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Jeffrey’s “Export to Photobucket” Lightroom Plugin
Quick Links
· Latest Download:
     photobucket-20100205.19.zip
· Version History
· Update Log via RSS
· Installation instructions
· “Donationware” Registration Info
· More Lightroom Goodies
· All-Plugin Update Log via RSS
· My Photo-Tech Posts
· My Blog

This Export-to-Photobucket plugin is for Lightroom 2.0 and later, and is not compatible with Lightroom 1.

Functionality

The screenshot below, of the plugin's Export Dialog, gives some idea about its functionality, at least as of the initial public release version, 20090721.1.

After downloading, installing, and enabling the plugin (download link is in the orange box, in the upper-right of this page; install instructions are here), you can activate the Photobucket export by clicking on the Export Dialog's masthead, as illustrated here.

You can add additional functionality to the Photobucket export (and to all exports) with export-filter plugins. On my Lightroom Goodies page I have export-filter plugins related to Geoencoding support, metadata management, and running external apps on images at they export.

The plugin also adds a File > Plug-in Extras > Photobucket Extras menu-item dialog.

Availability

This plugin is distributed as “donationware”. I wrote it and 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 costs the minimum 1-cent PayPal fee; any additional donation you'd like to make in encouragement or thanks is optional and completely up to you. For details, see my blog post titled Lightroom Plugin Development: Now With Added Encouragement.

Lightroom 3Registrations in Lightroom 2.x will not carry over to Lightroom 3 when it is released, so plan that you'll have to re-register if you upgrade to Lightroom 3. (That's for the real Lightroom 3.... registration is not required in the Lightroom 3 Public Beta, but be warned that plugin support is spotty and plugins may not work well there.)

Version History

( Update Log via RSS )
20100205.19

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.

Caught a few more LR3b issues.

Fixed the {GPSAltitude} template token so that it should now actually work.

Oops, the upload date/time custom metadata items were swapped. Doh! With this new version, each catalog will auto-update to correct the issue the first time it's loaded. The format used for the date and time are restricted in LR2 to whatever I've chosen, but the first time you load the plugin in the real LR3 (whenever it comes out), the catalog will update itself again to write the dates/times in your user-customized, localized format.

Lots of updates to the Twitter support:

  • Better tweet-size estimates in line with recent processing changes at Twitter.
  • Added the ability to control whether to send a Twitter tweet with photo keywords.
  • Added <title> and <description> tags to the tweet-text template (they use the title/description from the first image exported).
  • Added the ability to geotag tweets with a static location, or with the geoencoded location of the first image. A static location can be specified with a latitude, longitude pair, a my geoencoding-support plugin).
  • You can now configure the plugin to shorten URLs via your own bit.ly account, in case you want to track click-throughs yourself.
  • You can now specify that you want all URLs shortened. The default remains to shorten them only when required to get under the 140-character limit. You might, for example, want to forcefully shorten them all in conjunction with your own bit.ly account, for click-through tracking.
  • The plugin now goes to great lengths to report whether a tweet is accepted by Twitter. In their infinite wisdom, the folks at Twitter suddenly decided to start ignoring long tweets instead of truncating them, but (here's the brilliant part) they still report back to the plugin that the tweet was successful. Sigh.

    Furthermore, they might also ignore (yet report as successful) other kinds of tweets, such as those that are a repeat of a "too recent" tweet. Those crafty folks at Twitter implemented these changes more than three months ago, but in a truly cunning move, they still detail the old behavior in their API documentation, making no mention whatsoever about how their service now actually works.

    Only by doing a bunch of extra work can the plugin detect whether a tweet was accepted or ignored. If ignored, there's no way for the plugin to know why, so at this point it merely reports that the tweet didn't go through.

20100118.18Added two new template tokens, {DaysSince} and {PhotoDaysSince}. They're a bit tricky, but could be useful.
20091230.17Added a "Repopulate URLs" button to the Plugin Extras dialog, to allow correcting for the bug fixed in the previous push, and to correct for photos uploaded with old versions of the plugin.
20091230.16Sigh, it seems 30,000+ lines of code are getting to be hard to keep track of, and I unintentially removed the exported url from the custom metadata (from the 'At Photobucket' item) a few versions back. This should fix it, at least for images uploaded from now.
20091216.15Figured out when the "AgExportSession.photoExportSequence is obsolete; use photoIdExportSequence instead" error was coming from. A bug in LR3 beta. I had to disable the export filter for the beta to avoid this.
20091215.14Allow changing the font size of list of upload destinations. Those with long names might want to choose a smaller size to allow more text to fit on each row.
20091214.13Added the special {NOJOINERS} token to the Template Language understood by my plugins.
20091209.12A few small fixes for LR3b.
20091205.11Minor internal debugging tweaks.
20091119.10Removed a debugging message that gets in the way while reporting a bad network connection.
20091118.9Added an {Altitude} item to the templates understood by the plugin. It's the numeric altitude in meters, as opposed to the {GPSAltitude} item which is a description of the altitude along the lines of 32.7 m. Also updated the Places filter so that it can be used on fields that merely begin with a number.
20091118.8Bug unfix for LR3 beta on Windows. LR2/Win had a bug that I needed to work around, but it's fixed in LR3, so I had to unworkaround the bug to get it working again. Or something like that.
20091023.7A bunch of UI fixes for LR3b, such as fixing the scrollbar and the token-examples dialog.
20091022.6Added 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.
20090916.5

