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Jeffrey’s “Export to Photobucket” Lightroom Plugin
Quick Links
· Latest Download:
     photobucket-20100829.36.zip
· FAQ
· 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. The same download works for both Windows and Mac.

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 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, see my blog post titled Lightroom Plugin Development: Now With Added Encouragement. If you're interested in how I picked up a plugin-development hobby like this, see My Long Path To Lightroom Plugin Development.

Lightroom 3:

It's been a long and arduous road preparing for Lightroom 3, but it's finally out. My plugin registration system has changed for Lr3, for plugin versions released after Lr3 was released. Please see the registration page to understand the details before deciding whether to upgrade.

Version History

( Update Log via RSS )
20100829.36Made the revalidation process much simpler, doing away with the silly need for a revalidation file.
20100820.35Discovered 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.
20100817.34

Added the {KeywordsAll} template tag.

Added code to allow plugin revalidation after having been locked due to a bad Lightroom serial number.

A few users found some photos to always be "stuck" as Modified photos in a Publish collection. I'm still not 100% what might be going on and can't replicate the issue myself, but this version of the plugin tries some things to hopefully alleviate the problem.

20100715.33There was a bug on Windows that caused the warning about potentialy-excessive JPEG quality settings to lock up Lightroom for an indeterminate amount of time. Only way I could fix it was to move the warning to the metadata management section (where it doesn't belong as much as it doesn't belong where it was before, but Lightroom doesn't let me put it where it should go, next to the jpeg-quality slider).
20100715.32

The plugin has long remembered your export settings from Photobucket export session to FLickr export session, overriding Lightroom's desire to always bring your recent export settings from non-Photobucket exports. However, I had neglected to update the list of settings for Lightroom 3, so this is now corrected, and so the plugin now also remembers watermarking settings, file-renaming and photo-stacking, and DNG compatibility.

Added a warning that blocks export when the JPEG quality is set needlessly high, referring users to my Analysis of Lightroom JPEG Export Quality Settings. You can bypass the warning if you like, and hide it forever, of course.

20100703.31Fixed the errors one got after trying to export the first time after a Lightroom restart.
20100702.30Some extra debug logging.
20100629.29Lots more changes, especially related to auto destinations and replacing images.
20100629.28Various fixes, including better handling of virtual copies (created on images uploaded with this version or later).
20100628.27Had broken auto destinations.
20100625.26Yikes, shaking out some more build issues.
20100624.25Discovered a nasty build bug; pushing a new version in case it affects this plugin.
20100624.24Some killer new debug logging, and maybe a few bug fixes.
20100621.23Yikes, previous version was all dorked up, sorry. This one should work.
20100617.22

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.

Lots and lots of changes under the hood.

Added some options to the Twitter <dest options> special code: add simple as an option to have it become just the name without quotes or other adornment; add short to par down the gallery name to just the leaf name. They can be combined, e.g. <dest short simple>.

Added some stuff to the LUA template token: a version of the standard os table (with date, difftime, getenv, es and time), and the standard Lightroom STK tables LrDate, LrPathUtils, and LrStringUtils). Also added a new functions TBL() (returns an empty table), ne(item) (returns true if the item is not empty), and nb(item) (returns true if the item is not blank; " " is blank but not empty, while "" and nil are both blank and empty).

20100323.21

Removed some LR3-related debugging stuff that's showing up now that LR3b2 is out. All plugin-related things should work in LR3b2 except Publish, which will likely change drasticly between now and when LR3 is actually released.

New when running LR3b2 is a new "Snapshots on Export" section, which is basically a built-in version of this new plugin.

Added new tokens to the templates used in my plugins: IfKeyword and IfExportedKeyword are supported for LR2 and later. For LR3b1 and later the very powerful LUA token, and for LR3b2 and later, a bunch of new localized date/time tokens. See the templates page for details.

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20100315.20

Title presets weren't getting saved across LR restarts in some cases (for definitions of "some" meaning "all", sorry).

Changed the semantics of the Places filter (in the tokens understood by the preset templates of my plugins) in two ways: if applied to a string value rather than a number, it works on the first number found in the string. Another is that you can now use something like Places=-1 to round to the 10s, Places=-2 to round to the 100s, etc.

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.

Added three new tokens to the templates that my plugins use, CameraName, IfGeoencoded, and Keywords. See the templates page for details.

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 geohash, or a url from a mapping service like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. On the encoded side, geodata embedded in the image can be used, or the geodata maintained by 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 (1 year 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 (1 year 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 (1 year 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 (1 year 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 (11 months, 27 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 (11 months, 23 days 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 (9 months, 23 days ago) comment permalink

Export to facebook stopped working today. I get a message that says bad signature or something from facebook. Any suggestions?

A lot of people have suddenly started to get this. Evidence strongly points to problems at FB… difficult otherwise to explain the sudden rash of problems. Hopefully they’ll fix it soon. —Jeffrey

— comment by Charles Thomas on April 10th, 2010 at 5:53am JST (4 months, 23 days ago) comment permalink

I just upgraded to the final version of LR3 and tried to install the latest version of your Photobucket plugin. It shows up in the Plug-in Manager as installed and running but is invisible (does not show up) in the Publishing Manager. I have no access to the configuration screen.

Any ideas?

Let me know if you need the log files.

The Photobucket plugin doesn’t have Publish support, sorry. —Jeffrey

— comment by Robert Kent on June 20th, 2010 at 12:09pm JST (2 months, 13 days ago) comment permalink

Hi, installed this with lightroom 3.2 RC earlier and it worked first time – once I realized it was used via export, not via publish :-) The “Remove meta data” option leaves the copyright notice in place. Since I use photobucket for things I want to publish anonymously but my camera is set to tag put my name in the copyright feel that’s a bit of a pain.
Any chance that will change – or do I need to get your meta-data wrangler ?

You need the wrangler… most people want the copyright notice there, I’d think, which is probably why Adobe had “minimize” instead of “elide”. The metadata wrangler can indeed strip it all out if you want. —Jeffrey

— comment by James O'Neill on August 11th, 2010 at 8:56am JST (3 weeks, 2 days ago) comment permalink
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