from this dialog.
- The new publish collections aren't pre-populated with appropriate images from the local photostream.
I just didn't have time to get these working before Lr3 was launched. I hope to remedy them soon.
Smart Flickr Publish Collections
The previous sections describes creating normal Flickr publish collections, but you can also create smart Flickr publish collections, which incorporate Lightroom's smart collections features that allow you to set up rules that describe what kinds of photos should and shouldn't appear, such as “photos with a 5-star rating photographed this year”.
The thing about smart collections is that you can't manually add or delete photos from them, so this makes for some interesting gymnastics in this Flickr publish-collection world: you can't delete a photo from your local photostream if it's in a smart Flickr publish collection; you must have it removed from the smart collection before you can delete it from the local photostream.
Do not attempt to create smart collections via the “Import Smart Collection Settings...” item in the Publish Service context menu. A bug in Lightroom causes this to create a corrupt publish collection, and the plugin infrastructure doesn't offer me a way to disable that menu item.
You can create “publish collection sets” as you like, which are just like normal Lightroom collection sets: empty shelving on which to put your various publish collections. You can use collection sets to organize your publish collections as you like.
Publish supports the ability to fetch comments and ratings from Flickr
(where in this case a photo's rating is the count of people who have
favorited it, though since no one has ever favorited one of my pictures, so
I don't know whether that actually works. 
)
However, due to a bug in either Lightroom or my understanding of things, comments are shown only when you're viewing a photo in the Flickr photostream publish collection, and are not shown while viewing the photo from whatever photoset/group collections it might also be in.
This can lead to the odd situation where you add a comment to a photo
yourself (via the “click here to add a new comment” box in the
comments section of Library), but it doesn't show up if you're not in the
Flickr photostream publish collection. If you were, it would show up
right away. But if you're not and you don't realize what's going on, you
might try adding it again, and again, until you get frustrated enough to
move on. Who will be the first to admit that they added half a dozen copies of the same comment
to a photo because they didn't know about this, or forgot?
Hopefully I or Adobe can figure this out before it comes to that.
Making Changes to an Existing Flickr Publish Service
You can edit the publish-service settings via the “Edit Settings...” item in the publish-service name's context menu. You can change all settings except the account at Flickr and the export location, but there's a catch: if the change relates to something about how each image is exported and uploaded (such as the size or image quality, metadata settings, etc.) and you want those changes to be reflected in photos already at Flickr, it won't happen magically: you'll have to republish them all.
Republishing can take a long time if you've got a lot of photos, and not all changes necessarily need to be reflected in every photo, so it is not done automatically.
With most publish services in Lightroom, you can invoke the “Mark To Republish” thumbnail context menu item, but that doesn't actually work in the Flickr one due to (extremely complex) issues under the hood. It'll indeed put them into the “Modified Photos to Republish” section, but when you actually Publish them, they'll immediately jump back to “Published Photos” without actually being rendered and uploaded. There's a kludge that works to get around this issue: after invoking “Mark To Republish” on them, make some small change to them (such as clicking one of the exposure buttons in Quick Develop, then clicking on the opposite button to effectively undo the change without actually invoking Lightroom's undo). Then publish, and they'll actually be rendered.
Adding Another Flickr Publish Service
If you have another Flickr account you'd like to publish to, or you'd like to publish with different settings (e.g. your first Flickr publish service had full size exports, but you'd like to be able to upload to some collections with smaller sizes), choose
from the existing publish service's title context menu (where “Set Up...” had been before the first one was created.)
The following issues are inherent shortcomings in Lightroom's initial version of Publish, and apply to all publish services:
There's no way to tell which publish collections have photos awaiting action except by visiting each publish collection in turn and viewing the grid to see whether the “Publish” button is enabled or disabled.
There's no way to invoke publish on all your publish services in one go; the best you can do is address each publish service in turn, selecting all its published collections and then invoking Publish on them.
The photo-thumbnail “Go to Collection” context menu item does not list any kind of smart collection that the photo may be part of, including smart publish collections.
The use of undo with publish-related operations is likely to not work and perhaps even corrupt the publish parts of your catalog. Take care.
You can't import smart-collection settings to a publish smart collection; doing so creates a corrupt smart collection.
I have not tested export-to-catalog yet, but I would expect that Publish information does not go along with the images.
