.
Jeffrey’s “Export to PicasaWeb” Lightroom Plugin
Quick Links
· Latest Download:
     picasaweb-20100205.114.zip
· Version History
· Update Log via RSS
· Installation instructions
· “Donationware” Registration Info
· More Lightroom Goodies
· All-Plugin Update Log via RSS
· My Photo-Tech Posts
· My Blog

This Export-to-Picasaweb plugin has been completely rewritten for Lightroom 2.0 and later, and is not compatible with Lightroom 1.

(See the old plugin page for a version compatible with Lightroom 1.x)

Please see the 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.

Availability

This plugin is distributed as “donationware”. I wrote it and make it available for free — everyone can use it forever, without cost of any kind — but unless registered, its functionality is somewhat reduced after six weeks. Registration costs the minimum 1-cent PayPal fee; any additional donation you'd like to make in encouragement or thanks is optional and completely up to you. For details, see my blog post titled Lightroom Plugin Development: Now With Added Encouragement.

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

Version History

( Update Log via RSS )
20100205.114

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 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.

20100118.112Added 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.

20091230.109Added 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.
20091230.108Sigh, 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.
20091216.107Figured 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.
20091216.106Got a runtime error in the face of network failures. Now should be a bit more graceful.
20091215.105Allow 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.
20091214.104Added the special {NOJOINERS} token to the Template Language understood by my plugins.
20091210.103Actually get the feature added in v99 to work.
20091209.102A few small fixes for LR3b, and tweaks to the extra-keywords stuff do tidy up repeated keywords in the display.
20091205.101Minor internal debugging tweaks.
20091203.100Turns 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.
20091123.99Added an option in the auto-destinations stuff to set the date of auto-created albums to the date of the first photo.
20091118.98Added 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.
20091023.97A bunch of UI fixes for LR3b, such as fixing the scrollbar and the token-examples dialog.
20091022.96Added 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.
20091014.95Followup correction on yesterday's push.
20091013.94Google 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.
20090916.93Some 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.
20090915.92Fixed 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.)
20090905.91Turns 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.
20090904.90I'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. :-)
20090717.89Fixed a "wrong number of arguments to insert" bug.
20090716.87Sigh, 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.

20090616.85Sigh, this upload-destination fiasco is a real pain. Maybe have it nailed down this time.
20090615.84Some 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.

20090521.81Sorry, 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.

20090519.79Fixed 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.
20090518.78Somewhere 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.
20090510.77Added 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>.
20090429.75Fixed a bug that could potentially crashed the plugin while editing caption/title and auto-destination presets.
20090425.74Tweaked 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.
20090422.73Fixed 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.
20090422.72A 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.

20090402.70Added 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.

20090310.66I'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.
20090305.65Fixed 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.
20090303.64If there's an error calculating the automatic destination for a photo, now actually reports that error instead of just crashing
20090302.63Fixed a bug that could cause the plugin to crash when using the File > Plugin Extras
20090228.62Fixed 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.

20090129.60Small 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.
20090126.59The 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.

20090116.57It 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.
20090115.56Added more debugging-log stuff to the 'Upgrade Now' button action, to try to understand why it doesn't work for some people.
20090115.55Added a 'click here to change the export destination' note to the masthead image, because some new users are confused how to change export destinations.
20090110.54Added 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.
20081228.53My 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.
20081224.52The "Extras" item in the File menu had stopped working. Works now.
20081223.51Bumping back the expiration date.
20081215.50Small fix for some of the logging code.
20081208.49Fixed a problem that sometimes caused errors during login/authentication, or after logging out.
20081204.48Try 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.
20081128.47Added the "auto destination" feature.
20081127.46The counting of previous uploads (for the All/Update/New of the Upload Destination section) was not working right.
20081125.45Another fix for a bug that had disabled plugin presets (for captions, etc.)
20081124.44Perhaps 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.
20081123.43Fixed a plugin crash when using the plugin's built-in preset system.
20081122.42No problems from the upheaval recently, so pushing back the expiration a bit.
20081118.41Fix album-creation bug.
20081117.40Oops, wouldn't let you log in / authenticate if you weren't already. Doh. Fixed.
20081117.39No 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.
20081113.38Fixed yet another list-of-upload-destinations bug. There are sure a lot of edge cases here.
20081111.37Fixed a crash that happened sometimes when there are not yet any preexisting destinations at PicasaWeb.
20081104.36Perhaps squelch a spurious error dialog
20081103.35I 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.
20081031.34Now works properly with the shadow GPS data maintained by my geoencoding plugin.
20081024.33Added 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.)
20081022.32Addressed (and perhaps even fixed) a bug introduced in the previous build.
20081021.31Small 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}.
20081015.30Added 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(?)
20081010.29Changed 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.

