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folder-watch-20120330.31.zip
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This plugin attempts to fill deficiencies in Lightroom's built-in Auto-Import facilities, allowing you to auto-import images in place, in a folder or a whole tree of folders. It's likely of most use to those who shoot tethered.
This plugin works in Lightroom 4, Lightroom 3, and Lightroom 2. (Though for Lightroom 3, you must have at least version 3.5)
The same download works for both Windows and Mac. See the box to the upper right for the download link link (in orange) and installation instructions.
Note: a Lightroom major upgrade, such as from Lr3 to Lr4, de-registers the plugin in the upgraded version, thus requiring a new (1-cent if you like) registration code in the upgraded version. It makes for a hassle every couple of years, I know. Sorry. See this note for details.
Availability
This plugin is distributed as “donationware”. I have chosen to make it available for free — everyone can use it forever, without cost of any kind — but unless registered, its functionality is somewhat reduced after six weeks.
Registration is done via PayPal, and if you choose to register, it costs the minimum 1-cent PayPal fee; any amount you'd like to add beyond PayPal's sliding fees as a gift to me is completely optional, and completely appreciated.
For details on plugin registration and on how I came into this hobby of Lightroom plugin development, see my Plugin Registration page.
Version History
(
Update Log via RSS
)
| 20120330.31 | Update to handle 4.1RC |
| 20120309.30 | Had broken registrations in Lr2; Update to the debug logging to better track down timing issues that might arise. |
| 20120304.29 | More prep for Lr4. |
| 20120216.28 | Added some extra debug logging, and more work for Lr4. Also end a current scan early if "watch" is disabled. |
| 20120128.27 |
More on the march toward Lr4, including upheaval in the code to handle Lightroom APIs being discontinued in Lr4. |
| 20120114.26 | More tweaks for Lr4b |
| 20120112.25 |
Update for Lr4 beta: explain in the plugin manager that the plugin can't be registered in the beta. |
| 20111210.24 |
Had issues with the registration button sometimes not showing. When doing a plugin upgrade, offer the ability to flush all the old copies of the plugin. Added a system-clock check and reports to the user if the system clock is more than a minute out of date. An incorrect system clock can cause problems with various kinds of communication and authentication with some of my plugins, so I've just gone ahead and added this to every plugin. |
| 20111020.23 | Now imports video as well (ones that Lightroom supports), and tidied up the list of image file extensions to try to import to better match what Lightroom understands. |
| 20110714.22 | The remote-filesystem-time-is-off detection wasn't working when there were multiple folders to scan. |
| 20110525.21 | Some windows folders couldn't be scanned... think I've got it fixed now. |
| 20110520.20 | You can now select multiple folders to scan. |
| 20101017.19 | The whole display was getting cut off at the right sometimes. |
| 20100829.18 | Made the revalidation process much simpler, doing away with the silly need for a revalidation file. |
| 20100820.17 | Discovered a bug in my plugin build system that caused horribly difficult-to-track-down errors in one plugin, so am pushing out rebuilt versions of all plugins just in case. |
| 20100815.16 |
Added all kinds of enhanced folder-scan logging when Enhanced Logging is turned on, to try to track down some issues. The plugin now tries to detect and adjust for a remote file system having a different clock than the host system. Added code to allow plugin revalidation after having been locked due to a bad Lightroom serial number. |
| 20100625.15 | Yikes, shaking out some more build issues. |
| 20100624.14 | Discovered a nasty build bug; pushing a new version in case it affects this plugin. |
| 20100609.13 |
This version can be registered in Lightroom 3. It can run in Lightroom 2 or Lightroom 3; it does not work in the Lr3 betas. It uses my new registration system when run on Lightroom 3, which avoids some of the silly issues of the old one. Please take care to note the details on the registration page: use of this version (or later) of the plugin in Lightroom 3 requires a new registration code, even if you had registered some older version of the plugin. |
| 20100516.12 | Update for the Lr3 beta. |
| 20100315.11 |
Completely changed how the one-click upgrade applies the newly-downloaded zip file, in the hopes that it'll work for more people. Rather than unzipping over the old copy, it now unzips to a temporary folder, then moves the old folder out of the way and the new folder into place. Prior versions' folders are now maintained (with the version number in the folder) in case you want to revert a version; you may want to clear them out from time to time. Of course, it won't take affect until you try to upgrade after having upgraded to or beyond this version. Wholesale changes that attempt to honor the user's locale settings for numeric display (e.g. Europeans writing 3,14156 for pi). I've probably missed some spots, so let me know if you find some. Fixed up some UI confusion that happened sometimes if the plugin was not enabled and there was no valid folder to scan. A few other small UI cleanups, and a fix that caused the plugin to abort sometimes in LR3b |