Crikey! That looks very, very exciting. It’s interesting to feel such feelings of wonder and joy about a new version of Lightroom and what your plugins are contributing, after feeling dumbfoundedly underexcited as I watched the iphone launch this morning in Hong Kong.
This is awesome, a little overwhelming. I’ve always used your export plugins but I think I will wait until things get a little more finished before I try to really work with the publish services. The way I work is I have different sets on Flickr that I upload to from lightroom using separate export presets that have different keywords, description presets etc depending on the type of image. For example wedding pictures have a separate export to flickr preset. I really need the publish service to apply different settings depending on which set the images are going in. I don’t know if that’s possible, or if I just haven’t messed around with it enough.
“A little overwhelming” describes my life circa Lr3b… it only amped up from there. )-: You can have completely different settings for each Publish Service that you set up with the plugin, so it’s entirely possible. Probably a good idea to let early adopters plow through the bugs for you, though. —Jeffrey
Simply amazing. Fantastic work, as ever.
I think my you’ve made my life significantly simpler. Well, once I’ve set everything up of course. Seriously considering nuking my flickr account of all pictures and starting afresh using this as a basis.
Nuking your Flickr account may be cleansing, but it’s not required… you can set up publish collections that map to what you already have. (Currently, it’s manual, but once I get caught up on things, I’m sure I’ll add some automatic stuff.) —Jeffrey
This is simply terrific – I’ve been both a Lightroom and a Flickr user for years, but only now I’ve put the two together; I love this plug-in in general, but what has absolutely floored me is the ability to compare date stamps with Flickr, and build a collection of Flickr pictures automatically; I’ve been looking for a way to do that ever since I first started using Lightroom (way too many pictures on Flickr to do it manually).
FWIW, the sync-up-photos stuff has been in the plugin for years, but the organic nature of the plugin’s development, sans documentation, perhaps hid a lot. I’m going to try to document things better, as I started to do with the publish stuff, but wow, it’s a lot of work. I need to find a way to automate refreshing the screenshots.
I don’t know if you are looking for bug reports at this stage, but I’ll drop one just in case – on Lightroom 3, the “Visit photo at Flickr” option results on a “cannot find URL” error; however, this works just fine on the right-hand menu, so it’s by no means a big deal.
Many thanks for creating this unbelievably useful plug-in.
The “visit photo” thing uses different data than the metadata one… the metadata one is the most recent upload for the pic, which could well be for a different user (if you use the plugin with multiple Flickr accounts). The Publish stuff keeps it all segregated by user — it’s monumentally complex under the hood — and it was built with the per-user history that the plugin has maintained all these years, but I didn’t add the upload url to the per-user stuff until maybe 18 months ago, so photos uploaded before that will be sans url. I had a version of the scan thing that filled in the urls by asking Flickr for them, but it made it very slow. I’ll try to add it back as a menu option or something, once things settle down. —Jeffrey
Are the images _always_ reloaded to flickr for _every_ change? Also for new Keywords only?!?
Initially, I have it set up to look for develop changes, but I’m not sure how well tested this is. The whole point of Publish is that you want an ongoing relationship, so you want the new version to be reflected whenever there are changes, but nothing gets sent until you press the “Publish” button. If you don’t want the ongoing relationship, use normal export. —Jeffrey
So what is the solution for matching up photos that have the same timestamp? Is some way to match them up manually in the pipeline, or is there some way to do it now that I’m missing?
It’s a problem that I had with the old version of your plugin, but it seems to be especially important to be able to sync up everything if I’m going to use publish services to its full potential.
Currently, there’s no solution for matching up images with conflicts. It definitely needs work. —Jeffrey
Well done Jeffrey. I am not an early adopter and will let some bugs be worked out for the time being. Any reason to not use the built-in LR3 Flickr Publishing services until your plugin bugs are relatively worked out?
The worst-case scenario of plugin bugs is that the plugin somehow mixes up upload history and mistakenly replaces the wrong photo at Flickr (thereby deleting the original). That risk has existed since Lr1 and has never happened, but Publish is much, MUCH more complex under the hood. More realistically, the worst-case scenario is that you lose the upload history. Practically speaking, though, the reason I don’t push it out yet to everyone is that I’m not ready for the email deluge for the random small issues that remain. —Jeffrey
I want to have the relationship, but i don’t want to re-upload the whole image only for keyword changes or when i add it to another set. So i have to use the export way like in LR2?
