Jeffrey’s “Export to PicasaWeb” Lightroom Plugin

Google has started to dismantle PicasaWeb, and many features no longer work. If you use PicasaWeb, you should migrate away immediately.

Google has stated that they have no plans to release an API for Google Photos, so a Lightroom plugin for Google Photos is highly unlikely to materialize.

This plugin allows you to export images from Lightroom directly to your Google PicasaWeb (AKA “Google Photos”) account.

This plugin works in Lightroom Classic, and older versions as far back as Lightroom 3, though some features depend on the version of Lightroom.

The same download works for both Windows and Mac. See the box to the upper right for the download link (in orange) and installation instructions.

Please see the FAQ and known issues before reporting bugs. If this is your first look at my export plugins, please see the announcement post for an overview and some important information.

When run in Lightroom 3 or later, there is full support for Lightroom's new Publish feature. See the manual for Publish to PicasaWeb for details.

Google Plus (G+)

Google doesn't yet provide an API for third-party apps to upload to Google Plus, but you can sort of get some G+ interaction via uploading through PicasaWeb; see this FAQ 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.

Note: a Lightroom major upgrade, such as from Lr10 to Lr11 de-registers the plugin in the upgraded version, so if you want to maintain registration, a new ($0.01 if you like) registration code is needed in the upgraded version. It makes for a hassle every couple of years, I know. Sorry. See this note for details.

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 )

20171019.293

Oops, more Lr7 stuff.

20171019.292

Probably one of the last updates for this plugin, since Google has abandoned PicasaWeb. This update allows the plugin to work in Lr7.

20170621.291

Added the Newline template token.

Enhanced the FolderName token

Added the "only if it has a value" feature to template tokens.

20170309.290

Added the following tokens to the template tokens that my plugins understand: Artworks, ArtworkTitle, ArtworkCopyright, ArtworkSource, ArtworkCreator, ArtworkDateCreated, ArtworkInventoryNum

20170217.289

Tell users that Google is shutting PicasaWeb down, so most things don't work anymore.

20170130.288

Uploads had suddenly stopped working, and it seemed like it was because Google had abandoned PicasaWeb, and that may still be the case, but thanks to Rob Jones over at Lightroom plugin provider New P Products for cluing me in on an upload method that still actually works.

20170109.287

Oops, yesterday's update caused all photos sent to Twitter to be marked as sensitive.

20170108.286

Retooled to use a new Twitter API, allowing photos not to take up any characters in a tweet.

Added the following tokens to the templates that my plugins understand: FileModYYYY, FileModYY, FileModMM, FileModDD, FileModHH, FileModMIN, FileModSS, FileYYYY, FileYY, FileMM, FileDD, FileHH, FileMIN, FileSS, Weekday, Wday, weekday, wday.

Fix for Lightroom 2. Support for older versions of Lightroom will be stopped soon.

Got around a situation where Lighroom would crash duing an export of large images.

Better dialog real-estate managment for the meatadata section.

Fixed a bug with the keyword tables in the LUA token.

20160620.285

Fixed how custom {People} formatting works with people keywords that have no birthday associated with them.

Try to avoid yet another place where Lightroom gets hung because it can't handle certain kinds of dialogs at the same time.

Fix to get around a Mac display issue with Lr6 on OSX.

Added Russian-langauge support for the People-Support {People} tag.

Added the {FilenameNumber} token to the templates that my plugins understand.

Some updates to support Lr2. Lr2 is sufficiently old that I will drop support for it soon.

20151215.284

Added ChildOf and DescendantOf filters to the {Keywords} and {KeywordsAll} template tokens that my plugins understand.

Fixed a bug with the 'edit saved credentials' dialog.

20151109.283

Well, I learned two new things today. One is that Lightroom doesn't filter bogus latitude and longitude data during import, and the other is that uploads to PicasaWeb with bogus location data fail very ungracefully.

20151019.282

Updated the Caption part of the dialog to show up to three lines of text, and the full text in the tooltip.

Added {SpeedKPH} and {SpeedMPH} to the list of template tokens supported by my plugins.

The {People} token wasn't working properly for some keywords without a registered birthday.

Updated Twitter support to better count lengths of tweets that include URLs.

20150612.281 Try to navigate better the rat's nest of conflicting data that is Lightroom's “understanding” of a photo's capture time.
20150517.280

Fixed the "SpecPeople:259: attemt to index al nil value" error.

UI fix for OSX 10.9

Fixed an assert-failure bug that could happen when editing a collection's settings.

20150206.279

In the POODLE-vunerability dialog, display a raw URL of a page on my site that discusses the issue, so that folks can be independently sure that the dialog is indeed from me and not malware.

20150130.278 Build Update.
20150126.277

Added support for the {People} template token, which works in conjunction with my People Support plugin to automatically include in upload captions and the like the names and/or ages of people in a photo.

Fix to the date_diff() function supported by the LUA template token.

The Plugin-Extras dialog to resend metadata could allow the [Resend] button to be pressed when no metadata was selected, resulting in confusion.

Updated the camera-name code to try to guess the actual camera model of Hasselblad H5D files, since in their infinite wisdom Hasselblad decided to encode three distinct models with the same internal code, making it impossible to know for sure what camera produced a given image file.

20141219.276

Added an "Export Location Override" section to the Publishing Manager dialog (when editing an existing publish service) that allows you to change the Export Location. I don't know why Adobe doesn't let you change it... it seems arbitrary.

Add a help dialog to the publish-services edit dialog to make it clear how to delete a publish-services collection.

Use a compressed view on the Plugin Extras dialog if the screen is not very tall.

Better debug logging of Twitter interaction.

Very long tweet text could break the dialog display.

Don't allow expert when we know ahead of time that the tweet is too long.

If twitter rejects a tweet (e.g. because it's too large), show the tweet and offer to allow the user to edit/resend at twitter.com

Added extra logging to debug why Lightroom might fail to render for export.

When associating a Lr image to a PicasaWeb image manually, incorporate the actual posted time to PicasaWeb as the upload time in the photo history in Lr.

Registration was broken on Lr2

20141019.275 Windows Only: Add a one-time check for the POODLE security vulnerability, and alert the user if it exists.
20141010.274 Better error reporting with the visit-collection item in Publish.
20140923.273 Added the LrMD5, LrLocalization, LrSystemInfo, and LrMath packages to the {LUA} template token.
20140922.272 When deleting from a publish collection, properly maintain the 'Uploaded to...' metadata field.
20140902.271 New build system
20140820.270 Updating the name of an album to match a change at PicasaWeb didn't also update the visit-url. Does now.
20140802.269

Made the {GPSAltitude}, {Altitude}, and {GPSCoordinates} tokens subject to the geo-privacy settings like the other geo-related tokens.

Updated the Twitter support to allow my plugins' template tokens in the tweet text.

20140731.268 Registration fix for Lr5.6
20140729.267 Previous updates broke support on Lightroom 2
20140720.266 More Creative-Cloud support.
20140715.265

Fixed an issue with Creative-Cloud revalidation.

20140712.264

Lr5.5 and later Creative-Cloud installs can now revalidate themselves if needed.

20140710.263 Sigh, had a bug in the Creative-Cloud support.
20140708.262

Now supports Lr5.5+ Creative-Cloud Installs.

20140704.261 Sigh, introduced an error for some folks with the rebuild the other day.
20140630.260 Build-system update
20140618.259 Comments on published photos, when returned by Google to the plugin, can have HTML entities such that "It's great!" can become "It's great!", so try to reverse-code those back to plain text.
20140613.258

Added date_diff() and raw_time_diff() functions to the special {LUA} token understood by the plugin.

20140605.257

A missing 'automatic destination' could cause the plugin to crash.

Set up the ability to reauthenticate to your PicasaWeb account from the Publishing Manager dialog.

Add a note to the Keyword options to highlight that only exportable keywords are considered.

Removed the "location privacy" stuff from the metadata-management section of the dialog... it all appears in its own section, but I'd forgot to remove it here when I added it there.

20140509.256

Added new tokens to the template language the plugin understands: LrVersion, LrVersionMajor, LrVersionMinor, LrVersionRevision, LrVersionBuild, Location, CatalogName, CatalogPath, OperatingSystem, OS

Added new token filters: NS and LO

20140506.255 Fixed a "attempt to compare number with nil" error WRT album sort.
20140422.254

Fixed a bug in the "smoother revalidation" stuff recently added.

20140417.253

Added the "Recent PicasaWeb Comment" custom metadata item, which holds the date of the most recent comment for a Published photo, in YYYY-MM-DD format. While in the "Published Photos" section of the Library Grid, you can set the Filter to "Recent PicasaWeb Comment" and then scroll down to the end to see the most recent dates, and via that see the most-recently commented photos. It's a bit unelegant, but it's the best I can think of within the severe limits of Lightroom's plugin infrastructure.

Added a new "Location Privacy" section to the Exprt/Publish dialogs.

Updated the location-based tokens in the template language the plugin uses — City, State, Country, Location, Latitude, Longitude — to respect new privacy options in the Export/Publish dialogs, and in the resend-metadata dialog. You can override those options on a case-by-case basis with the evenIfPrivate filter.

Added locationIsPrivate variable to the environment available to the LUA token.

The {Empty} template token wasn't working properly.

Make the revalidation process smoother, especially for folks using Lr5.4 and later.

20140204.252

Enable a new feature internal to Lr5 for large exports that keeps the CPU from running too far ahead of the upload. Prior to this, Lightroom would go ahead and peg the CPU to pre-render all the images even if they weren't being uploaded at nearly the same speed. Now Lightroom pauses the behind-the-scenes rendering if it has gotten too far ahead of the upload.