Some UI tweaks earlier in the month had an unintended side effect of breaking the "choose destination at export time" feature. Sorry... fixed! Also, added some prose to make it more clear that the "create gallery" part of the choose-destination-at-export-time dialog is not part of the export process, but merely a tool placed there for the convenience of those wishing to create a new gallery just prior to exporting.

(Sorry to everyone who couldn't contact my server for the last few days... it had "issues", that are now fixed.)

20090902.4

I'm back from a long trip and starting up the plugin machinery again. This push fixes the "failed signature" error that Windows users were getting.... it turns out that there's an insidious bug in Lightroom on Windows that silently dorks certain accesses to Photobucket. Wasted hours and hours and hours on this before I ran a network protocol analyzer and realized that Lightroom was being very naughty. Sigh. Should be fixed now.

One other minor update: the HOME album is now at top in the alphabetic list, even though "H" might fall after other album names. "HOME" is not really the name, but a description, so it makes sense to list it first.

20090823.3Album creation neglected to respect the designated parent album ... it does now.
20090730.2Fixes, I hope, some sloppiness evident in the first version. One unfortunate side effect is that the "visit destination album" feature has been removed. I hope to figure out a way to restore it in a future version.
20090721.1Initial Public Release

Comments so far....

Please make one for DeviantArt too please.
It will be quite popular as DA has dedicated fan following in thousands.

— comment by rush on August 14th, 2009 at 5:46pm JST (5 months, 25 days ago) comment permalink

Hi,
Il first would like to thank you for your usefull plugins.
I’ve got a problem with the Photobucket plugin. If I send an image to the HOME folder it’s OK but if I send an image to a subfolder, it does’nt work and there is an error message in LR like that : http://i594.photobucket.com/albums/tt27/estragon34/Phtotobucket_export_problem.jpg
I don’t understand ?!?

If you get that again, please send a plugin log (via the “Send to Jeffrey” button in the upper-right section of the Plugin Manager), and I’ll check it out. —Jeffrey

— comment by Estragon34 on August 15th, 2009 at 12:42am JST (5 months, 25 days ago) comment permalink

Hi I’ve got a prblem uploading from LIghtroom into Photobucket – receive an error message ‘Authentication failed signature check failed’.

Tried reloading the plug in and checked all the log in details but to no avail…

I am thinking about changing the password on photobucket in case its that but thought I’d check in with you first

thanks Ben (London)

That sounds like a bug in my plugin…. if you get it again, please send the plugin log (via the “Send to Jeffrey” button in the upper-right section of the plugin manager). —Jeffrey

— comment by BenB on August 18th, 2009 at 3:51am JST (5 months, 22 days ago) comment permalink

Hi. I got that message too and did send the plugin log. Any update?

I have not been able to reproduce the errors, though I try to replicate everything I’ve seen in the logs. I’m a bit stumped. I just pushed a new version to fix something else, so it wouldn’t hurt to give it a try, but I don’t think I’ve yet fixed the “failed signature check” errors, which I don’t get. —Jeffrey

— comment by TimK on August 24th, 2009 at 9:59am JST (5 months, 16 days ago) comment permalink

On trying to use the plug in it hangs when trying to d/load my album list from Photobucket. and then times out. Any ideas what the problem is?

Where do I enter my un and pw for my Photobucket a/c?

Tom

You don’t enter your password and such in the plugin… there’s a browser-based dance you have to do. See the top section of the Export Dialog to authenticate the first time you use it. —Jeffrey

— comment by Tom on September 5th, 2009 at 3:56pm JST (5 months, 4 days ago) comment permalink

Thank you very much for your quick answer and your update it works very well now !

— comment by Estragon34 on September 10th, 2009 at 9:30am JST (5 months ago) comment permalink

I am using LR 3b, and I too am getting the “Failed Signature” error for Photobucket, and was wondering if this issue was fixed?

Thanks for all the great work on the plug-ins!!

Garen

It works for me… if you get it again, send the plugin log (via the “Send to Jeffrey” button in the plugin manager). —Jeffrey

— comment by Garen on November 10th, 2009 at 5:37am JST (3 months ago) comment permalink
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