20080923.27Sigh, just realized that the "check for new version" stuff did break in 2.1. Totally my fault, sorry. Fixed.
20080921.26Oops, 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.
20080920.25Enhanced 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"}
20080918.24Added the ability to use template tokens like {Filename} in the "extra tags" input box.
20080916.23Update 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
20080916.22Finally 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.
20080914.21Added a few more descriptive tooltips to the example-token dialog
20080914.20Oops, fixed a boo-boo introduced in the previous version.
20080914.19Remember (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.
20080914.18Fixed 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).
20080905.17Fixed an "undefined global: DestinationSynopsis" error that could happen when using a preset with a "select at export time" upload-destination setting
20080831.16Handle a race condition in the upgrade logic that sometimes results in a superfluous "You have version XYZ, but version XYZ is now available" message
20080829.15Added a bunch of new items to the template language.
20080829.14Oops, left some debugging cruft that results in an "empty" dialog if the logged-in-user has no galleries or the like. Fixed.
20080828.13Minor tweaks
20080828.12A few more tweaks to report a failed upgrade attempt a bit more clearly
20080828.11Whoo-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.
20080827.10Fixed 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)
20080817.9Lots 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.
20080814.8Fixed infinite cycle of 'assert' messages one might get in odd situations
20080812.7Fixes (I hope) a "bad argument #1 to '?' (table expected, got nil)" error
20080811.6Moved 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.
20080806.5Fixed {State} and {Rating} in preset templates.
20080805.4Oops, 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.
20080804.3Fixed "Access to undefined global: LrError" error that happens when trying to report a login-related problem.
20080804.2Fixed a couple of internal errors related to the "choose destination at time of export" feature
20080729.1Initial public release

Comments so far....

picasawev-20080729.1 does not work on my Lihtroom 2. I get information that there is something wrong in reading the schema. So the plug in is disabled. OS Windows XP.

Regards,
Erkki

— comment by Erkki M on July 30th, 2008 at 3:43am JST (1 year, 6 months ago) comment permalink

I get an error using this version on XP: selecting the file-export- a dialogue box pops up titled “info” with the text of “At line 13435″
clicking ok continues to the usual album dialogue and works ok from then.

Fixed in .2 —Jeffrey

— comment by Daniel on July 30th, 2008 at 5:42am JST (1 year, 6 months ago) comment permalink

LR2 “Update Catalog for Plug-in” message on first opening of catalog after copying files to the Modules folder. Win XP. Why is a catalog update needed?? I’ll update but am apprehensive…

Ah, I should have mentioned this somewhere. LR2 allows plugins to add per-image data such that it can be used in searches, smart collections, and filters, but to do so it has to update the catalog with the “schema” (information about what kind of data will be stored, and how it can be accessed by the filters, smart collections, and searches).

My “Export to….” plugins support all that, so the catalog is upgraded. Frankly, I don’t know why it’s something to bother the user about, but it does. You’ll get the same message if I add (or change) the list of possible per-image items the plugins saves.

I’ll go add something to the plugin-install page that mentions this. —Jeffrey

— comment by Morey on July 31st, 2008 at 9:57am JST (1 year, 6 months ago) comment permalink

Ah ha, Yes I see the “Uploaded to Picasa Web” in the metadata and in the new filter tool bar. Very Cool! I love this plug-in and use it ALL of the time. Thanks!

— comment by Morey on July 31st, 2008 at 1:48pm JST (1 year, 6 months ago) comment permalink

Also found a second dialog “Access to undefined global: LrError”

I have a picture of it. Send me an email and I can send it to you.