20131106.251

A complete overhaul of the "Associate Images Automatically" code (in File > Plugin Extras > PicasaWeb Extras). It's still a fragile process, but it might work a bit better now.

20131023.250

Added (to File > Plugin Extras) the ability to check the remote status to see whether uploaded photos are still there, and clear out data from the catalog when they are not.

Added keywords to the list of metadata that can be imported back from PicasaWeb.

20131011.249

Gave the Publishing Manager UI some attention on Windows.

Added the “:EMBED” token filter to the template language.

20130926.248 Oops, fix a bug introduced in the previous update
20130925.247

Added a bunch of tokens to the preset templates supported: ExportFormat, ExportColorSpace, ExportBitDepth, ExportQuality, ExportSharpeningLevel, ExportSharpeningMedia, IpernityUrl, GoogleDriveUrl, and TumblrUrl.

The token-examples dialog had been broken. Also deprecated Folder and Path tokens in preference to FolderName and FolderPath tokens.

20130909.246

Work around a Lightroom bug concerning the determination of whether a photo is offline.

20130829.245

Update to reflect the new (but still undocumented) larger upload limit for photos: 100 megabytes / 50 megapixels.

20130822.244

Added the ability to import captions and map location from PicasaWeb back into Lightroom.

20130820.243

Made big updates to the "Export with Smart Previews?" section; you can now pick to be asked whether to export via Smart Previews, and can differentiate between when the Smart Previews are "good enough" for an export and when they are not.

Fixed the KW/KWE tables in template tokens; they had been broken when using load for the script.

Better handle very long user account names, so that the [Logout] button doesn't get cut off of the Export dialog.

20130718.242

Added an "Ask" option to the "Export with Smart Previews?" section, so one can be alerted to the situation at each export.

Moved the "Export with Smart Previews?" dialog section to a more-logical place in the order.

20130701.241

Work around a bug that causes the export-related progress bar to not show up right away.

20130629.240 Added an error report to aid in debugging why publish association might fail.
20130613.239 Better support for plugin revalidation.
20130611.238 Sigh, previous update for Lr5 broke things for the Lr5 beta.
20130611.237 Yet another Lr5 update
20130610.236 Better logging to try to understand catalog-write-access contention under Lightroom's hood
20130531.235 Made the "fetch my list of albums" operation substantially more efficient for users with a lot of G+ shares.
20130524.234 Apparently, a recent change broke things on Lr2, which some folks apparently still use.
20130520.233

Added the ability in Lr5 to export images even if the master image file is not available, so long as there's a smart preview available.

20130501.232 Update for Lr5
20130412.231 Fix to the Twitter fix.
20130412.230

Can now have Publish collections renamed to match album names changed at Google.

Sigh, Twitter yet again made an unannounced undocumented change to their API that immediately breaks apps that have worked for years, and doesn't even bother alerting developers after the fact. Lord knows how many developers wasted how many hours trying to debug something that should have been announced on the developer's blog. Days later, it's still not announced there. Twitter is not worse than Facebook, but seems to be trying.

20130328.229 Fix for the registration system.
20130319.228

Export could crash if a too-big-for-the-remote-service video upload was attempted.

Fixed a possible plugin crash in Lr2 that might happen if the remote site's servers are failing.

The account upgrade from "PicasaWeb" to "G+" that Google forces requires Lightroom support not found in Lr2, so tell the user that instead of just crashing.

20130220.227

Added support for some new template tokens: FlagStatus (requires Lr4.1 or later), and for Lr3 and later, a bunch of IPTC extended metadata: AdditionalModelInfo, CodeOfOrgShown, DigImageGUID, Event, ImageSupplierImageId, MinorModelAge, ModelAge, ModelReleaseID, ModelReleaseStatus, NameOfOrgShown, PersonShown, PlusVersion, PropertyReleaseID, PropertyReleaseStatus, and SourceType.

20130214.226 Small fix for Lr2
20130209.225 Update to handle new Twitter url-length settings.
20130206.224 Update the Twitter-related code to handle their new API. Their old API goes away next month.
20130201.223

Added the ability to use "automatic destinations" (the naming of target galleries based upon image metadata) in Publish. It's been in Export for years (as illustrated in this 2008 article on backing up), and you must create the destination presets from Export, but you can now access them in Publish.

Added the ability to set the caption on a one-off basis by just typing it in, avoiding the need to make a preset each time.

20121222.222 Seems there's a Lightroom bug for Lr4.3 on Windows tickled by the previous update, causing an error when uploading a replacement. This update untickles the bug.
20121220.221

A lot of work on the upload data path, making it more efficient and restoring the ability to retry the attempt on certain errors.

For Lr4.3 and later, greatly enhanced the efficiency of replace operations (e.g. when republishing an image).

Added automatic retry for the new mysterious Google response “UNAVAIL (GumbyTask: Fife status=APPLICATION_ERROR, message=/BlobService.CreateBlob to 10.165.81.9:4616 : APP_ERROR(7) MigrationProxy BaseOperation rejected because maximum thread pool capacity was reached.)”.

20121205.220 Added some debugging.
20121203.219 Add a link to the FAQ for the "missing destination cookies" error.
20121020.218 A recent optimization for Lr4 broke support for Lr2.
20121017.217 Plugin was blocking export due to DPX-video format in some cases where Lightroom didn't allow the format to be changed.
20121014.216 Added a help dialog when encountering the mysterious 'handle in the wrong state' error.
20121010.215 Fixed Twitter authentication.
20121009.214

Workaround for an "attempt to call field 'getProgressScope'" bug introduced in Lr4.2.

Enhance the {EMPTY} template token so that it interrupts the squelching of superfluous joining characters.

Disallow DPX-format video export, since that totally breaks things.

20121002.213 Keywords weren't being sent properly... likely broken since v209 )-:
20120902.212 Fixed some issues surrounding the "Create Album" dialog in Publish.
20120820.211

Updates to the environment in the {LUA} token (in the template tokens in my plugins) to include photoTime() and currentTime(), and other changes to match the updated docs at that link.

.
20120816.209 Throw an error if a caption is longer than Google allows, or if an image has too many keywords.
20120723.208 Fix (I hope) an "attempt to index a nil value" error.
20120722.207

Better reporting when you're out of quota at Google when trying to replace an image.

Oops, a side-effect of recent changes caused the log to bloat with a binary dump of exported images. Fixed.

Wow, it seems some people using Lr2 are still using very old versions of Lr2 that aren't up to snuff feature/bugfix wise. I don't want to support gratuitously old stuff, so I put a minimum of Lr2.6 to use the plugin.

20120702.206

In Lr4+ you can now create albums from the publish-service context menu, and also create "collections sets" for local organization of your publish collections. (You can't possibly imagine how difficult something so seemingly simple was to fit into Lightroom's Publish infrastructure.)

20120614.204

Twitter support now allows suppressing "Private" geoencoded locations in Lr4.1+

20120607.203 Very slow uploads of very large files in Lr4.1 could cause the new progress bar stuff to blow up.
20120604.202

It seems that Google creates a lot of spurious internal-use albums for some G+ users; these are now omitted from the album list shown in the plugin.

Discovered that the plugin was being inefficient when it fetched the album list from Google, doing so twice in a row. Now doing it just once, and in a much more efficient way to boot.

20120601.201 A corrupt image date could crash the upload at Google.
20120530.200

(See my blog post “Hidden Gems in Lightroom 4.1; Hidden Gems in Lightroom Plugin Development” for some details on what's new in this update for Lightroom 4.1.)

New upload engine in Lr4.1 that greatly increases the efficiency of large uploads. In Lr4.0 and older versions, upload handling is inefficient and large uploads can crash Lightroom, but from Lr4.1 you can easily upload up to PicasaWeb's max 20MB images and 100MB videos. (Note: PicasaWeb advertises videos up to 1GB, but you get that only when uploaded via the Picasa desktop app. The limit to third-party apps like this plugin is currently 100MB)

Due to remaining limitations in Lightroom, the plugin can use this more-efficient method only for initial image/video uploads, and not for replacements. The big win is for initial video uploads, so this is not a huge setback because Google doesn't allow videos to be replaced anyway (the plugin continues to silently ignores video updates).

With Lr4.1 and later, you also get an upload percent-complete report in the task progress bar, and the ability for upload cancels to take effect immediately.

Also added the ability to control whether geoencoded locations are sent along with the photo to PicasaWeb, and from Lr4.1 proper (the actual Lr4.1, not the 4.1RCs), the plugin knows whether a photo's location has been marked as private, so the plugin can now respond to that and exclude the geoencoded location in such situations. Options have been added to export and to metadata-resend operations; they default to excluding private locations.

Update to handle the Mac App Store version of Lightroom.

20120508.199 Yikes, Lr2 registrations were broken again.
20120430.198

Tweak for Lr4.1RC2.

Fixed the “photo too large to tweet” dialog message, which had been all garbled up.

20120426.197

Fixed a potential crash when processing some captions.

20120423.196

Added to the template tokens supported by the plugin: {FullMasterFolder}, {FullExportedFile}, and {FullExportedFolder}, and to match, renamed the recently-added {FullMasterPath} to {FullMasterFile}.

20120411.195

Enhanced the send-log dialog to hopefully make reports more meaningful to me, yielding, I hope, the ability to respond more sensibly to more reports.

Added {FullMasterPath} to the list of template tokens supported by the plugin.

