But I’m a bit surprised by the slow speed because while it’s searching I notice almost no hard drive activity and CPU is at 0% (Core i7 at 4.4Ghz, 8Gb ram, SSD drive). Do you have an idea where the search is spending its time? I guess the issue comes from LR rather than your plug-in but being a programmer myself I’m really wondering what cause this lack of performance (which is still OK, less than 1 minutes for 1000 pictures).

The delay is the query the plugin makes under the hood to get the image data from Lightroom. I’m not sure what’s going on because it’s a black box to the plugin, but yeah, it’s frustrating. —Jeffrey

The following is a serious gotcha (at least for me): I have a series of Publish Services setup via “jf SmugMug” such that all of my originals automatically get sent “as-is” to SmugMug for backup/archival purposes. This seems to be working fine.

Yesterday I ran a “jf Proximity” on my whole catalogue, which worked as expected, except that LR now considers that **all** of my images have been altered and wants to refresh the archival copies at SmugMug! (that’s >8000 images and about 30Gb) I presume this has been caused by jf Proximity changing the “within range”, “meters away” and “direction” attributes.

From the start, I had configured these Publish services such that no metadata changes would ever trigger an update, but it looks as this might be broken.

I’m using LR 3.3 and up-to-date (as of yesterday) versions of “jf SmugMug”, “jf Geocoding” and “jf Proximity”.

I’d rather not have to restore my most recent catalog backup, so… how can I convince LR to not want to refresh those images?

I’ll have to look into whether the proximity stuff is causing images to be marked for export (it certainly shouldn’t), but in the mean time, select all the affected images, then visit the SmugMug Extras dialog, and “Re-Mark as Published”. —Jeffrey

I was going to dismiss the idea as impossible with the current limited tools that Lightroom makes available to plugins, but then got the idea that I could use “added order” in combination with a distance sort prior to populating a collection, but it turns out for whatever reason (likely a Lr bug) that when do that, “added order” does not work…. but “user sort” inexplicably does! So from version 20110103.40 it can populate the collection (in Lr3 or later) and when you set the collection to “user sort”, assuming you haven’t rearranged the thumbnails yourself, they’ll be in order by distance. Rename the collection if you want to preserve a specific set of results, because the same name is used for each search. Thanks for the great idea! It’s a really kludgy plugin (my first non-uploading plugin, from long ago), but this update helps, at least in Lr3, make it a bit less kludgy. —Jeffrey

Thanks. Haven’t tried any of your plug-ins yet, waiting for Adobe to fix the LR 3 import problems first before I do any more work with any of my databases!

The plugin is fine… report it to McAffee so that they can update their stuff. The exe hasn’t changed in a year, so it’s frustrating that they still can’t get their act together. —Jeffrey

You’ve got to realize that it’s not a case of “fixing”… I was going way Way WAY out of the normal path to finagle the thumbnails I was getting… it was imperfect, unreliable, and highly unsupported. I invested a lot of work to get even that much working, and now it’s all for naught, and I don’t blame them one bit because I knew the risks when I went down that path. I know users don’t care about this background…. they just want the feature back, as I do when I use the thing (it’s one of the few plugins that I actually use), but it’s best to consider it fun while it lasted, rather than something now broken. I did ask them about hooks so I could try the same thing again, and for whatever reason those hooks did not appear, but I have one last idea in the back of my mind to explore. I don’t think it’ll be fruitful, but you never know…. —Jeffrey

Thank for the report… just pushed .32 that should fix it —Jeffrey

I don’t think my proximity-search plugin ever did anything with tracklogs…. perhaps you’re thinking of my geoencoding plugin? —Jeffrey