Fixed in .3 —Jeffrey

— comment by Brett Michaels on August 3rd, 2008 at 4:24pm JST (1 year, 6 months ago) comment permalink

For me it runs smoothly. No problem so far.
Thank you, Jeffrey!

— comment by Pacorramos on August 4th, 2008 at 1:17am JST (1 year, 6 months ago) comment permalink

Thanks Jeffrey! Works like a charm on WinXP SP3 + LR 2.0

— comment by Denis on August 5th, 2008 at 4:38am JST (1 year, 6 months ago) comment permalink

A little question: Would it be possible to change the logfile folder to other than “My Documents” (for instance, the same as the LR default plugins location)?

Moved to a temporary folder, as of .6 —Jeffrey

— comment by Pacorramos on August 10th, 2008 at 12:48am JST (1 year, 6 months ago) comment permalink

Works like a charm! Thanks :)

— comment by Gordo on August 12th, 2008 at 9:52am JST (1 year, 6 months ago) comment permalink

Hi,

I’ve found your plugin really useful and I appreciate it a lot!

I have’nt found any bugs, I just have a small feature request.

When I upload photos to Picasa (or Flickr or Facebook) I start by creating a collection in Lightroom. And then I reorder the photos to get a better “story”. But it is not possible to select “user-order” when I upload. Would it be possible to add this feature?

Regards

Nils

PS I’ve used this workaround: 1) Export with custom name and three digit sequence number. 2) Reimport. 3) Upload in alphabetical order.

— comment by Nils Ohman on August 21st, 2008 at 5:36am JST (1 year, 6 months ago) comment permalink

I am using your picasa plugin with Lighroom in Leopard. I get the following error when I try to export images. No images to process. All were filtered out. Is this a bug?

Look at the All/Updated/New filter in the Upload Management section of the Export Dialog. You probably have it set to Updated or New, and have selected only images that have already been exported. —Jeffrey

— comment by MVB on August 23rd, 2008 at 12:36pm JST (1 year, 6 months ago) comment permalink

I’m finding that while the flickr plugin exports keywords correctly, applying country/city metadata the picasa plugin doesn’t convert/apply these data into keywords – I don’t think it’s LR2 as using the same photo the plugins export different keywords. I’ve tried w/ and w/out the hierarchical option checked. Not sure what could be causing this, does the picasaweb one not convert/export/apply location data to keywords?

— comment by Dan on August 26th, 2008 at 1:12am JST (1 year, 5 months ago) comment permalink

Works smoothly with LR2 and excellent instructions. Thanks! Windows XP.

I can’t figure out how to rate it on the Adobe Website, but will give it five stars if there is a way.

— comment by Wes Rishel on August 26th, 2008 at 2:10am JST (1 year, 5 months ago) comment permalink

It’s so great someone creates this free plugins! Thank you very much Jeffrey!

And one question: is it possible to upload your pictures without “tags” to Picasa? I want my tags in Lightroom, but I don’t want other people to see them online. I thought it was a feature before, but maybe i’m wrong?

Within Lightroom, you can mark each tag as to whether it should / shouldn’t be part of an export. —Jeffrey

— comment by Sam on August 27th, 2008 at 7:26pm JST (1 year, 5 months ago) comment permalink

Thanks so much for making your lightroom plugins freely available to everyone. I just sent you a little something to show my appreciation for your great service and outstanding workflow tools.

— comment by Tom G on September 3rd, 2008 at 12:26am JST (1 year, 5 months ago) comment permalink

Great tool,
but it would be even more great if it was possible to sort the list of album fetched from Picasa Web. I have about 30-50 albums and it is bit time consuming to manual search to list of albums.

So either, sort alphabetically or maybe search by typing.

Are the three options directly under the album dropdown (that allow you to sort alphabetically, by recentness of use, or by recentness of creation) not sufficient? —Jeffrey

— comment by Henrik on September 9th, 2008 at 2:15am JST (1 year, 5 months ago) comment permalink

Hi,

First of all, thanks for the plugin!