20120410.194 Fixed the "Not authorized to view access private" error some folks got when switching among multiple PicasaWeb accounts.
20120404.193 Allow line breaks in captions.
20120330.192 Update to handle 4.1RC
20120327.191 More graceful handling of videos whose pixel size is not known.
20120326.190 Fix a "Credentials:200" error.
20120323.189

It seems Google has started to quietly roll out unannounced changes to user-account data that completely disconnects a user from their history in this plugin, so I've been scrambling to come up with a workaround so that years worth of work is not lost. This kind of firedrill wasn't quite on my schedule for the turbulent aftermath of Lr4's release, but such is life. This release contains a first stab at a data-migration utility that will help some. A catalog backup is recommended before taking the data-migration step. (A dialog will prompt you.)

No longer send the geoencoded location if metadata is marked to be removed from the exported copy.

20120309.188 Fix registrations in Lr2.
20120309.187 Handle better when authentication fails. Can now reauthenticate directly from publishing manager.
20120308.186 Update to the debug logging to better track down timing issues that might arise.
20120229.185

Lots more preparation for Lr4 (but still works in Lr2 and Lr3).

Lightroom's internal infrastructure doesn't handle large uploads well, and will most likely crash when trying to upload huge videos, so I've not added a warning and the ability for the user to decide when it kicks in.

Files that are offline are now detected before an export/publish begins, and if there are any, offers the option to abort the export, or just skip the offline ones. This is a lot more clear than the "dng_error_file_not_found" error you get from Lightroom if you follow through with an export attempt of an offline image.

20120217.185

Discovered why "metadata that triggers a republish" wasn't reliable, and fixed it.

20120214.184 Fixes an Lr2 issue introduced in the previous version.
20120214.183

A change in the previous version seemed to tickle a bug in the Lr4 beta that would see Lightroom lock up when the plugin was enabled with certain catalogs. I'm not entirely sure what the bug was, but in this release I've worked around what was tickling it.

Attempt to prepare for changes Twitter has announced will take place in how they return information about server errors.

20120201.182

More on the march toward Lr4, including upheaval in the code to handle Lightroom APIs being discontinued in Lr4.

Bumped up the minimum Lr3 version to Lr3.5, to ensure we've got those bug fixes. Lr2 and Lr4 are still supported, of course.

Added the {AspectRatio} token to the token templates understood by the plugin, and added the Length=num filter.

Be a bit more graceful in reporting when the target album of an upload no longer exists at PicasaWeb.

20120114.181 More tweaks for Lr4b
20120114.180

More attention to the new Twitter authorization code.

20120112.179

Removed the “Re-mark as Published” button from the plugin-extras dialog in Lr4, because Lr4 now supports this natively.

Moved the Twitter code over to a new style of Twitter authentication, in hopes that it cures the authentication problems some people have been having.

Moved all access of Twitter to HTTPS.

Removed an obsolete reference to bit.ly from the Twitter help dialog.

Update for Lr4 beta: explain in the plugin manager that the plugin can't be registered in the beta.

20111222.178 Enabled export snapshot creation in Publish.
20111216.177

Better error handling for video export, and for when images/videos exceed upload limits.

Warn about the need to update the list of albums if it's not been updated for a long time.

The Lightroom bug referenced in the version note for 20110623.157 was fixed in Lr3.5, so I've removed the special workaround processing for that version and later.

20111210.176 Had issues with the registration button sometimes not showing
20111207.175

Google isn't graceful handling references to images that have been moved from an album that has since been deleted; I now try to get around that a bit better.

Updated how the Manual-association dialog is sized.

20111117.174

When doing a plugin upgrade, offer the ability to flush all the old copies of the plugin.

Fix an "attempt to concatenate field 'user_id_string'" error that pops up at rare times.

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 website authentication, among other things.

20111012.173

Updates the account-authorization handshaking done with Google to handle some changes they will implement on Nov 15, 2011.

Include the account id (in addition to the full name that's already there) in the Publishing Manager login section, to allow multiple accounts associated with the same real name to be easily differentiated.

Reporting some errors can create a huge dialog box that can be difficult to close on OSX, so this update adds a [X] button in the upper right of the dialogs.

20111006.172 It seems that Google has a max limit of 50,000,000 pixels per photo.
20111004.171

Plugin would crash in some cases while trying to process Twitter-related settings.

Resending metadata could crash for images that had no GPS data

The "repopulate" function could fail with a "must be https" error.

Publish repopulation could fail with write-gate timeouts.

Google sends back "quota exceeded" errors in a non-standard way... detect these and pass along to the user more gracefully.

20110918.170 Previous update introduced a problem when trying to update a photo that has been deleted at PicasaWeb.
20110908.169

Reworked the innards to try to handle errors from Google more gracefully. (I wish Google's PicasaWeb API had a shred of consistency in how it reports errors. )-:

20110903.168 Added {PluginProperty} to the template tokens used by my plugins.
20110903.167 Work around what seems to be a bug in Windows that caused authentication to sometimes fail with a plugin crash.
20110902.168

Handle more gracefully the situation where there are no albums at PicasaWeb yet.

Display the PicasaWeb "nickname" instead of the (possibly-numeric) "username" in the "Logged in as" note.

Some internal optimizations to handle large gallery sets.

20110821.167 More updates for the big authentication change.
20110820.166

Due to the big change in the previous version, all authentications ("logins") from prior plugins had to be deleted and reauthenticated, but it seems I missed one place to warn the user. Hopefully this catches them all.

20110820.164

Huge overhaul of how the plugin talks to Google, moving to a new authentication system that should work with every type of Google account. (The authentication system the plugin used to use was the only one available when I first developed the plugin, but it doesn't work with some kinds of accounts.) I have immense respect for the folks at Google, both for what they do and how they do it, but the API to their photo service is patheticly haphazard... it really is not even in the same universe as the rest of what Google does.

Added the ability to include a photo when issuing a tweet via Twitter.

In the list of albums, added the ability to prepend the album type ("private", "protected", "public") to the name.

Gave the Twitter tweet input UI some attention.

Twitter automatically replaces URLs with their own t.co urls, and the tweet-text character-counter now takes that into account, so pasting in urls of any length now "costs" a fixed amount (currently 19 characters for an HTTP url; 20 characters for an HTTPS url). The plugin no longer uses bit.ly.

Made it so that hitting ENTER while entering a tweet does not actually launch the export. This is a maddeningly-frustrating aspect of the Lightroom plugin infrastructure, but I've worked around it in a way that seems to work.

The 'refresh list' button was missing from the upload-destination list when it was configured to be a popup menu.

Google doesn't allow videos to be updated, so an attempt to republish them is silently ignored. Video metadata is updated.

Fixed "attempt to compare nil with number" error that some users might have gotten in Publish.

20110712.163 Had a minor plugin-crashing boo-boo in the previous update
20110711.162 Really long captions could cause a stack overflow.
20110708.161 Fix the "Export:663" error some have gotten.
20110706.160 Still struggling with catalog-access issues that seemed to have materialized out of the blue (with a bug in Lr3.4??). This update addresses creating a new publish collection.
20110706.159

The manual-association dialog was too big for some screens... now it auto-adjusts depending on the screen size.

More on the catalog-access errors that some are getting with Lr3.

20110703.158 For Lr2, fixes a 'must be called inside withReadAccessDo' error I'd recently introduced. For Lr3, tries to address a similar error that seems to pop up in rare cases.
20110623.157

There's a bug in Lightroom that causes it to sometimes include private keywords in exported copies. The plugin now detects these situations and alerts you to them, allowing you to avoid a privacy blunder.

20110614.156 Better error reporting for Google errors that we can do nothing about.
20110606.155

Better handle long album names by truncating at the beginning with '...', and having the tooltip be the full name.

20110521.154

Added a new section to the Publish Service settings dialog, on whether to refresh remote comments automatically or manually.

Be more robust to errors during the gallery-creation process.

Fixed a bug that caused the export destination to not properly refresh in response to selecting a preset in the export dialog.

20110513.153 Fixed a bug in how some export errors are reported.
20110419.152

Handle more gracefully the error that Google returns if you've changed your password since the last time the plugin authenticated itself.

Wasn't properly issuing an error message when used with Lr3.0 and Lr3.2.

20110409.151

Fixed some plugin-crash asserts that some new users might get.

Added "select all" button to Publish collection list.

20110329.150 Oops, the button to refresh the list of galleries had inadvertently disappeared.
20110324.149

Previous build was broken under Lr2, and some Lr3 installs.

20110322.148

Added the ability to create new PicasaWeb albums from within the publish manager.

Added the ability to sort the album list in the Publishing Manger

Added the ability to select which metadata items cause a Publish republish.

20110311.147

Added support for uploading videos. It's predicated on my guessing the MIME type of the video from the filename extension, so if you run into one I get wrong, please let me know.

Added the ability to manually associate photos to images at PicasaWeb, via the File > Plugin Extras > PicasaWeb Extras dialog.

Detect when Google throws up a CAPTCHA wall, and directs the user to be vetted by Google in their browser.

Added a progress dialog to the “Re-mark as Published” operation, so that it can be canceled, and to make it clear that something is going on under the hood.

Fixed a bug whereby one couldn't export via preset to an account different from the currently-logged in account.

The list of upload destinations was sometimes getting cut off

20110120.146

Added “Re-Mark as Published” to the Plugin-Extras dialog (“File > Plugin Extras > PicasaWeb Extras”). If you have published photos in the “Modified Photos to Re-Publish” grid segment, this moves them back to “Published Photos” without actually uploading anything to PicasaWeb. You might use this after making what you know to be a metadata-only change that won't affect how the image is shown at PicasaWeb.

Fixed a problem such that long album names caused buttons to become inaccessible in the export dialog.