For keyword-only updates, see the File > Plugin Extras > Flickr Extras dialog. For adding to (or removing from) sets and groups, create publish collections within the publish service that map to the ones you want, and by simply adding or removing photos from the collections, they’ll be added/removed from the sets/groups. The photo is actually uploaded only once (and then again when there are develop/pixel changes), with the set/group updates being simple “add/remove” operations. —Jeffrey
*a Dutchie here*
Seems like an awful lot of work, already just the manual!
I’m eager to try the plugin but would like to get one thing clear first. I’m wondering whether ‘one relationship per image per Flickr account’ means per image in the lightroom catalog of per image in the publish service.
I´ve got a paid account and use it as backup as well as for showing the images. My idea would be to make one publish service which uploads everything in full-res for backup and set those images to private. And then create one service with which to upload selected images in reduced resolution in public. Will this work, or should the smaller images in a separate flickr account?
In theory what you want is possible, but I think in practice the 2nd time you try to publish the same image to the same Flickr account, it’ll notice and say “oh, this is a replace” and make it so. That’s what people would want in a normal situation, so I hope that’s what it does. Once things settle down, I can think about an option to give you some control over it, but for now I don’t think you can do what you want. —Jeffrey
Some questions … I have a few photos now in the “Modified Photos to Re-Publish” category, but I don’t know how they got in there. I think all I did was scroll through a few photos and some of them (maybe the ones with comments) are now listed as “Modified Photos to Re-Publish”. Does that sound right? If a photo is in the “Modified Photos to Re-Publish” group, can I remove it from that group and tell Lightroom not to re-publish?
I had a photo in LR that seems to be disconnected from its Flickr companion (wrong Flick URL). Can this be fixed?
When I try to add comments, I click in the box where it says Click here to add a new comment, but my cursor will not stay in the box, and for example, if the first letter of my intended new comment is D, Lightroom thinks I want to switch to develop module. I have tried quite hard to make sure I click in the box and then don’t move the mouse at all, but not working.
The first issue is likely the result of my pushing the Publish framework 1000x beyond was it was intended for… the photo is not likely actually going to be uploaded again when you Publish. I will try to update the docs on this, but generally speaking it won’t actually be republished unless there’s actually been some change.
The second issue is likely related to some imperfect history in your catalog when you sucked up all the data for Publish. It’s on the todo list to try to add stuff to scrub and tidy old or out-of-sync data.
The third issues sounds like something you should report to Adobe… haven’t heard of that one. —Jeffrey
I tried to sync with Flickr data. When the deep scan was complete, there was a message something like this (I don’t recall the exact wording):
- 246 matches
- 6 images will be ignored ….
The 246 matches the number images I have on Flickr, so far so good… When I clicked OK and then “Claim for this Photostream”, only 18 images were added to the photostream. Perhaps a bug in this part of the plugin?
Difficult to tell with the sparse info… could you send a log? —Jeffrey
Regarding Martijn’s comment, shouldn’t it be fairly straight forward to do what he wants with virtual copies? Maybe that’s already possible? Just a thought.
Works great, except for some small issues. The sync to existing photos on flickr found almost all photos from my repository, too! I don’t expect the plugin to be able to figure out all of the photos by itself, but I think it would be nice to be able to manually setup the connection for the rest.
Also, when trying out the plugin, I published a photo, and then deleted it from flickr (via the plugin). When I’m trying to publish it again, I get the following error messages:
?:25706: attempt to index a nil value
+9108.1: [x13068e528] line 6707:
?:25706: attempt to index a nil value:
+9108.1: [x13068e528] line 6707
+9108.1: [x13068e528] line 14764
+9108.1: [x13068e528] =(tail call) line -1
The photo shows as being “Uploaded to Flickr”, with a link pointing at deleted photo.
I suppose all of this data is just rows on the Lightroom catalog/database, but I’d rather not try to find out how it works by myself – at least with all of my photos in the line of fire…
Is there some way to set/break the connection between the photo and flickr under the hood, with SQL?
I’ll look at the delete error soon, but FYI, you can disassociate an image via the File > Plugin Extras > Flickr Extras menu. —Jeffrey
Thanks! I hadn’t even noticed the menu before. Fixing the associations for the rest of my flickr photos worked through that in a breeze.