| 20100111.10 | Re-import a scanned file if it has changed (size or create/modification date). Thus, if you move a file out of the scanned tree from within Lightroom and later add another file with the same name, it'll get imported. I also now report only the number of files scanned each time; folders are not included in the scan count. |
| 20091221.9 | Added some heuristics to avoid importing a file that's still being written to disk. Modification times reported to the plugin are a bit imprecise, but if an image file seems to be less than a second old, it is not imported. |
| 20091205.8 | Minor internal debugging tweaks. |
| 20091022.7 | Added a first draft of some rudimentary support for Lightroom 3 Beta. See this important note about plugin support in Lightroom 3 Beta and Lightroom 3, including future plans for features and my registration system. |
| 20090714.6 |
Enhanced the one-click upgrade stuff quite a bit, now detecting ahead of time when it will fail because the plugin is installed where Lightroom can't write (if Lightroom can't write to it, it can't update itself). I also added a progress bar, and now download in smaller chunks to avoid 'out of memory' errors on the larger plugins. Do remember that this new functionality becomes available after you upgrade to or past this version, when you then upgrade with it. |
| 20090521.5 | Fixed a "loadstring" error some users got. |
| 20090511.4 | Now it quietly ignores images that Lightroom can't process. The failure is noted in the plugin log. (It's on the to-do list to expose an "activity log" where this event might be more readily accessible.) |
| 20090510.3 | Added a link in the Plugin Manager to the plugin's update-log RSS feed. |
| 20090509.2 |
Added a "show splash dialog" option to the "upon import of a new image..." configuration, so that you can be informed when the plugin imports a new image in the background for you. You can configure whether the splash is shown, and if so, for how long before it automatically disappears. I've not tested this too much, so I don't know what problems it might cause having a background task (the folder watch plugin) throw up a splash dialog. It seems to work okay, except... .. if a splash dialog pops up while you're painting local corrections, it'll do bad things to the current brush stroke, such that after dismissing the splash dialog, you'll have to undo the brush stroke you were working on and redo it. I also realized one other caution: when the plugin imports a photo for you, that import action is added to the undo stack. This happens whether the import is accompanied by a splash dialog, or if it's totally silent in the background. The worry this creates is that if the import happens just before you do a bunch of undos, you may unwittingly undo back past the import and not even notice. The only option I see around this problem is even worse: having the import pop up a warning dialog that it's about to clear the undo stack, and then actually have it clear the undo stack. So, if this is a practical worry for you, enable the splash screen. I also fixed the home-page url, and the folder-to-watch edit box, which would sometimes show only a partial folder path on a OSX. The report of overall session imports is now red when something's been imported this session. It also turns out that if you reload the plugin, Lightroom doesn't completely do away with the previous instance, so it was possible to have multiple versions of the plugin running and not even know it. It's a big hairy mess, but I think I've worked around it in this version. The plugin also refuses to scan if it's not enabled. I also added an option to restart the watch when Lightroom is started, so that you can have it running all the time. Along with that is an option to throw up a splash screen during Launch if the plugin has been set to scan at launch. You can use this to remind yourself that the thing is running. |
| 20090428.1 |
First public version. Pretty rough at this point. Currently, everything is controlled from the Plugin Manager, which is probably not the best UI. Pick your folder to watch, the frequency with which to check, then click the "watch!" checkbox to turn it on. You can then leave the Plugin Manager and, most likely, open the target folder in Grid Mode (perhaps sorting to most-recent first). Some random notes:
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Fantastic! I’ve wished that there was a way to setup “in place” auto imports ever since I installed Lightroom.
Thanks!
btw, it would be great if there were the option to have Lightroom call up the import dialogue when new images are detected. I’m not sure if that’s possible.
It’s not possible, unfortunately. The Lightroom plugin infrastructure gives exactly one option to the “import new photo” hook, and that’s to stack the new photo with some preexisting photo. I’m sure future versions of Lightroom will expand on this, but now it’s as bare bones as it can be, which limits the practical usefulness of this plugin. —Jeffrey
Jeffrey, when it does an ‘import’, where does it import it to?