Not sure what happened to the export dialog since I last checked it in Windows, but it was in need of some UI love.

20110116.145 Added Twitter support to Publish.
20110113.144

This version no longer works in Lr3.0 and Lr3.2 because many bugs have been fixed in Lr3.3: if you're using Lr3.0 or Lr3.2, please visit Lightroom's Help > Check for Updates to download the free update from Adobe. (The plugin also continues to work in Lr2.)

Added {CroppedWidth} and {CroppedHeight} to the template tokens used by my plugins.

Add a note of instruction to handle a (rare) situation where one needs to reauthenticate in the normal Export Dialog in order to get a Publish Service working again.

Be more graceful in certain no-response-from-Google situations.

20101217.143 Updated Twitter support for Twitter's new API endpoints
20101124.142 Fixed a crash sometimes encountered while updating remote-account data in the plugin.
20101116.141

Check whether galleries at PicasaWeb have been renamed from when publish-service collections were created, and prompt the user with a note that the renaming can be incorporated into Lightroom by enabling the "Forcefully rename current collections" option.

Replaced an ugly debug message that popped up when the plugin detected that a publish-service collection's related gallery at PicasaWeb has been removed from PicasaWeb, with a more user-friendly message.

20101104.140

Not sure when photo deletion started to fail, but updated the plugin to handle Google's response.

Be more clear about quote-exceeded messages from Google.

20101028.139

Fixes “Spec:343: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value)” error some were getting

Uses with more than 1,000 albums were getting the list chopped off... now all albums are shown, though album lists this large are pushing the limits of what Lightroom can handle.

20100908.138

Publish was sometimes getting stuck in a 'not logged in' state, if you hadn't refreshed your account data in the plugin for too long a time. Not sure why I might have built it that way, but I took off the time limit so now it shouldn't get stuck anymore. Wish I understood why I'd put it in in the first place, though. )-:

Warn about the loss of metadata if the "resize to megapizels" option is used.

20100830.137 When I upgraded the plugin to work with Google's JSON API, I neglected to handle login expiration in every place I needed. I think I've taken care of it now.
20100829.136 Made the revalidation process much simpler, doing away with the silly need for a revalidation file.
20100820.135 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.
20100817.134 Added code to allow plugin revalidation after having been locked due to a bad Lightroom serial number.
20100801.133

Creating of a private gallery in the tools section didn't cause the gallery to be auto-selected for export.

20100729.132

Added an interactive filter to the album list in Publish; it'll show up if there are more than 10 albums. Only albums whose names match all the (space-separated) terms in the filter are shown.

Added the {KeywordsAll} template tag, for all keywords (like {Keywords}, but also includes those not marked for export).

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.

20100715.131 There was a bug on Windows that caused the warning about potentially-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). This also allowed me to put it back into Publish.
20100715.130 Yikes, the JPEG-quality thing I added didn't play well with Publish. Removing it from Publish 'till I figure out a better way.
20100712.129

Egads, the list of albums in the Publish Service dialog was not sorted.

Did a lot of work to revamp the ability to tie in photos already at PicasaWeb into your Lightroom catalog (and hence to populate a PicasaWeb publish service), working around bugs in Lightroom. See the new publish docs for details.

The plugin has long remembered your export settings from PicasaWeb export session to PicasaWeb export session, overriding Lightroom's desire to always bring your recent export settings from non-PicasaWeb 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.

Clarified that the "delete all copies previously uploaded" option applies to, well, all copies previously uploaded, as opposed to some magic subset of copies previously uploaded that you might have fixed in mind.

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.

20100702.128

Discovered some rare and complex bugs related to collection renaming, and (I hope) fixed them.

Some users get "Unexpected resource version ID" errors when deleting photos, and while I can't replicate it myself, trying a blind change that might fix it.

20100630.127

Finally pushing the new version out of plugin beta (where it has been for a couple of weeks), after eight months of oft-painful development. It's extremely complex under the hood, so now that it's getting wider user and additional bugs are shaken out, there will likely be frequent updates... please keep an eye on the version history when you update.

Here are the update details from when it was in beta:

20100616.120 — 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, including publish support in Lr3.

20100624.121 — Lots of bug fixes, and lots of new debug logging.

20100624.122 — Discovered a nasty build bug; pushing a new version in case it affects this plugin.

20100625.123 — Yikes, shaking out some more build issues.

20100628.124 — Had broken auto destinations.

20100629.125 — Lots of changes. Bolstered the separation between Publish and non-Publish exports.

20100629.126 — Lots more changes, especially related to auto destinations and replacing images. I sure wish Google would hire a few more PHDs to destupdify their photo API. Identified that "Import Smart Collection Settings" does not work for Publish, and corrupts things. Don't use it.

20100510.119

Added "STORAGE_UNAVAIL" to the list of mysterious Google replies that get auto-retried.

20100507.118

Added an automatic retry for when Google returns its mysterious "SERVER_ERROR" error.

Handled more gracefully a replace operation when the target photo no longer exists at PicasaWeb

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).

20100323.117

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.

20100315.116

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.

20100221.115

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.

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

20100205.114

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.

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

20100205.113

Lots of updates to the Twitter support:

  • Better tweet-size estimates in line with recent processing changes at Twitter.
  • Added <caption> tag to the tweet-text template (it use the caption 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.

  • Added the ability to control whether to send a Twitter tweet with photo keywords.

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.

20100118.112 Added two new template tokens, {DaysSince} and {PhotoDaysSince}. They're a bit tricky, but could be useful.
20100111.111

Added the ability to set the date of an album while creating it, comparable to the feature added in v99 for automatic destinations. Also fixed a bug in that earlier code that made the minutes value of the album date wrong (though I don't think it really matters, because Google doesn't show the time-of-day on album dates.)

And it seems that I screwed up the previous version naming, pushing it out as 20100130.110 instead of 20100109.110, so the automatic version check for those running v110 will be fooled for the next month into thinking that there are no updates. These binary-looking dates are making me feel dyslexic. Sorry.

20100109.110

For some reason, Google no longer seems to be pulling the photo-capture time from an uploaded image, thereby falling back to the upload time as the "photo date". Perhaps it's just a bug, but in any case, the plugin now forcefully sets the photo date during the upload, so it seems to be working again.

I also figured out how to enable a "replace" function, so that you can update an image in place and not lose comments, etc.

20091230.109 Added 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.
20091230.108 Sigh, 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 PicasaWeb' item) a few versions back. This should fix it, at least for images uploaded from now.
20091216.107 Figured 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.
20091216.106 Got a runtime error in the face of network failures. Now should be a bit more graceful.
20091215.105 Allow 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.
20091214.104 Added the special {NOJOINERS} token to the Template Language understood by my plugins.
20091210.103 Actually get the feature added in v99 to work.
20091209.102 A few small fixes for Lr3b, and tweaks to the extra-keywords stuff do tidy up repeated keywords in the display.
20091205.101 Minor internal debugging tweaks.
20091203.100 Turns out that Google has a 500 photos-per-album limit, so the plugin now reports it more clearly when that error is reached. I also put in something to retry the upload if the REJECTED_USER_LIMIT error is hit. I never run into it myself, so it's a shot in the dark whether the new code will actually work, and it's still debatable just what "REJECTED_USER_LIMIT" actually means, since Google does not seem to document the errors they might send back. We'll see.
20091123.99 Added an option in the auto-destinations stuff to set the date of auto-created albums to the date of the first photo.
20091118.98 Added 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.
20091023.97 A bunch of UI fixes for Lr3b, such as fixing the scrollbar and the token-examples dialog.
20091022.96 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.
20091014.95 Followup correction on yesterday's push.
20091013.94 Google seems to be having all kinds of troubles with their servers and the delete-photo operation. This push tries to work around them so that the "Delete copies previously uploaded" option doesn't cause the upload to abort.
20090916.93 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.
20090915.92 Fixed some keyword-related issues. First, due to a silly bug on my part, there had been an artificial limit on the number of keywords sent. Second, also due to a bug on my part, the keyword order was scrambled. The plugin now sends them in the order Lightroom provides them (which seems to be alphabetic). (Sorry to everyone who couldn't contact my server for the last few days... it had "issues", that are now fixed.)
20090905.91 Turns out that Lightroom has a bug in its XML parser on OSX that was tickled by yesterday's push. I've worked around it in this one, and filed a bug with Adobe. Sorry for the hassles.
20090904.90 I'm back from a long trip and starting up the plugin machinery again. This push addresses a small issue reported today that causes ampersands in your display name to show up incorrectly. I had been fairly sloppy in how the plugin processed user data from Google, but now I've done it in the Right and Proper way. Hopefully I didn't break anything along the way. 🙂
20090717.89 Fixed a "wrong number of arguments to insert" bug.
20090716.87 Sigh, Twitter engineers treat developers like a bunch of twits. Twitter just made a sudden, unannounced, and undocumented change to how they allow external applications like this plugin to connect to Twitter, breaking every external application out there. If a plugin follows the Twitter documentation, it will not work. I couldn't believe Twitter engineers could be so inexperienced or hostile (which?) the first time they pulled a stunt like this, but again? This is ridiculous... are there kids running the shop over there? If they do this again, I may just yank Twitter support from the plugins... it's not worth the frustration. For the time being, this push should fix things.
20090714.86

Completely rewrote how the “extra tags to send...” line is parsed. It could sometimes be a bit wonky, especially when template tokens were used, but hopefully it's more solid now.