Does the “Clear” button only work on the selected photos, or everything? I cleared the association already by hand from the database before I got your reply so I have no need to test it now, but from the description I’m not quite certain if it will destroy everything.
And publishing worked again once I removed the old, broken association, of course.
Clear applies only to the selected photos. So does “associate” for some plugins, not for others… it’s a messy situation that I need to address. —Jeffrey
What about visibility on flickr? I know you can set the initial visbility using keywords, but apart from that I see no other ways to control the visibility from your plugin. Does that mean that it does not keep track of the visiblity, so I can change visibility via flickr itself without possible nastiness in Lightroom?
Once Lightroom uploads the image and sets the various parameters, it doesn’t pay attention to what happens to it at Flickr. Is this different from your expectation? —Jeffrey
Thanks for the quick reply!
Did not really have an expectation, was merely wondering. No problem at all for me as it is the way I use to this anyway, upload all in one batch only visible for me and later change some images to public.
Could be nice to have the option to change the visibility in lightroom, but probably there are a lot of other requests which are more useful. Or maybe better not to include such an option, now there still is a reason to visit flickr and be in risk of finding cool images from other users. I guess this would not be the case if all can be done using your plugin
jeff,
first off, excellent plugin. have been enjoying it greatly for a few years now, of course as the old “one way” push incarnation.
one comment/bug report about the publish service that others have pointed out:
it seems that photos barely “touched” (ie a keyword change) get reuploaded.
they DO get completely reupped, as the file hash to the flickr jpg link gets changed.
as a result, any img tags using that jpg link get broken. as you can imagine this is a huge PITA!
not to mention the keyword doesn’t actually get updated on flickr in the first place!
i want to go back to the “old way” of using the plugin, but when i try i get the following error:
an internal error has occurred: ?:14134: attempt to index field ‘?’ (a nil value)
PLEASE don’t make me go back to using the flickr uploader!
thanks
ken
Try updating to the latest version here and the error should go away. Republishes shouldn’t change the hash at Flickr… I’ll look into it. —Jeffrey
Hello, Great plugin, I’ve been a user for some time now and this is a nice extension of the basic one built into lightroom.
Quick question though:
What does ‘Create Published Collection Set’ do when you right click on the photostream?
I’m following instructions during these early releases and I’m trying not to break anything.
That’s creates a level of hierarchy in the display in Lightroom… it’s just for your personal organization of the publish collections within the service. It’s not reflected back to Flickr in any way. —Jeffrey
Hi Jeffrey,
Besides the Flickr and other photosites publish services, is there also a Publish plugin for simple ftp to ‘normal’ webspace, but so that photo’s deleted in the collections are also removed. If possible with multiple levels (albums with subalbums). In other words, a Publish version of the ftp-upload plugin.
I have set up my site with ZenPhoto, there I have some categories wich holds the albums. It would be great when I could have this structure as collections/subcollections in Lightroom and publish from there.
Or do you know of an existing plugin that does the job?
Thanks in advance,
Filip
I don’t know of a Publish FTP plugin, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before someone builds one. I intend to make it so that my Zenfolio plugin can do all you suggest… working on it now. —Jeffrey
Whoa, such huge amount of work (programing and documentation) !
While I had programmed in Lua before and working now on a Wordpress/NextGen plugin, that doesn’t encourage me to work with publish services (although very useful).
Congratulations and thanks.
One thing I’d like to see is the ability to push photos to an online service without the interconnection with LR i.e. I just want to push photos out there and then I want LR3 to forget them. There are a whole host of reasons for doing this including the fact that my LR3 database is large enough without adding the the extra overhead.
Is there any way to do this?
If you do a regular export, then invoke File > Plugin Extras > Flickr Extras > Clear, you’ll be where you want. —Jeffrey
Jeffrey,
I’m in Boston, and a long-time user of your excellent Flickr export plugin. I’ve always taken care to maintain an arrangement of sets and collections in Flickr and in Lightroom which exactly correspond, and I have at least a hundred sets, many of which I often add content to. I’ve always dreamed of being able to somehow link my LR catalog to my Flickr account, and LR3’s Publish, combined with your plugin, looks awfully close. However, I have a few questions – and I’m not sure whether these are feature requests, or you’ll be able to explain to me that the plugin already does (or will soon do) this:
1. I’d hate to have to manually re-create my set/collection structure in the Publish service when it’s already right there in Lightroom. Can I indicate to the plugin that I want to use the set/collection structure already made in either Flickr or LR?