I have a file structure, outside of LR…and the catalog inside LR mimics that same structure.
The reason I ask….I have the ’2009′ tree on the watch list (currently ~7K images…take 0,4 sec to scan). Set up to only import new images. I added an image which created a subfolder. I can’t tell if it imported the image, but the folder was definitely not set up (in the catalog). BTW…I have never set an ‘Auto Import’ settings.
Thanks…John
It imports them in place. If the folder doesn’t currently exist in the tree you point to, it’s added. You should find it in the Folders panel on the left side of the Library module. If it’s on a volume (e.g. drive) not currently represented there, it’s added. To the best of my knowledge, though, this plugin is the first and only plugin to take advantage of the (limited) import support provided by Lightroom’s plugin infrastructure, so there well may be bugs that have not come to light, so if you can’t find it after fishing around, please contact me via email. —Jeffrey
just one question.
As i didn’t find a lot of documentation about this plugin, can you tell me the difference between this plugin and the automatic function in lightroom” auto import”?
sorry for my English…
ciao
+Marko
The built-in Automatic import copies from the import location, while the plugin imports in place. Also, the plugin can handle a whole tree. —Jeffrey
There were a couple “bugs” (caused by what I keep in my file structure). Took me a while to report them, but Jeffrey fixed them overnight…(luckily his day :~)
Folder-Watch is absolutely wonderful. Exactly what Adobe should have built into LR in the first place.
The “tree” I have F-W watching covers the entire 2009 shoots to date. I add things to the tree from multiple sources…from CF/SD card (using Downloader Pro); export from LR; WIP or output from PS, web or email reduced size copies from Qimage Pro. It doesn’t matter where they are from…whenever I add something to the tree F-W will automatically import it…and show it in LR in the subfolder structure that I like and have created outside of LR.
Thanks, Jeffrey….another great plugin.
John
This plugin is great. Just a question: since there is no official API in Lightroom SDK for import, how could you do that?
Cheers
Giuseppe
There is: see LrCatalog:addPhoto —Jeffrey
Plug-in is fast, but I can’t figure out how to have LightRoom automatically display the most recent import using Loupe-view. I thought the point was to be able to review your work while you are shooting, but the current implementation requires me to click on the newly imported image to display it, which is not helpful in a fast paced environment which is the norm for tethered or wireless shooting.
I agree with your assessment of the requirements, but it’s just not possible given the current version of Lightroom. The best I can come up with is to view the target folder in grid view, with large thumbnails, sorted by Added Order or Capture Time, in reverse (click the a/z next to the sort to reverse the order). Then, the most recent picture will always be in the upper-left corner. If Lightroom’s plugin infrastructure would give the plugin a way to make a photo selected, I’d do it, but it doesn’t, so this is the best I can come up with. Sorry. —Jeffrey
Hi,
for my workflow it would be best, when a MasterFile, which was recently changed and saved under the same name, would be imported to the catalogue and the last Version removed from the catalogue, because I do not keep all tiff-versions when I work on an image. At the moment I have to save the recent version under a new name (will be imported by FW) and manually remove the old version from the catalogue.
Thank you very much
Dominik from Germany
I don’t quite understand… if you make a change to a tiff master image, I would think that Lightroom would notice the file change and refresh its view of that image. It certainly does this if you’ve invoked the edit of the master image via “Edit in..”. —Jeffrey
Thanks, I normally invoked PS from LR only the first time after raw conversion in LR, so the further changes were not recognized by LR when I changed a MasterFile in PS later…
No problem to start generally from LR, so this issue is fixed for me, thanks again
Dominik
You are totally right, the changes are noticed even when the editing was not invoked via LR…
Very nice PLugin
Dominik
Thanks for all the high quality stuff you have got out.
I wanted to check if there is any way I could “sync” my smart folders in LR with a Folder Tree on my disk.
This is because I shoot a lot of pics of similar type like Wildlife in Karnataka, India, My Daughters, Photo Shoots for clients etc. I need a mechanism to display this in multiple places like Picassa Web Albums and keep those albums updated new content as I add more pics into LR any suggestions and tools will be welcome.
Thanks a bunch.
A Vari
There’s not an easy way, no, because LR doesn’t give its plugins any access to collections. However, it’s easy enough to create an export preset for one of my export-to plugins with settings to indicate “upload only new or changed”. You then could develop a habit of visiting a collection, selecting all its photos, then invoking the export preset. I sort of described something similar here. —Jeffrey
Thanks Jeff for your comments, very kind of you.