One quick note–it doesn’t seem to be uploading all of the selected tags to Picasa Web Albums. Sometimes in lightroom I’ll have five or six tags on an image, but it will only upload two. If I retry and retry, it will always upload the same two tags. Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Robby

Are you sure it’s not the Lightroom keyword bug mentioned in the known issues? —Jeffrey

— comment by Robby on September 15th, 2008 at 4:51am JST (1 year, 5 months ago) comment permalink

Plugin Manager Update button doesn’t work for me.
- Open Plugin Manager
- Picasa Plugin reports Version xxxx is available
- Version yyyyyy is installed
- Click the [Upgrade Now] button. Upgrade In Place dialog is displayed.
- Click [Download & Install Now] button
- seems to work for a bit and reports Version yyyyyy has been installed.

The only way I have been able to upgrade is manually DL zip file, delete old and replace with new.

Windows XP SP3
LR2 obviously

Thanks!

Sadly, I had a bug in the auto-upgrade stuff in the old versions. It’s all fixed now, but people still have to upgrade manually to the fixed version to, er, get a fixed version. (By the way, I should point out that none of this upgrade stuff is built into Lightroom… the plugin does it all itself.) —Jeffrey

— comment by Morey on September 19th, 2008 at 9:44am JST (1 year, 5 months ago) comment permalink

Since .24 mine has been updating fine from the Plugin Manager. I too am on LR2.1 RC1.

— comment by Morey on September 23rd, 2008 at 12:54pm JST (1 year, 5 months ago) comment permalink

Downloaded version 20080923.27 and tried LR 2.0 plug in manager. The plug in manager wants some filed with a .lrplugin extension and there are none to be found. Am I doing something wrong or did I download the wrong file? Thanks.

The name of the folder left after unzipping ends with .lrplugin. That’s the plugin. —Jeffrey

— comment by Anthony Ahearn on September 24th, 2008 at 1:32am JST (1 year, 5 months ago) comment permalink

I can’t log in to PicasaWeb via your plugin:

Mac OS X 10.5.4
Lightroom 2.1 RC1
picasaweb-20080924.28

I suspect this is caused by one of two things:

1. The fact that I’m using an early release of 2.1; or
2. I have two Google IDs with the same e-mail address (the same one I used to submit this comment), which could be confusing your plug-in, or whatever Google service you try to authenticate with.

If it’s #1, then this might be an early preview suggesting your plugin might break for everyone when 2.1 is released. The rest of my post works with the assumption that #2 is happening (which seems more likely, for reasons discussed below):

* I have a normal “gmail-style” Google ID. This is what PicasaWeb uses when I try to log in on the web site (it only accepts this password with my e-mail address). Your plugin rejects these credentials as though they were invalid (BadAuthentication).
* I also have a “Google Apps for Your Domain” account with the same e-mail address. This account (password) doesn’t work with PicasaWeb. When I try to use this password with your plug-in, I get a very different error message:

INTERNAL PLUGIN ERROR
PicasaWeb login aborted

It’s as though the service you’re trying to log into is confused about which version of my ID it should try to use, and when it (wrongly) tries to use the Google Apps account, either PicasaWeb or your plugin chokes.

This “duality” of Google accounts has always been a source of frustration, because applications can’t treat them as equivalent, and sometimes it’s not clear which one they should use if an ambiguity exists; please feel free to complain to Google if they’re doing something wrong here, or if poor documentation allowed you to do something wrong. Thanks for your help.

(With David’s help offline, I was able to address this. The fix appears in .29 —Jeffrey)

— comment by David Nesting on October 4th, 2008 at 11:08am JST (1 year, 4 months ago) comment permalink

Jeffrey,

Thank you for creating this file. I have tried a several times unzipping the file, it keeps telling me that the file is corrupted. Would you please help?

Thank you,
Carolyn

I’d suggest downloading again from scratch. It perhaps got corrupt during your first download. —Jeffrey

— comment by Carolyn on October 4th, 2008 at 1:36pm JST (1 year, 4 months ago) comment permalink

Jeffrey,

thank you very much. Using your plugins made my decision to actually buy Lightroom to organize my photos. You should get commission from Adobe. I have a copy of your regex book in my office, excellent work!!!