2. I have at least a few pictures which are virtual copies or are taken very close together in time. I’d like it is the plugin could use other metadata (say, image title, which always matches from LR to Flickr) to figure these out when I link them, instead of becoming baffled.
3. Regardless of the above, I’m anxious to link my LR catalog and Flickr accounts with Publish. However, my Flickr account is about 3500 pictures, and I don’t have an especially fast connection – I’d hate to have to re-upload all of them. Can I link everything without re-uploading them all? Nothing ought to have changed for the vast majority of them, but it might have been years since I uploaded them.
Thank you for writing these plugins, and thanks in advance for answering all these questions!
-Matthew
Items #1 and #2 are certainly on the todo list, but behind getting the basics working well, which they aren’t quite yet. If most of your photos were uploaded via the plugin, Adobe’s Flickr plugin, or can be matched up via the associate feature, then you don’t have to worry much about Item #3, except for the photos that don’t match up (because of Item #2). —Jeffrey
Hello,
Can you create a new Set (on Flickr) through the plugin?
I went to create a new publish set and I needed to select and existing set, so I went to create a set within Flickr but it wanted me to add photos to it – the ones that I was about to upload.
I’ve got myself into a chicken-and-egg situation here.
Thanks for the plugins, they’re by far the best thing about Lightroom!
Not yet with Publish, sorry. You can with a normal export. It’s on the list. —Jeffrey
Hi from the UK, Jeffrey,
Hopefully a quick one – if a keyword is added, deleted or changed on a photo in Flickr, does that get sucked back into Lightroom by the publish service? And I guess, does the same thing happen for the title and description?
I have a bad habit of only noticing typos etc. once the photo is published and I’m reviewing it on Flickr; so just need to work out if I should then edit in Flickr and it will get back to Lightroom, or I need to make the change on Lightroom and republish.
Many thanks,
Guy
No, it’s one way at the moment. I may try to build some kind of return-sync function, but that’s some ways off… —Jeffrey
Hi from France,
I want to upload a 104 Mb .mov video. Whenever I try, I get several popups (often “not enough memory”, once “LUA exception”), and the video doesn’t upload.
Any idea ?
Thanks
Only the first error is relevant (other errors are likely problems in handling the first), and if you’re out of memory, there’s not much I can do. Perhaps there’s something about the specific video? If you don’t mind sharing it, ftp it to the “incoming” folder on my server (regex.info, with username and password both “ftp”) then drop a note so I’ll know to find it. —Jeffrey
Hi! What happened to keyword-based group assignment in the publish module?? Adding to groups is one of the most time-consuming processes when adding pics to flickr, and being able to combine this with adding keywords was one of the main reasons why I continued using your plugin instead of the adobe-flickr-uploader when I bought LR3, but today LR told me that the plugin I got when I bought LR3 was a beta that had expired so I had to download it again and now this feature is gone in the publish module.. I see that I can assign to groups via a publish collection, but thats very little help for me -I’m in so many groups and use them so randomly, I will either have to re-configure the group assignment for each individual picture or have hundreds of collections with different combinations..
It’s on the todo list to figure out a way to work that into Publish, but I want to shake out the bugs in the basics first. —Jeffrey
What is the relationship between your plugin and the predefined “Flickr publishing module” in LR3?
My main question is: How can I get images that have erroneously been marked as requiring republishing back into their “Published” status without doing an actual “publish” operation? I’m using a free Flickr account and a “publish” would reset the status of the images but also delete all comments people made.
LR changed the “Published” status on its own for no good reason. It seems that looking at an image in the “Develop” module already can change its status.
I’d really like a way to reset an image to “Published” status manually.
I’d even use a binary editor to edit the LR catalog file, if that’s possible.
My plugin is unrelated to Adobe’s, though my plugin can import data from Adobe’s. With either, though, Publish is not very compelling with a free Flickr account…. Flickr, doesn’t allow image replacement for free accounts, so updates become a delete & resend operation, which has drawbacks as you note. Your best bet is to not use Publish… just normal export. But FWIW, the “claim” operation puts them directly into the Published state. —Jeffrey
Hi Jeffrey,
congratulations on this good plugin! It is really a time saver.
