Comments on: Jeffrey’s “Folder Watch” Lightroom Plugin

By: Jamesk

Jamesk — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 15:50:38 +0000

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

By: Wes Neuenschwander

Wes Neuenschwander — Mon, 16 May 2011 16:23:56 +0000

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

By: Alvgarci

Alvgarci — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 22:44:57 +0000

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

By: Michael K

Michael K — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 11:10:58 +0000

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

By: franmcob

franmcob — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 04:37:57 +0000

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

By: jjay

jjay — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 03:26:56 +0000

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

By: TP Woodall

TP Woodall — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 20:42:54 +0000

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

By: Michael O'Rourke

Michael O'Rourke — Tue, 25 May 2010 02:20:13 +0000

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

By: Neville

Neville — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 01:06:56 +0000

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

By: Michael O'Rourke

Michael O'Rourke — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:22:41 +0000

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