Christian

— comment by Christian on October 8th, 2008 at 7:24am JST (1 year, 4 months ago) comment permalink

Thanks for your plugins Jeffrey, they’re great since I try to use Lightroom 2 as a one-stop application to do everything. One thing though: when uploading a lot of pictures with your Picasaweb-plugin, somewhere in the process Lightroom returns this error:

+371.4: At =(tail call) line -1:
Return header ERROR
—————————————————————-

errorCode = “timedOut”
name = “timed out”
nativeCode = -1001

Any idea how to solve this? I got it with different series of pictures I tried to upload to a private picasaweb album. All have keywords, and I add a generic title for all pictures (basic text + filename), which appears under the pictures on picasaweb. Any ideas???

Timeouts are transitory in nature… they happen when there are network “issues” at your computer, at PicasaWeb, or in between. It would be nice if my plugin presented the error to you in a more graceful manner, and perhaps offered to retry instead of just dying. Generally speaking, my plugins aren’t very polished in the error-handling department, sorry. —Jeffrey

— comment by Bart G. on October 18th, 2008 at 3:29am JST (1 year, 4 months ago) comment permalink

Hallo.

This plugin used to have option NOT to upload Lightroom metadata and Lightroom Keywords. I really do not want my keywords to be uploaded.
Can you put this feature back, please?

Best regards, Filip.

It still does… you can strip most metadata with the “minimize” checkbox in the “Metadata” section. If you’d like more control, you can exercise a line-item veto of any item with my Metadata Wrangler plugin. —Jeffrey

— comment by Filip on October 19th, 2008 at 10:50am JST (1 year, 4 months ago) comment permalink

Hi, thx a lot for this Plugin – but

picasawev-20081015.30 does not work on my Lihtroom 2. I get information that there is something wrong in reading the schema. So the plug in is disabled?
i work with Windows XP?!?
Can you give me a hint??

thx and regards,

günter

This sounds like perhaps a corrupt zip, or something like that. Just delete everything from the first install attempt, download again, and try installing again. —Jeffrey

— comment by toamau on October 19th, 2008 at 6:25pm JST (1 year, 4 months ago) comment permalink

Hello

First thanks for your plugin. I don’t know why, I have already exported several albums to my picasa web account with your plugin and suddenly, I have the following error :

?:13879: bad argument #1 to ‘?’ (string expected, got nil)

Do you have an idea ?

I have lightroom 2.1, I never had version 1. I tried to download the latest version, it is 20080905.17

— comment by Bruno Thomas on October 24th, 2008 at 6:13am JST (1 year, 4 months ago) comment permalink

Works perfekt with LR 2.1 and Vista SP2.
Great work!

Thanks a lot!
Andreas

— comment by Andreas on November 1st, 2008 at 6:55am JST (1 year, 3 months ago) comment permalink

Hello,

I want to develop a plugin for LR2.1 (1 workflow and 1 FTP).

Do you know where I can find resources and there is a book about the SDK?

thank you for your reply.

Many Thanks.
Eric

The only resources I know of are the SDK documentation and examples from Adobe, and the user-to-user forum. The docs contain a 187-page PDF full of details and examples. —Jeffrey

— comment by Baledent on November 8th, 2008 at 12:07am JST (1 year, 3 months ago) comment permalink

Jeffrey – What a great plugin. Many thanks for creating this and sharing it with us.
Best regards
Duncan

— comment by Duncan Soar on November 20th, 2008 at 9:40pm JST (1 year, 3 months ago) comment permalink

The picasa plug-in (version 20081123.43) is estimating 5 hours to upload 255 RAW images. (using fast ethernet connection, Vista OS, fast computer). Is there a way to speed up the upload process? Thank you for developing this.

The time to upload is most strongly influenced by your internet connection. Fast connection means faster upload. (Personally, I have 100 megabit fiber to my house, but I still hesitate to use “fast” when uploading big images). —Jeffrey

— comment by Steve on November 24th, 2008 at 3:27am JST (1 year, 3 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey,

Is it possible to automatically create a smart collection for each Album that I created in Picasa?

I can create it manually, but is it possible to automate it?

It’s easy to have one smart collection for all Photos, I uploaded.
It’s also possible to select only photos in one particular picasa album, by filtering by the name of the album. But how can I create one Smart collection for each Album I have uploaded to picasa and name it accordingly?