One thing that seems like a bug to me.
I alredy published comments from my Lightroom 3 to flickr but I cannt see any comments from flickr in Lightromm – even the ones I published from LR before (Yes I hit the refresh button).
Any ideas on this?
Regards, Kai
Are you perhaps not looking in the base photostream? As documented, comments appear only there. —Jeffrey
Perhaps this has already been addressed, and I missed it (there is a lot to read here) … but before I had Lightroom, I uploaded photos using Flickr tools. Now, I want to add some of these old uploaded photos, plus some new photos I just took this week, into a Lightroom publish collection, and then publish to Flickr. But the publish collection thinks these very old photos are new uploads, and adds a 2nd copy of the photo on Flickr, in addition to the ones I uploaded years ago. What I really want is to have the old copies stay intact, just added to the proper set on Flickr, and managed via the publish collection in LR. Is this possible?
Yes, it’s possible, and addressed in the Publish docs. If you think it’s a lot to read, consider how much work it was to write. —Jeffrey
Greetings from Minnesota, thanks very much for all of this amazing work. I’m just trialing Lightroom, but if things continue going well, I’m sure I’ll be sending both Adobe and you some money soon. One question, though: When I use this plugin to upload to flickr, I have it add tags via the Metadata Management options. Is it possible for those tags to also be added in Lightroom?
Thanks again!
Normally, tags set in Lightroom are included within the exported copy of the image, which are then grabbed by Flickr. This doesn’t happen if you “minimize embedded metadata” in the export dialog, and there’s a bug at Flickr that causes it to fail if you have “too many” keywords (where the number seems vague, but around 20). The plugin tries to detect and correct that latter situation, so send a log if it doesn’t seem to be working. —Jeffrey
Hi Jeffrey,
Great plugin, the hard work you must have put into this is appreciated.
I understand that one of the noted limitations is that you can’t create a flickr set through the publish service. That being said, how do you best go about creating new flickr photo sets? A flickr set requires a photo, but I can’t create a publish collection and upload a photo without linking to an existing set. It seems like a catch-22 so I was wondering what the best practice is for creating new sets.
One thought I had was just to put everything in my photostream and just organize things in flickr. This worked up until the point that I had about 2k photos in my photostream. When I would publish something new the publish service would try to receive comments/favorites for each photo in my photostream and would take a *very* long time since it’s making thousands of API calls every time I publish a single photo.
Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Dave
Yeah, it’s a catch-22. You probably at this point have to just export with the normal export that creates the set, then add the collection for the set to publish, then add the photo. Should work, but it’s a kludge. I know this needs to be addressed soon, but I’m still so totally overwhelmed with reports as everyone jumped to Lr3 for 20+ plugins, and I’m teetering a bit on the edge of panic. That, combined with the fact that Publish was not at all designed with Flickr’s odd paradigm in mind, so even to get what I have now required coding contortions what would freak out even a seasoned Cirque Du Soleil performer. It’ll come, but it’ll take some time. Sorry. —Jeffrey
I quite like the new plug in, and I like creating sets to match my flickr sets and just dragging photos onto these.
I confess, though that I miss being able to simply click on all the groups that I belong to and have my photos uploaded to them automatically. There doesn’t seem to be a way to do that in this plugin. (My own sets, yes, but not public groups, unless I missed it).
Also I’m terrified of the “update” feature, with no apparent choice. For example, if I convert a photo to B&W and add it to a public “B&W only” group and then some day later on, want to play around and see what it looks like in color again, I’ll end up being banned by the group for having a color photo in the B&W group. Or am I missing an option somewhere?
Publish is not appropriate for everything… sounds like you might want to use the normal export (in which you can still click groups) for some things, such as your B&W-group photos. —Jeffrey
Dave sez:
Create a set on Flickr with a single image (doesn’t matter what), then in Lightroom create a publish set with whatever photos you want, and Publish. Go back to Flickr, remove that single image.
That works, but is such a painful kludge… )-: —Jeffrey
I was wondering why, when setting up the publish manager, i’m limited to a quality setting of 92% and get oddly chastised (Can’t save changes Do you REALLY need that quality setting? See “Flickr: Upload Destination” section) if i pick my (apparently naïve) default of 95%.