I went through the process and it seems like a good process considering what we have now. However I would like to ask you something more…
Would it be a lot of work to create an option in one of your plugins that could do the following?
Save to disk instead of a web service
Create the folder structure from the source in the exported destination for e.g.
Source -> c:/Photos/Japan/Autumn/*.raw
Destination -> c:/Photos/Japan/Autumn/*.jpg
This option is built in to Lightroom… see the “export location” section of any Export Dialog. A related option is Tim Armes’ LR2/TreeExporter plugin —Jeffrey
to take an e.g. from your photo stream
Add a filter to choose images to export from the source folder e.g. Images with 5 Stars / Color Red, Changed Images etc.
You already have the update option.
This will help a lot as LR is a great tool especially
when shooting in RAW
Can provide a nice workflow for most crucial tasks
And is probably as good as it gets with respect to the technology of Post Processing
However, it is not very good at sharing images. I can understand Adobe wanting to control how we use “our” images, use only my slide show etc.. Many have tried and failed before them.
There will be many requirements to share images into multiple end use scenarios – could be Web Services, DVD Slide Shows, Media Center (Apple TV, Windows Media Center), etc. These we understand now, more will come up.
Right now all this is a pain as there is no simple solution. From what I know, you are the closest to one.
A Vari. Bangalore, India
Jeff,
Thanks for the link. It seems to do some of what I need, but I see that LR/Morgify is also updated, so more experimentation
Thanks Again.
A Vari
Great plugin!
I am shooting a lot of school pictures, and this plugin will save me a lot of time
There is one function I would like to have in this plugin, and that is the ability to autotag the pictures when they are imported.
To keep track of the person in a picture I use barcode scanners and a database. If this plugin can connect to a database, capture a name and tag the imported picture that would be a great feature
- Jan-Tore -
That’s a bit too specific to add to the plugin, but I’ll think whether I can make some kind of generic something that runs after the import that might allow it…. —Jeffrey
For us that converts our .CR2 (raw files) to DNG upon importing photos in lightroom.
This plugin will not work for us? Hence it auto adds raw files without any dialog?
Yes, sorry, the Lightroom plugin infrastructure doesn’t offer much for doing import… I can just point LR at a file on disk, and hope. Maybe it’ll be better in LR3… —Jeffrey
Thanks for the excellent addition to basic functionality that Lightroom lacks!
The one thing I’d really love that it doesn’t seem to do is to notice files removed from the watched folder and remove them from Lightroom.
Can it do that? If not is that functionality you could add?
I can’t, no… plugins have no hooks for removing files. You might consider running synchronize on the folder (via the right-click context menu) to have LR delete missing files. —Jeffrey
Thank you for your hard work to date. Well done.
I and Many Many others in the Leica community want to shoot with the M9 & M8 tethered. Do you know if your software plugin will create this opportunity. Have you any clients that mention they have succeeded with this. if so I will proceed and also give you a big positive mention on the Leica forum. You will get a lot of hits from these guys if it can work.
Really looking forward optimistically to your reply.
Best regards
Neville porter
It should certainly work, but I haven’t heard of specific attempts. You can use the plugin for free, so give it a try and let us know how it goes for you. —Jeffrey
If photos have had metadata updates made external to Lightroom, those updates don’t seem to be reflected during the watching.
Is this something that your plugin can do? Or is this some option elsewhere in Lightroom? I can get the metadata for a photo to update by right clicking and selecting ‘Metadata->Read Metadata from file’ but I want all this to happen automatically.
The plugin wasn’t designed to watch for updates to already-existing files… just new files. I can perhaps have it look for updates to report them, but it’s not possible for a plugin to cause the changes to be read in. About the only thing I can suggest that might help to mitigate things is that you can use the Synchronize Folder feature of Lightroom to suck in metadata changes on a whole tree at once. —Jeffrey
I installed the plugin into lightroom 2 by mistake and have lightroom 3 on the same computer which needed the plug-in installed. Now I don’t see a way to unregister it from lightroom 2 so that I can register it in lightroom 3. How do I go about doing this?
TP Woodall
There’s no unregister, so your mistake will cost you a pretty penny… but just one… to generate a new code for Lr3. Sorry for the hassles. —Jeffrey
Love your plugins and your continuing contribution to the LR community Jeffrey.