Greetings,
Hendrik

I’m using version 20081127.46

I’d suggest either using a special per-album keyword that you apply to each photo you want in the album, then make a smart collection based on that. You can then use the “Update” upload feature after selecting everything in the smart collection to ensure that all the images in the collection are indeed uploaded. But actually, the more straightforward approach would be to simply maintain a set of collections yourself, since that’s sort of exactly what they’re for.

In either case, to complete the process, it’d be easier if you could use the “auto destination” feature that I have on my other plugins (highlighted here. I guess I haven’t added that to the PicasaWeb plugin yet, so I’ll try to do that soon. —Jeffrey

— comment by Hendrik on November 28th, 2008 at 6:37am JST (1 year, 2 months ago) comment permalink

How do you clear the PicasaWeb Metadata in LR? I uploaded some photos and then deleted them in PicasaWeb and I want to have those changes reflected in LR.

Pull up the “File > Plugin Extras > PicasaWeb Extras” dialog. —Jeffrey

— comment by T.J. Powell on November 29th, 2008 at 11:17pm JST (1 year, 2 months ago) comment permalink

I can’t upgrade from 20081208.48 to 20081208.49 version. It downloads, then asks me to restart the plugin. I do and then it returns me to the start where it says I have v .48 and that a new version .49 exists. It cycles over and over if I keep trying. .49 never really seems to install. Any ideas what to do?

Also where do I enter my Picasa web account info? I can’t find a way to actually upload my files to Picasa.

— comment by Teaman on December 10th, 2008 at 4:28pm JST (1 year, 2 months ago) comment permalink

Is it possible to make this create albums which are sign-in on the privacy settings? I see it can create public and unlisted; Google recently added the Sign-in only viewing for albums and this would be great to create automatically.

Can you point me toward some docs? I can’t find reference to it in Google’s docs… —Jeffrey

— comment by Davi on January 2nd, 2009 at 1:58am JST (1 year, 1 month ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey,
The only reference I can find is in the Google Support pages at
http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=39551 – if you mean on the Google/Picasaweb API end I don’t have a clue as to where to start looking, sorry- Maybe someone else might know!

— comment by Davi on January 2nd, 2009 at 7:18pm JST (1 year, 1 month ago) comment permalink

Hello! What a great plug-in! great job there!
I wonder if there is a way to auto select the album date for picasa export! I am using the LR2 version!
Tks!!

— comment by Guilherme Nunes on January 8th, 2009 at 12:53am JST (1 year, 1 month ago) comment permalink

Thanks for the great export plugins. I have one question, I’m using picasaweb-20090116.57.zip with Lightroom 2.2 and I can’t seem to find a way to use Photoshop actions as a post-processing filter. I can add your Wrangler plugin but how can I use a PS action/droplet? Thank you.

Lightroom disables the post-processing actions when using a plugin as an export destination. That sort of makes sense because you’d be applying the Photoshop action after the photo is uploaded. I really should just port over my run any command piglet to Lightroom 2…… —Jeffrey

— comment by WakoNiko on January 19th, 2009 at 12:22pm JST (1 year ago) comment permalink

Thanks for the quick answer… I’ve been looking all over the Internet and nobody seems to mention this issue. Looks like you’re the only one with a potential solution in your hands. I hope you will port run any command one day… Do you have any alternate suggestion in the meantime? I’ve tried to use LR2/Mogrify and specify my droplet there in the config screen instead of ImageMagick’s binary, but obviously that doesn’t work -must be trying to add parameters that the droplet doesn’t understand. I might be able to point to a .bat and strip the extra parameters and just send the filename to the droplet. Not sure this is gonna work, I will let everybody know.

As a side note, if ever you need a new export plugin idea… Would be great if you could do an export to Gallery!!!

— comment by WakoNiko on January 19th, 2009 at 1:17pm JST (1 year ago) comment permalink

I have searched high and low but can’t seem to find anything that can help my login/conection issues with Picasa using your plugin after upgrading to LR 2.2.
I have tried trashing and re-dowdnloading, moving to a different directory and/or drive..