Speaking of the template tokens, I added a bunch more somewhat esoteric things, filling out all the metadata items available to the plugin. Something like “Workflow Job Identifier” might not be all that useful, but if you repurpose a field with my metadata-viewer preset builder plugin, these otherwise esoteric items may prove to be useful. For example, I've relabeled the Job Identifier field as “Blog Url” in my custom view, and can now use the {JobIdentifier} token to refer to it.

I redid all the code on squelching joining characters to make more sense (I hope), and included <br> and friends (e.g. <br/>) as special joining characters that should magically do the right thing. Also added colon as a joining character.

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.

Fixed that during an upload of a single image, the progress-bar status didn't reflect when the image was being uploaded (it said "rendering..." the whole time).

Added a defensive error check: try to detect some of the weird error messages that the OS returns when a firewall blocks Lightroom from using the Internet. You'd be shocked to hear how much time I spend telling people "check your firewall and enable an exception for Lightroom...". Hopefully this'll stem that stream.

20090616.85 Sigh, this upload-destination fiasco is a real pain. Maybe have it nailed down this time.
20090615.84 Some people are still having images uploaded to the wrong album, and I'm starting to think that it's a case of corrupt Lightroom preferences. I've looked at some logs and it seems to be a case of "this can't possibly happen" happening. I've added something in this version that kills some old information with prejudice.... if this doesn't take care of it, please send a log again (via the "Send to Jeffrey" button in the upper-right of the plugin manager), but I suspect my reply will be to ask you to blast your LR preferences file and start over.
20090614.83

Sigh, it turns out that a few days ago, Twitter suddenly changed authentication methods in a way that was guaranteed to break every strong-authentication application (such as this plugin). Sigh. This update handles the new authentication style, and includes better error reporting for the next time they pull a stunt like this.

Fixed progress bar during upload.

Added a couple of new custom metadata fields, "PicasaWeb Upload Date", and "Upload Time". The former can be used in the Library Grid Filter to sort/select/filter by the date you uploaded to PicasaWeb.

Because the new custom fields mean a change to the database, the first time you load this new version, Lightroom will pop up a dialog asking "Update catalog for plug-in?" to which you'll want to answer yes ("Update"). Then a progress bar will show up and, if you have a lot of photos in your catalog that had been uploaded to PicasaWeb, will just sit there for potentially several minutes, looking stuck. Just let it work. For my catalog with 48,000 photos, it took about 5 minutes.

I'll add these to my Metadata-Viewer Preset Editor plugin soon, but for those maintaining their own viewer tagsets, these can be found at info.regex.lightroom.export.picasaweb2.uploadDate and ....uploadTime.

20090602.82

Well, here's something new: Twitter support. It may be a bit iffy, mostly because I don't use Twitter myself, so perhaps I've missed something about the culture in which it's used, but I've added something that allows you to send a tweet after a successful upload, with a mini template language that allows you to include a photo url or destination-set url in the tweet.

The plugin uses Twitter's new strong secure authentication, so you don't even have to tell the plugin your username or password. You authenticate at Twitter and grant the plugin application permission to send tweets on your behalf.

A note to fellow developers, who will feel my pain: in order to get this strong-secure authentication support working, I had to code up SHA-1 Secure Hash computation from scratch, in pure Lua... a horrid language, I'll remind you, that has absolutely no bitwise operations, or even integer support. No masks, no bitwise xors, no way to test bits or shift words or any of that stuff. As I coded it, I felt as if I were chiseling NAND gates from rough blocks of silicon.

I felt quite the achievement once I got it working, but only then realized that I also need to code up my own HMAC-SHA1 secure signature routine. It's less involved than the original SHA-1 stuff, but again, filled with bytewise xors. Fun stuff, in a very old-school way.

20090521.81 Sorry, another quick bugfix. It seems an internal change I made to try to get around a bug in Lightroom wasn't quite ready for prime time. Hope it is now.
20090521.80

Fixed a "loadstring" error some users got.

You can now use the scroll wheel with the scrollable lists (such as for the album list)... sort of. It works while the mouse is actually hovering over the scroll bar. That's the best I can figure out so far... it's better than nothing if you're a scroll-wheel user.

Added some new token filters to the preset templates used for things like extra tags and image captions: They're listed in the docs, but include new items like UCFirst capitalize first character of the item, or LC to lower-case the entire item. For example, if you want to include the city as an extra tag, but prefer your tags to be all lower case, you might use {City:LC} in the extra-tag dialog.

20090519.79 Fixed an album-creation bug I introduced recently, and added the hard-coded PicasaWeb's image-size limit of 20MB, so you'll be informed before upload that it's too big.
20090518.78 Somewhere along the way the plugin stopped updating the progress bar as it worked. I've restored it, so now you can see it inch along as the uploads complete. I also included some stuff to communicate with the next version of my Metadata Wrangler plugin help coordinate a canceled export. Unfortunately, if you cancel an export, Lightroom does not tell filters like the Metadata Wrangler, so it blindly continues trying to process images that will not show up. I've added some hooks here to help the next version of the Metadata Wrangler detect a canceled export and not complain. It's imperfect, but I'm hoping it'll help.
20090510.77 Added a link in the Plugin Manager to the plugin's update-log RSS feed.
20090509.76

Added items to the title/description presets: ZenfolioUrl, SmugMugUrl, and FlickrUrl. If you have previously uploaded this image to one of those sites with my plugin that uploads to those sites, you can refer to that copy of the image by reference. Using the tag alone, e.g. {ZenfolioUrl}, it becomes the raw url, or nothing if the image wasn't previously uploaded. Using a =text argument inside the tag turns it into a link with the given text, e.g.

    See the {ZenfolioUrl=photo at Zenfolio}.

becomes:

    See the <a href='...'>photo at Zenfolio</a>.

if the url is known. If the url is not known, the tag is replaced with nothingness, so you might want to include an "|..." fallback section, such as:

    See the {ZenfolioUrl=photo at Zenfolio|"photo at <a href='http://myname.zenfolio.com'>my Zenfolio site</a>"}.

The entire double-quoted part after the "|" is used when what comes before ends up being empty. In this case, that double-quoted part is some text that includes a link to a Zenfolio user's home page (you'd want to put yours, of course). So, if the url isn't known, the entry becomes

    See the photo at <a href='http://myname.zenfolio.com'>my Zenfolio site</a>.
20090429.75 Fixed a bug that could potentially crashed the plugin while editing caption/title and auto-destination presets.
20090425.74 Tweaked how the plugin tries to update itself during the one-click upgrade process, to hopefully get things working for those few Windows users that have never had it work. Crossing fingers. We'll see.
20090422.73 Fixed the caption preset stuff to disallow editing of the built-in caption presets, and added a note to that effect in the preset editor. I also reset the 'None' preset to an empty value, just in case it had gotten edited in a prior version of the plugin. Sorry it took so long to get around to this fix.
20090422.72 A few minor housekeeping updates: the 'enable enhanced debugging' checkbox in the Plugin Manager now turns on logging of all web traffic. It'll be useful if I ask you to send a log, but you probably want to leave it turned off during general use. I also added an icon to the registration page to reinforce what plugin is being registered.
20090403.71

Corrected the photo-date related items in the preset templates to properly use the dateTimeOriginal metadata field, rather than the edit-time dateTime field. It now uses the first of the following that it finds with a value: dateTimeOriginal, dateTimeDigitized, and dateTime. This bug was reported to me long ago, but I let it slip through the cracks, sorry.

20090402.70 Added scroll-one-line arrows to the top and bottom of the scrollbars, to allow fine-grained control of scrolling very long lists. (I've been programming for almost 30 years, but this is the first time I've ever built a graphical scrolling system from scratch, so I may be a bit slow on the uptake at times 🙂 )
20090329.69

Turns out that there's a bug in Lightroom that causes login names to be rejected if they can't actually fit in the input box that's presented when trying to log into a second account. To get around this bug for the few who run into it, I've made the box as wide as I can... I hope it's sufficient.

20090325.68

Big UI changes in some areas. I've cobbled together a way to add what appears to be a real scrollbar, so I've replaced the kludgey scrolling solution I had before. It seems to work okay.

I also changed the "Token Examples" dialog from paging to use the new scroll stuff.

20090313.67

It seems that PayPal doesn't give everyone a "Unique Transaction ID" in the registration confirmation mail; some people get a "Receipt Number". So, the registration dialog now accepts that as well.

I also removed the "Resolution value to record in metadata" control in the Metadata Management section. That had dated back to a time when the resolution setting was not available in the standard "Image Sizing" section of the export dialog, and I forgot to remove my custom one when the standard setting appeared. It was sort of silly having two controls for the same thing, sorry.

The resolution setting is still utterly meaningless unless you use it to actually compute the pixel size of the image (that is, if you have the "resize to" setting to something other than "pixels"). Once the image has been created, it's just a hint about how you intend it to be rendered when printed, but it has exactly zero impact on the quality that can or can't be achieved when printing.

20090310.66 I've added a popup dialog that appears the first time you install this plugin that explains how to activate it from the Export Dialog. It's currently not very “discoverable” (in UI lingo), and it leaves a lot of people befuddled. I hope this helps to stem the flow of “I can't get it to work” messages I get each day. I've begged Adobe to tweak the UI to make it more clear in the future.
20090305.65 Fixed a bug that caused the plugin to crash (and stay crashed across Lightroom restarts, even!) when deleting the caption preset that was actually chosen for the caption.
20090303.64 If there's an error calculating the automatic destination for a photo, now actually reports that error instead of just crashing
20090302.63 Fixed a bug that could cause the plugin to crash when using the File > Plugin Extras
20090228.62 Fixed a bug that caused a plugin crash if my server couldn't be reached during registration.
20090219.61

NOTE: you may need to restart Lightroom after installing to this (or a later) version from the previous (or an earlier) version. Please try a restart if you get an error the first time you try to use the plugin.