I realize that the quality difference is likely negligible (and all in my head), but why prevent the manager from being saved otherwise (can’t save or won’t save) Adobe’s manager has no problem with the setting, why would this one?
This would also probably be no big deal if the Upload Destination section was easy to find and rationalized the decision in some way, but i looked around and got a bit frustrated
Am i missing something? In future iterations, may i ask that you please not ask a question of the user that he can’t reply to in any way from within the actual ui. Here i am on your comment board because i’m trying to find a way of saying “yes, i do want that quality setting, that’s why i picked it. Now what?” It would be one thing to actually stop the slider at 92 and have done with, but to actually make the quality slider available and then to second guess the user for selecting an available option (and then preventing them from going through with it despite the warning) seems a bit harsh. especially for something so benign.
otherwise, a pretty sweet plugin! i don’t mean to sound like a jerk, but it’s really befuddling.
best,
–marcos
Sorry about that… I’ve been pretty much overwhelmed lately, and when I added the code to my plugin base, neglected to remember the one case (Publish on Flickr) didn’t have that section of the dialog. Of course, I’d like to add the warning directly at the point in the UI where you set the quality, but Lightroom is extremely restrictive about what a plugin can do. Anyway, I’ve pushed a new version that turns off the warning for Publish… I’ll try to engage brain before attempting another solution. —Jeffrey
I have about 2100 images on Flickr that I am syncing up to your plugin, but it doesn’t appear there is any way to not have Titles overwritten on Flickr without going through One. By. One. in LR and adding the titles from Flickr into the metadata block. I still need to update about 1900 with my new Mogrify settings.
There should be an option to “don’t override field if already populated” in the setup!… OR at least be able to retrieve photo titles along with comments. I can’t do this for another 2,000 images… and I definitely don’t want my titles over-written.
Please let me know if I’ve missed something. The Adobe Flickr plugin had the “don’t override” option.
There are as many workflows as people who use the plugin, so I can see a benefit to adding something like you’ve suggested,but to make it useful to more, I’d probably want to separate it out to its own “import metadata from Flickr” kind of thing. The todo list is very long now and I’m fairly overwhelmed past the point of being able to cope, but hopefully things will settle down and I can add it to the list. —Jeffrey
Jeffrey, I’ve started using the plugin to see how it does against the regular Flickr plugin included with LR3. I read the documentation, imported the existing published photos from the other plugin (115) and ran the deep scan, then claimed the photos. It was only able to identify 209 photos out of my 2,199 published photos at Flickr after it scanned my entire catalog (~80,000).
I wonder, can you update the logic in this plugin to the one used in the SmugMug plugin, where it was able to identify >90% of the photos already uploaded. It’d be wonderful if I were able to replace existing photos in my Flickr stream with the new export settings I’ve chosen for my recent images.
Thank you for another wonderful plugin!
Hi Jeffrey… this is a *great* plugin and makes my life using Lightroom & Flickr soooo much easier.
One question I do have is what to do after a reinstall. Every six months or so, I reinstall my OS (Mac) just to keep things neat & tidy. I then reinstall Lightroom (v3), move my Pictures folder back to where it belongs, and fire up Lightroom. Since the LR catalog keeps track of the images, I don’t have much trouble there. What concerns me is that every time I reinstall, I have to put my plugins back into the Plugin manager. I fear when I do this with the Flickr plugin, I won’t be able to keep my Flickr Published Collections in line.
How do I ensure that when I reinstall my Mac & LR3, then add the Flickr Plugin, that I don’t lose my connection to Flickr?
Thanks!
Mike
Don’t worry, it’s all kept in the catalog. (Reinstalling OSX every six months sure seems to be overkill unless you have some kind of public machine…. it’s not Windows, after all!
)—Jeffrey
I think the answer to this question is implied above, but I’ll ask to be sure. If I create a publish collection for set A and another for set B, then I drag one photo into both publish collections – does it upload the photo once and add it to both sets?
From what I read I expect the first publish action would upload the photo and add it to that set, then the second publish action would note the photo did not need uploading and simply add it to the second set.
Yes, the photo will be uploaded only once per Publish Service, even if it’s in multiple collections and groups. —Jeffrey
Hi,
Nice plugin! Keep up the good work please!