Interested in this plugin, but a little confused. Numerous threads relate to importing directories and trees etc., but most of my importing is done from the camera cards, into a directory structure based on year then month and day …eg: My Pictures\2010\201007\20100731\DSCF2015.jpg etc.
I import and save to those locations during the import. (Wish I could burn to DVD’s simultaneously as well). Once I have a sub directory made such as 201007, LR automatically drops the photos in by day.
Whenever I need a new month or year though, I have to create those directories. Whew …sorry for that long winded description.
I was hoping the auto import would do the above with the ability to set that sort of structure as default and have it create the necessary directories (other than the day …which LR seems to do anyway), on the fly.
Am I correct in assuming this plugin is not designed for the above …but instead is designed to import “in place” from an existing file structure …instead of from the camera cards?
jj
You’re correct, this plugin is designed to import in place, for when some external application is creating image files on the fly. It’s a way to sort of do tethered shooting in Lr2 (or in Lr3 for camera makes that Lr3 doesn’t offer native tethered support for). The import dialog should be able to automatically create the folder structure you want… you should look into the options more. I import to a YYYY/MM/DD folder structure (as described in my camera-workflow post), and Lr handles all the folder creation for me. —Jeffrey
when i have time i will try and put in the plug in i always have troube with these things
however what i saw at the smugmug meeting made it enough for me to want to use lightroom with my account. looks like it will free up my time loading the new files
i’ll thank toy now for keeping me in the loop. just one more step get it to work thank you
I’ve got a question regarding this plugin: If photos are imported automatically, which size do the generated previews have? When I import my photos using the Adobe Importer I can choose between different preview sizes and qualities, but I haven’t got this choice with the plugin.
I actually don’t know… Lightroom doesn’t provide the plugin any options other than “import this file”. Lightroom also doesn’t expose to a plugin the preview status of an image, or allow a plugin to invoke preview generation. Basically, the plugin is blind. —Jeffrey
Great job as always.
Are you plan to use metadata into the plugin?. I’m looking for the way to look for photos on which there is only one face: 1) Picasa recognize the faces, 2) Use your plugin to add metadata from Picasa. I didn’t found yet the way to filter photos with only one face into.
Your plugin should do the job if it plays with metadata…
Thanks
In the Library Filter, select “Faces” and then “1″. —Jeffrey
The ability to watch multiple folders (with or without the ‘subfolder’ option) would be great. This would avoid including entire folder trees (with potentially many irrelevant files), while still providing effective coverage for all directories of interest.
Good idea… just pushed a new version that allows this. —Jeffrey
We are using this plugin in a entertainment location where they sell photos, for the first day it was working fine, but now that about 1k photos are loaded its taking 3-5min for the folder watch plugin to start detecting the new pictures… Does this plugin have to do a scan of all the existing photos in the ‘watched folder’ every queue. I’m trying to figure out what is causing this delay whether or not the computers need to be rebooted because of a lag in the system or if the plugins response time begins to break down after a certain amount of photos.
Thanks
It does have to do a scan each time… that’s the only way to find new photos… but 1000 files shouldn’t be much of a burden, I’d think. Once it gets going, send the log (not via email, but as described here: http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/faq#log ) and I’ll take a look. —Jeffrey
Hi Jeff,
Would it be possible to add an option to bring up Lightroom Import Dialog when new files are detected in the watched folder? I really like to have the options available in that dialog, and cannot find any way to get it to come up automatically when I insert my PCIe card reader into my Mac.
Best,
John
Actually, that might be possible once Lr4 is out (but it’s not possible in earlier versions for sure). —Jeffrey
Hallo Jef,
in my Lightroomversion 4, Folder Watch do not work. LR 4 claims, the installed version is to old.
Regards
Please upgrade to the latest version of the plugin. —Jeffrey
I’m trying to create a plugin to archive a part of my photos to a usb drive and keep the folder structure. My mackbook air SSD is almost full and I want to free-up space for new photos. Now I can get the folder location from the metadata, but I can’t change this. So the result is that the files are moved, but in the catalog I got missig photos. So the folder location is not updated. Is there a function to update the folder location within a plugin?
First, to answer your question, no, not that I know of. However, you can just drag-n-drop folders in Lightroom, and it’ll handle everything. If the target disk/folder is not shown in the “Folders” list on the left hand side of Library, put a dummy image there and import it. Then you can just drag whole trees of folders to it. —Jeffrey