As per the ongoing discussion on my blog, with this version the plugin moves over to a "donationware" model, in which the plugin remains free, but registration eventually becomes required (and an eventual donation hoped for 🙂 ).

For details, see Lightroom Plugin Development: Now With Added Encouragement. (For info about what drove this decision, see What To Do When a Hobby Becomes Work?)

The plugin no longer expires, and correspondingly, I will not pay much attention to reports of bugs that have already been fixed, so please check your version and the version history before submitting bugs or feature requests.

There was a lot of internal upheaval in the code, so I expect that some boo-boos my surface. If something breaks for you with this version, please let me know, but until I fix it, feel free to revert to the previous version.

Several fixes and enhancements in this release: It can now track multiple PicasaWeb logins, and you can easily switch between and among them. There have been a lot of UI tweaks to make things look more natural (but Lightroom's plugin infrastructure still places great restrictions on what can be done, so it's not like it's smoothly polished yet). It now has more robust error reporting in the face of network problems.

20090129.60 Small housekeeping update for the new locales supported by Lightroom 2.3. Added more info to the debugging log when an export operation begins, to help diagnose any subsequent problems with the export.
20090126.59 The new scrollable-list stuff didn't deal with ampersands very well... things should be better now. Also added tooltips to the list items so that the full text can be read even if the display is cut short, although ampersands may appear in duplicate (or quadruplicate, depending on the OS)... it just wasn't worth the effort to get ampersands right in the tooltip.
20090119.58

Okay, so I spent the entire weekend working on my own scrollable-list control from scratch, because the built-in popup menu is just not very easy to work with when one has a lot of galleries. I didn't have much to work with, and the result is a bit wonky, but it's much more usable when the list is long, so I'm throwing it out there. If you don't have a long list of export destinations, you can revert back to the original via the "configure list appearance" button. With that button you can also change how much of the list is shown at once, to suit your personal preference.

20090116.57 It turns out that the automatic upgrade stuff doesn't work if the plugin folder has been renamed from its original. That should generally not happen, but it's possible, so the plugin now checks its own location reports the issue to the user if it finds it.
20090115.56 Added more debugging-log stuff to the 'Upgrade Now' button action, to try to understand why it doesn't work for some people.
20090115.55 Added a 'click here to change the export destination' note to the masthead image, because some new users are confused how to change export destinations.
20090110.54 Added a checkbox in the Plugin Manager to turn on enhanced debugging (more stuff in the plugin's debugging log), and added a button in the same place that sends your log to me. Particularly for “the upgrade button doesn't work” and “error while uploading” type issues, this should be useful for debugging.
20081228.53 My preset dialog (for caption presets) was a bit wonky and didn't update itself when a preset was added. Fixed that. Also, in the export dialog proper, the example text next to the preset dropdown didn't auto-expand as the preset was changed. Fixed that, too.
20081224.52 The "Extras" item in the File menu had stopped working. Works now.
20081223.51 Bumping back the expiration date.
20081215.50 Small fix for some of the logging code.
20081208.49 Fixed a problem that sometimes caused errors during login/authentication, or after logging out.
20081204.48 Try to work around a fairly rare Lightroom bug that sometimes causes large exports to fail with the note Whoa, exported image doesn't exist after waitForRender by pausing for a few seconds to see whether the image shows up. If not, then you still get the error and the export fails.
20081128.47 Added the "auto destination" feature.
20081127.46 The counting of previous uploads (for the All/Update/New of the Upload Destination section) was not working right.
20081125.45 Another fix for a bug that had disabled plugin presets (for captions, etc.)
20081124.44 Perhaps fixed a problem whereby the "Upgrade Now" button didn't work for some Windows users. We'll see whether it works when those users upgrade from this version to whatever version is next.
20081123.43 Fixed a plugin crash when using the plugin's built-in preset system.
20081122.42 No problems from the upheaval recently, so pushing back the expiration a bit.
20081118.41 Fix album-creation bug.
20081117.40 Oops, wouldn't let you log in / authenticate if you weren't already. Doh. Fixed.
20081117.39 No new functionality in this version, but a huge upheaval in the underlying code to repair an unfortunate design choice I made early on in the development that had limiting consequences I'd not foreseen. There are likely bugs introduced in this version, and as such, it has a short expiration date to encourage updates as those bugs are reported and fixed. If you do run into an error, please send (via email) the log referenced in the upper-right of the Plugin Manager. Thanks.
20081113.38 Fixed yet another list-of-upload-destinations bug. There are sure a lot of edge cases here.
20081111.37 Fixed a crash that happened sometimes when there are not yet any preexisting destinations at PicasaWeb.
20081104.36 Perhaps squelch a spurious error dialog
20081103.35 I don't know what's causing the slew of networking problems that have been reported, but I've gone ahead and added a retry mechanism. It'll retry operations that failed due to network problems indefinitely, but you can cancel out of the retries if you like. If the problems are some kind of flakiness on the machine (somehow introduced in Lr2.1???) this may allow operations to complete.
20081031.34 Now works properly with the shadow GPS data maintained by my geoencoding plugin.
20081024.33 Added an option to not add Lightroom keywords as metadata when uploading images. This allows you to not send any keywords if you also have them stripped from the image itself, such as when enabling the "Minimize Embedded Metadata" option, or when stripping keywords with my Metadata Wrangler. This applies only to keywords in the Lightroom library that are marked for export; those not marked for export are never sent. (Also related, recall that due to a Lightroom bug, images in a catalog upgraded from Lightroom 1.x with Lightroom 2.0 lost the ability to export keywords until a fix is applied.)
20081022.32 Addressed (and perhaps even fixed) a bug introduced in the previous build.
20081021.31 Small update so that a stuck background version check does not disable the plugin. Added the ability to put the "select at time of export" item at the top of the destination list, as had been requested a few times. Added some items to the template language that had inexplicably been missing: {HH}, {MIN}, {hh}, {min}, {ss}.
20081015.30 Added back the ability to set the print size via DPI and inches/cm. I think it's more confusing than anything (because it has nothing to do with what size something gets printed at unless you take care to set the printer DPI the same), but someone asked for it and I should really leave it up to the user. The plugin now allows you to use any color space registered on your computer when generating images to upload. I don't think this will be useful for very many people, but perhaps it might be a benefit when combined with some printing services(?)
20081010.29 Changed the PicasaWeb login method to not exclude users of Google Apps (which, apparently, had been happening until now). Internal change to the user-agent string that the plugin sends when uploading, to better conform to web standards
20080924.28

I created a "Metadata Management" section in the dialog, and moved some things into that from other sections.

Fixed a race condition that sometimes caused the export destination to not appear in the synopsis of a closed "Upload Destination" dialog section.

Removed the "replace" option, which had been inadvertently displayed (but disabled) for everyone. Google's "replace" operation requires HTTP support that Lightroom's plugin API doesn't provide.

Moved the items in the "Upload Management" section into the "Upload Destination" section, since they are really quite related.

20080923.27 Sigh, just realized that the "check for new version" stuff did break in 2.1. Totally my fault, sorry. Fixed.
20080921.26 Oops, the ability to use my template tokens in the 'extra keyword/tags' area, that I added last week, didn't actually recompute the tags on a per-image basis, applying the tags computed for the first image to all the others. That's now fixed, and tags are recomputed with each image.
20080920.25 Enhanced the {Rating} token to allow {Rating=*} to create "*****" through "". You can put most anything instead of the asterisk, so you might consider {Rating=great } to end up with "great great great". Since these forms result in nothing for an unrated photo, you can use the "|" pipe to provide a default "when empty" value, such as "rating": {Rating=*|"unrated"}
20080918.24 Added the ability to use template tokens like {Filename} in the "extra tags" input box.
20080916.23 Update an error message to reflect an apparent bug in LR that causes LR to hand off a file to my plugin for upload before the file is actually available. This seems to happen when using LR/Mogrify or other filters. Updated the url shown in the "status" section of the plugin manager
20080916.22 Finally have the upgrade button working on both Win and Mac. Since I returned home last week, I now have access to both kinds of machine for the first time since Lr2 was released. I can sum up the 5 hours I spent wrestling with the unzip code in three word: I hate Windows. Microsoft owes me five hours of my life back. Note that you may have to install this one by hand in order to get the newly working upgrade button... it's the next upgrade that should be easy-as-click.
20080914.21 Added a few more descriptive tooltips to the example-token dialog
20080914.20 Oops, fixed a boo-boo introduced in the previous version.
20080914.19 Remember (again) the upload-destination across exports. It used to work, and I'm not sure when it stopped working, but it must have been really annoying while it was broken, sorry.
20080914.18 Fixed tokens "OriginalWidth" and "OriginalHeight" in templates. Added a bunch of new template tokens and a new token filter. Added a token-examples button, which brings up a dialog listing all tokens and their value for an example photo (the first photo in the export list).
20080905.17 Fixed an "undefined global: DestinationSynopsis" error that could happen when using a preset with a "select at export time" upload-destination setting
20080831.16 Handle a race condition in the upgrade logic that sometimes results in a superfluous "You have version XYZ, but version XYZ is now available" message
20080829.15 Added a bunch of new items to the template language.
20080829.14 Oops, left some debugging cruft that results in an "empty" dialog if the logged-in-user has no galleries or the like. Fixed.
20080828.13 Minor tweaks
20080828.12 A few more tweaks to report a failed upgrade attempt a bit more clearly
20080828.11 Whoo-hoo, finally figured out the "assert" problem that some people without albums were having. When upgrading, ignore a status of “50” (which means “out of disk space”) from the unzip the plugin performs. It seems Windows often reports this status even when there's plenty of disk space left, so until I can understand it better, I'll just ignore that code.
20080827.10 Fixed the Caption {Filetype} token (was broken for DNGs). Made some Layout tweaks in my preset dialogs. Added titles to the tools sections (were missing on OSX)
20080817.9 Lots of little tweaks as I cleaned things up. Added a bunch of stuff to the Plugin Manager, including a “What's New” button that shows up next to the “Upgrade Now” button when a new version is available. Removed the auto-destination stuff because I'm getting error-code 500 responses from Google with them. Will investigate.
20080814.8 Fixed infinite cycle of 'assert' messages one might get in odd situations
20080812.7 Fixes (I hope) a "bad argument #1 to '?' (table expected, got nil)" error
20080811.6 Moved and renamed the debugging logs to a temporary folder, and added log Show/Delete buttons to the plugin's custom section of the Plugin Manager.
20080806.5 Fixed {State} and {Rating} in preset templates.
20080805.4 Oops, the Windows versions had lost the ability to upgrade themselves. Once this version is installed manually, subsequent versions should be able to upgrade as discussed here.
20080804.3 Fixed "Access to undefined global: LrError" error that happens when trying to report a login-related problem.
20080804.2 Fixed a couple of internal errors related to the "choose destination at time of export" feature
20080729.1 Initial public release