I have a problem with the publish feature or maybe I don’t use it right. I have a new set of pictures I would like to publish on flickr. Since there’s no way to create a new flickr photoset in Lightroom, I have to create it on flickr before being able to link it with a new publish collection in Lightroom, but the problem is that I can’t create an empty photoset on flickr… So I have to do an export anyway before I can use the publish feature, which in my opinion render the publish feature far less attractive… Cause I have to do the operation 2 times…. The only advantage becomes the ability to update the picture in flickr if I make any change in Lightroom, which I rarely do.
Would be great if the collections and collection sets in Lightroom could be automatically exported to sets and collections in flickr Btw, it’s a bit annoying that they use the exact opposite naming here! but it’s not your fault
.
Yes, I need to add a way to create a set from Publish. I’m just so overwhelmed with things it’s not happening now, but I hope soon. —Jeffrey
@Strob: The way I get around this is cumbersome, but effective. I’ve uploaded my company logo to Flickr and it just sits there. When I’m ready to sync from LR -> Flickr, I go to Flickr and create a new photoset with that logo as the only photo. I then go back to LR and upload the photos to the newly created set. Far from perfect, but I think it’s easier than uploading the photos, then creating a set, and moving them all to that set.
Great set of plug ins. I’ve been using them in LR2 and now LR3.
Win7, LR3, Plug in 20100727.197
I read over the manual twice and I don’t know if I missed this or miss understood.
Currently I only have one photostream defined under your plugin (clalled the default of flickr photostream). On Flickr I have many sets, most of which were created in LR2 with your older plug in.
So today, if I drag a photo to the JF flickr photostream service and publish, the photo is published to flickr, but doesn’t go to any flickr set. I need to organize photos to sets manually. Correct? (this works as I’d expect)
But, if I use the “export to flickr” option (your plug in), then I can define the set (new or existing), but it doesn’t move to the published stream. Correct? (this isn’t what I expected, I expected the published service photostream to be updated- similar to how the initial install of your plugin knew what I had previously done with your plugin in LR2)
I guess I am looking for more documentation/direction around adding in new photos. i.e. when adding to new sets. Adding to existing sets. Etc.
It’s pretty straightforward to manage existing sets… you create a published collection for each set, and drag photos to it when you want to publish to that set. The uploaded photo is generated with the export parameters as per the Publish Service. If you export via the export dialog, nothing happens with the publish service because if you wanted it to go out via the publish service, you’d send it that way, so if you’re exporting via the export dialog (because, for example, you want to upload at a different size or quality), the publish service steps aside. There’s currently no way to create new sets from Publish, but it’s high on the todo list to remedy… —Jeffrey
Hi Jeffrey,
I just started using the built-in Flickr publishing plug-in that ships with LR3, and just found your plug-ins. I hope these aren’t two dumb questions.
I notice that your plug-in has extensive metadata settings, so, for example, I can set the Caption in the LR exif panel to show up as the Description on Flickr (of Facebook, I imagine).
Now, I am assuming the built-in plug-in can’t do that, because I have tried it and the exif Caption I put in LR doesn’t show up on Flickr.
You’ll have to give it a try… I don’t use the built-in Flickr plugin, so don’t know what it can/can’t do.
Second, when you say that this publish service of yours synchs the photos on LR and Flickr, does that mean that any photo description I put in on Flickr will also be imported into my LR exif for the photo? If I already have photos up on Flickr, do I need to republish them through your plug-in, or can your plug-in detect the Flickr caption data that should be showing up in LR but isn’t?
The plugin does not import metadata back from Flickr to Lightroom. But it can sync up photos… see the Publish docs.
Finally, I would like my Facebook and Flickr photos to be synched. If I publish them both with identically configured publish settings in both plug-ins, it should effectively do that, right?
It should, but be sure to see the caveats (in the FB publish docs) about using Publish with Facebook. —Jeffrey
I sure hope I am not wasting your time,
Thanks in advance,
Jonathan Menon
Thanks Jeffrey.
Is there anyway to do a manual sync between Flickr and LR3? I have over 19000 photos in Flickr and only a handful of those in LR3. I was hoping to be able to do a sync up as some of those older photos get added without syncing everything again. Tks.
You can select the images you want to try to sync before invoking the sync operation. It’ll inspect only the images on Flickr that are within the date range, so should be efficient even if you have many other images at Flickr. —Jeffrey