The 30 most-recent comments (out of 300; see all), most recent last...

Hi Jeffrey!

Thanks a bunch for this magnificent plugin. I’ve been using it for some years now on different machines and have always loved it. One thing I noticed recently though: when changing the star rating of an image, it reappears in the Republish section even though I unticked the box allowing the plugin to republish after a change to ratings (actually I unticked all the boxes just to be sure). I tried working with colours instead, but this makes the images pop up in Republish as well. Any workaround for this one? I’ve seen similar requests for changes to metadata where you explained this is actually a problem on Adobe’s side, but I kinda hope this is different (and therefore solvable!).

Thanks a lot for your great plugin!
C

If you’ve set things up in the “Metadata That Triggers Republish” section and it’s still not workin, then sorry, it’s not different…. still a bug in Lightroom. )-: —Jeffrey

— comment by Caenwyr on August 23rd, 2016 at 10:50pm JST (7 years, 7 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey,

I tried the Picasaweb Plugin, works fine except for one thing:
Can I set somewhere that the uploaded images do not substract space from my Google Drive?

Thanks!
Greetings from Munich
Adam

No, sorry, Google does not allow 3rd-party uploaders like the plugin to do that; they require that you use their uploader for that. —Jeffrey

— comment by Adam on September 6th, 2016 at 1:24am JST (7 years, 6 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey,

For my first series of photos only approximately 35 of the 364 total items that I was attempting to upload actually uploaded to Google Photos. I received this error message:

“Couldn’t render image: readNegative: dng_error_bad_format”

Can you help me get this to complete?

Ben

This is Lightroom’s cryptic way to say that your master image file is corrupt (or couldn’t be read well). —Jeffrey

— comment by Ben on September 27th, 2016 at 11:43pm JST (7 years, 6 months ago) comment permalink

Hello Jeffrey,

First of all, thank you for your work and making the plugins available for free.

I recently installed your PicasaWeb plugin in order to upload videos to Google Photos. The plugin works perfectly well with photos, however I’m struggling with MOV videos.

No matter if I choose H.264 (whatever quality) or use “original unedited file”, the videos never show up properly on Google Photos, they get stuck in “Your video will be ready soon” state. On the contrary, if I upload the same original video file via Google Photos’ own web uploader, they show up just fine. The MOV files are from iOS 10 Camera app.

Plugin version 20160620.285 (I wish I could copy paste the version from Lightroom instead of typing it;) Lightroom 6.7, macOS 10.11.6

Cheers,
Márton

Traditionally, Google has had different rules and different processing for their own apps than they give for third-party apps. I hadn’t heard of this issue before, but with them shutting down Picasa and PicasaWeb, and not having an API for Google Photos in all these years, I don’t suppose it surprises me. Unfortunately, it’s not worth looking into with the impending demise of PicasaWeb. Hopefully they’ll release a real API for Google Photos…. some day. —Jeffrey

— comment by Márton Salomváry on October 27th, 2016 at 10:08pm JST (7 years, 5 months ago) comment permalink

I have what Google calls a “Brand Account” which somehow seems to under – or contained within – my normal personal account. I use the brand account for my photography business. My problem is that I can’t seem to figure out how to use your Picassaweb Publish Service plug-in to associate with this “brand account” . I already have your plug in set up to manage my personal account photos and want to keep that intact. How do I add a new Publish Service that points to the Brand Account?

Thanks — Dan

I’m afraid that I’ve never heard of a “Brand Account”, and can find no mention of it in PicasaWeb docs. They’ve let all this photo stuff wither on the vine, so it wouldn’t surprise me to find that it’s simply not possible. But who knows. )-: —Jeffrey

— comment by Dan (California) on November 21st, 2016 at 7:04am JST (7 years, 4 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey – your PicasaWeb plugin is simply fantastic for my LR publishing needs to Google Photos. Everything is great except for one issue I’ve observed. If I have a photo that is added to multiple collections/albums, I find your plug-in will upload the photo multiple times to Google Photos – as opposed to linking to the album from an existing uploaded photo. Until Google Photos provide a way to merge duplicates on their server, is it possible to implement a duplicated check prior to the upload? Unfortunately, I often need to share the same set of photos with multiple groups (with some tailoring to each group), I’m getting a large amount of duplicates on Google Photos. Please kindly advise.

Thanks,
Ron

Even if the PicasaWeb API supported it, it would be really difficult to shoe-horn into Lightroom’s Publish paradigm, and since Google has abandoned PicasaWeb, so I’m reticent to put any more resources into it. Let’s just hope they come out with a Photos API this century. /-: —Jeffrey

— comment by Ron Chan on January 15th, 2017 at 3:40am JST (7 years, 2 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey
Lightroom cc latest version Picasa plugin latest version. macOS
Not used plugin for some time so needed to re register and allow plugin in google – getting the following error message

unrecoverable server error at Google it returned a normal web page instead the proper API reply

have logged out of Lightroom and restarted mac without any change

Please help

regards
Kelvin from North West UK

I’ve just updated with a workaround… it should be working again if you update to the latest version of the plugin. No guarantee that Google won’t break things again soon, though. )-: —Jeffrey

— comment by Kelvin on January 27th, 2017 at 8:13pm JST (7 years, 2 months ago) comment permalink

Do you know if the picasaweb API has shutdown? I’m unable to upload pictures.

Thanks!

I’ve just updated with a workaround… it should be working again if you update to the latest version of the plugin. No guarantee that Google won’t break things again soon, though. )-: —Jeffrey

— comment by Guillermo on January 28th, 2017 at 5:54am JST (7 years, 2 months ago) comment permalink

Jefferey-

Thanks for the replies to the comments above, I thought the problem was on my end for a day or so!

If I understand things correctly, you don’t have any ability to provide a workaround until Google supplies you with a Photos API? i.e. the picasaweb LR plugin is most likely permanently dead?

Cheers,

Jason

I’ve just updated with a workaround… it should be working again if you update to the latest version of the plugin. No guarantee that Google won’t break things again soon, though. )-: —Jeffrey

— comment by Jason Griffith on January 29th, 2017 at 3:58am JST (7 years, 2 months ago) comment permalink

Is this the API that isn’t working currently? https://developers.google.com/picasa-web/docs/2.0/developers_guide_protocol

Yeah. But it turns out that parts are still working… I’ve updated the plugin to avoid what seems to no longer work, so if you update to the lastest version, it should work again. —Jeffrey

— comment by Doug on January 29th, 2017 at 6:27am JST (7 years, 2 months ago) comment permalink

This maybe relevant from another plugin:
http://www.newpproducts.com/lightroom-plug-ins/support-faq/#27_Jan2017_8211Google_Photo_Picasa_Web_uploads_fail_82204008221_error
Thanks for the pointer. Rob Jones of New P Products got back to me with info on a workaround. My plugin now works again….. until Google next breaks it, at least.—Jeffrey

— comment by Doug on January 29th, 2017 at 7:50am JST (7 years, 2 months ago) comment permalink

Hi,

From today it seems the PIcasa plugin doesn’t work anymore.
I always receive a network error

Neither upload a new album nor update an existing one.

Best regards,
Olivier

P.S: Thanks for your great plugins!

I’ve just updated with a workaround… it should be working again if you update to the latest version of the plugin.—Jeffrey

— comment by Olivier Hollender on January 30th, 2017 at 4:55am JST (7 years, 2 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey!

Thank you – it work’s excellent again!

Best regards, Arnold

— comment by Arnold Lengauer on January 30th, 2017 at 9:23pm JST (7 years, 2 months ago) comment permalink

Thanks for the quick fix !
Glad to see that there is cooperation between “concurrents” in such cases !

JC from France

— comment by Jean-Claude on January 31st, 2017 at 5:10am JST (7 years, 2 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey,
Thanks a lot for the update, you save my day!

— comment by Olivier Hollender on February 1st, 2017 at 3:01pm JST (7 years, 2 months ago) comment permalink

Hello, great plugin! I have noticed a Google 501 Update No Longer Supported error this evening. I am using Mac OS 10.11.6, Lightroom CC, and plugin version 20170130.288. Is this the end of the plugin as supported for Google Photos currently?

It’s still working for me at the moment, but I’m getting many reports of the “Update No Longer Supported”, so the writing seems to be on the wall. —Jeffrey

— comment by Noah on February 8th, 2017 at 4:03pm JST (7 years, 1 month ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey,

Firstly, thanks for the awesome plugin – have been using for years and has been a key piece in completing my LR workflow.

Last night a new issue started popping up. After clicking publish with at least 1 new photo, a dialog box appears saying:
“Unexpected HTTP status from Google: 501
Update is no longer supported”

What’s strange is that if you have multiple images to publish, this message will appear, and after dismissing, it will seem like the publish action failed completely, with no images uploaded. However, in the album on Google Photos, the first image that was to be published will have been uploaded. If you then try and click Publish again, exactly the same happens, but a duplicate of that first image is added the collection (I had tried running publish a few times before checking the album, at which point there were 4 of the same image uploaded, but nothing else).

Let me know if you need any other recreation steps.

Thanks!

Michael

Lots of folks are getting this error (though I’m not yet). I think the writing is on the wall that they’re starting to wind down the service. —Jeffrey

— comment by Michael Shannon on February 9th, 2017 at 3:31am JST (7 years, 1 month ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey,
I have been using your plugin successfully for a few years now but it has now stopped working.

I am using IOS 10.12.1, lightroom CC 2015.8 and your plugin ending .288

The screen message says no longer supported

Are you able to help please.

john

Google is shutting down PicasaWeb and abandoning photographers. —Jeffrey

— comment by john seaman on February 13th, 2017 at 10:37pm JST (7 years, 1 month ago) comment permalink

Hi,

I am using your great plug on Light Room 5 for log time with no issues.

Effective last week I was unable to upload photos to Picasa.
I keep getting LR message – “Unexpected HTTP status from Google:501, insert no longer supported.
I updated to latest JF release – 20170130.288. Same, same.

When pressing PUBLISH – I get “Catalog Corruption Discovered” window with the message: Missing destination cookies.

I deleted all items from JF and selected just few catalog items for testing – Same same.

Also double check that Google does “know” JF and that it is enabled. No success.

Please support…

Thanks

Google is shutting down PicasaWeb, so many things don’t work anymore. The “catalog corruption” is unrelated, but not worth fixing because PicsaWeb won’t work anymore anyway. —Jeffrey

— comment by Zvi Segal on February 15th, 2017 at 2:05am JST (7 years, 1 month ago) comment permalink

Hi,
I was wondering if you know of any google photos product forum post, or some place with a feature request for API uploads.. Just some place one can vent the frustration that picasaweb API was killed without any replacement..
I did a quick google search but haven’t found anything..

also you don’t by any chance know a useful workaround? 🙁 Not having my DSLR photos right next to my Smartphone photos on Google Photos makes it so much less powerful.. (Not your problem, but I guess people here are in a similar position)

thanks for your continued effort and great export plugins!
Herbert

There’s a PicasaWeb developer forum, but Google’s participation is limited to occasionally stopping by to rub salt in the wounds and dazzle with their indifference. —Jeffrey

— comment by Herbert Poul on February 19th, 2017 at 2:20am JST (7 years, 1 month ago) comment permalink

I know about the trouble with Picasa, but the upload API is still working. Picasa photo upload and other tools can still upload. I think google will keep an upload on the long run. So why not fix the current issue?

I’m not sure what you mean by “current issue”… Google is shutting things down. Even uploads fail for some folks. —Jeffrey

— comment by Tires on March 28th, 2017 at 6:25am JST (7 years ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey… using your Flickr plugin for quite some time. Great product – happy customer 😉

I’m on macOS 10.12.4, your newest plugin 20170309.391 and Lightroom 2015.9, and yesterday a weird thing started: On export the geolocation seems to get shuffled with locations from other images I’ve taken elsewhere. Eg https://www.flickr.com/photos/haraldfelgner/34079346025/ is in Augsburg, Germany – another photo from the same export is in Bad Blumau, Austria, a third one in Al Ain, UAE. All locations are correct in Lightroom: Goa, India.

What’s hapenning?

The rest of the exported metadata is correct, eg tags or titles. I changed those to test if the photos are correctly linked to my catalog. All fine except the geolocations 🙁

Thanks for your support!

That’s really weird. Could you try sending a plugin log after and upload that wanders? Thanks. —Jeffrey

— comment by Harald Felgner on April 17th, 2017 at 10:53pm JST (6 years, 11 months ago) comment permalink

Jeffrey I can no longer upload from Lightroom CC to my Picassa Albums. Can you suggest how to move my images somewhere else and maybe a place to move them. Many thanks as I have enjoyed this plugin so much and appreciate you maintaining it. I am from Choctaw Oklahoma USA and a freelance photographer.

Where to move them depends on what’s important to you. Lots of places are free or offer free trials, so give them a try, such as Flickr, Zenfolio, or SmugMug. Some places allow you to import from other places, or maybe just re-send from Lightroom. I don’t really have experience here, so can’t suggest much more. —Jeffrey

— comment by Tom Caton on August 4th, 2017 at 3:44am JST (6 years, 8 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey,

I’ve successfully and happily used your Export to Picasweb plug-in as long as Google allowed. I appreciate your effort and splendid code, but after having googled every other week for a solution to revitalize the excellent solution, I (with the rest of the community) have to find another solution.

Before moving on, I would very much like to convert all collections I’ve made in jfPicasaweb into LR’s own collections. Dragging them is to no avail.

Do you happen to know how to convert the collections?

One way would be to use my Data Explorer plugin, selecting all the collections and invoking the data-explorer plugin and having it report on all Publish Collections any selected photo is part of. In the result dialog, you can click on the “isolate” button next to each one you’d like to see as a normal collection, and the plugin will create it. You can then go move them around and rename them as you like. —Jeffrey

— comment by Ståle Freyer on August 8th, 2017 at 8:15am JST (6 years, 7 months ago) comment permalink

Hello.
I have been using Picasa Web for a LONG time, using your publish service mostly. I no longer use Picasa for uploading anything new, but I still have a large number of galleries still linked to my photos in Lightroom.
Now I am running into a big problem- As I go through my old collection of photos in attempt to delete anything I no longer need, I occasionally get this message when attempting to delete photos-
“The plugin’s authorization for your PicasaWeb account has expired… please visit the top of the Export Dialog to re-authorize the plugin for your PicasaWeb account.”
This leaves me unable to delete the photos. I have tried re-authorizing to no avail. I have tried removing photos from the publish collection galleries and that does not work either.

Do you know of any workaround that will allow me to delete photos?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions you may offer.

In the Publishing Manager for the Picasaweb plugin, there’s a section on delete options. Adjust that so that photos deleted from Lightroom are not deleted on Picasaweb, and hopefully it should work. You can also disable the plugin in the Plugin Manager. —Jeffrey

— comment by Jeremiah Toller on August 20th, 2017 at 5:21am JST (6 years, 7 months ago) comment permalink

Love your work and have bought a few plugins in the past (zenfolio, folder publisher). A question on the Google Photos plugin development. You mentioned that Google won’t release APIs. I found a post with a developer saying that he developed a plugin for Google Photos. How does this work and what is different from your plugins for other services?

https://medium.com/@stanaka/introducing-a-new-google-photos-plugin-for-lightroom-9957ec6a2bbc

It uses the same now-deprecated PicasaWeb APIs as my PicasaWeb plugin, so I doubt it works anymore, at least, not reliably. —Jeffrey

— comment by Magnus on November 9th, 2017 at 12:53am JST (6 years, 4 months ago) comment permalink

FWIW, I have now tried the Google Drive export plugin since there is now an option in the Google Photos Settings “Show Google Drive photos & videos in your Photos library”. It seems to work quite well so far. All Photos show up in the right place in Google Photos, only Videos have the wrong time stamp, but even updates to photos seem to work just as expected. Unfortunately the Keywords are ignored, but other than that I can see not too many downsides (except that it’ll probably count toward your storage limit)

— comment by Herbert Poul on December 9th, 2017 at 5:03pm JST (6 years, 3 months ago) comment permalink

There is a new API for Google Photos, check this out: https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/05/introducing-google-photos-partner.html

Yes, thanks, I’ve already started working on a plugin. The new API is not ready for prime time yet, though… it’s still extremely limited in what it allows, and what it does allow doesn’t always work correctly. But at least it’s a step in the right direction… —Jeffrey

— comment by Juan Pedro on May 13th, 2018 at 10:54pm JST (5 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey!

Google introudeced the Google Photos Library API: https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/05/introducing-google-photos-partner.html.
Are you planning to create an export6publish pugin to Google Photos?

Zoltán

— comment by Zoltán Tóth on May 29th, 2018 at 7:18am JST (5 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink

I think Google released the Google Photos API:
https://developers.google.com/photos/library/guides/get-started

If you’re planning to update the plugin please check the possibilty to auto create albums inside Lightroom that reflects on Google Photos.

Thank you!

I’ve been working on a plugin with it for a while, but it (their new API) is not powerful enough yet, so we have to wait a bit longer…. —Jeffrey

— comment by vynnus on May 30th, 2018 at 8:37am JST (5 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink
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See the known issues before reporting bugs. Also, when reporting bugs, please include the OS, the version number of Lightroom, and the version number of the plugin. PLEASE REPORT THE NAME AND FULL VERSION NUMBER OF THE PLUGIN WITH EVERY REPORT. Seriously. I need the full version number or I likely can't do anything but ignore the message.


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