Thanks in advance,
Dale

Lightroom Network Error: “cannot ConnectToHost”

“Can’t connect to host” is a networking error. Are you sure that PicasaWeb and your internet connection were up? —Jeffrey

— comment by Dale on January 26th, 2009 at 8:12am JST (1 year ago) comment permalink

Dale, you might be using special characters in your username/password. I know I had some problems with that before (with the old version of the plugin), I’m not sure how the new version behaves. I had to change my password to make it work, give this a try.

— comment by WakoNiko on January 26th, 2009 at 10:05am JST (1 year ago) comment permalink

As a follow-up to my comment on January 19th, 2009 at 1:17pm, I haven’t been able to use LR2/Mogrify to launch Droplets or any other executable than mogrify.exe itself. Sorry if anybody else is looking for the same thing, but that doesn’t look possible at this time, or at least until there is a “launch any command” plugin that works as an export filter under LR2. I actually ended up changing the way I publish files on the web and I now use The Turning Gate plugins which are different than Jeffrey’s but also very nice. I’m not going to detail every step of my workflow, but I export my files under a special folder called “Web”, running my droplet on them as a post-processing action, and then run the TTG plugins to export them to an FTP folder. It’s really less painful to use than it sounds.

— comment by Wako Niko on January 28th, 2009 at 6:50am JST (1 year ago) comment permalink

Hum, actually, about my last comment, Jeffrey has JUST posted a new “run any command” plugin so you can still use his export plugins with your beloved Photoshop Droplets! Think NoiseWare, Smart Sharpen, etc… Thanks buddy.

It’s at http://regex.info/blog/2009-01-27/1125

— comment by Wako Niko on January 28th, 2009 at 6:59am JST (1 year ago) comment permalink

Hallo, Jeffrey.
(plugin number 20090129.60)

Thank you very much for readding the former plugin feature

DO NOT EXPLICITLY ADD LIGHTROOM KEYWORDS

I couldn’t live without it. Now I can start to use your plugin again.

Regards.

— comment by Filip Goc on January 30th, 2009 at 9:24am JST (1 year ago) comment permalink

Hello, Jeffrey. I like and enjoy both your Flickr and PicasaWeb export plugins, that they’re very useful for me. I have only a little question: is there any chance they eventually could be full automatically updated without any user intervention?

Probably not. It’s generally considered rude for a program to update itself like that. I built the whole upgrade thing from scratch (none of it is built into Lightroom), and so it’s sort of fragile, and I still get occasional reports that it doesn’t work. Also, some updates are less stable than others, along the lines of “okay, I’m trying something here… let me know how it goes”, and each person should be allowed to decide for themselves whether to accept it or wait. —Jeffrey

— comment by pacorramos on February 1st, 2009 at 12:59am JST (1 year ago) comment permalink

Hey,

Whenever i try to use the export to picasaweb i get an error that says the operation timed out. nativeCode=12002

I am using Lightroom 2.2 64 bit on Vista 64 bit.

I looked at the connections going out of my computer with tcpview and i see it trying to connect to: ag-in-f93.google.com:http

Any Ideas?

-Peter

— comment by Peter on February 2nd, 2009 at 11:04am JST (1 year ago) comment permalink

Thanks Jeffrey for your efforts, hopefully you are seeing a little play money now from your work! I just registered the Picasa plugin, it’s probably the best $10 I’ve spent in a while – It has saved my a lot of time and makes pushing family photos online effortless!

In that vein, is it possible to parse and import new keywords and/or descriptions that have been added in Picasa Web into Lightroom?

My scenario is this: I am scanning family photos, and would like to put my family to work adding situational and people keywords on PicasaWeb. Then every few weeks, I’ll point the plugin (or something) to the Picasa album to snarf new/changed keywords and descriptions to get them into Lightroom. Does the Lightroom plugin API even allow for something like that?

Thanks again!

These kind of things are definitely on the to-do list, but this one will be tough. Indeed, the Lightroom plugin API does not allow for updating of keywords, and even if it did, without a timestamp on when each keyword was updated (in both Lightroom and PicasaWeb), it’s hard to make a robust sync. But until LR allows for a way to get keywords in from outside, you’re sort of stuck. )-: —Jeffrey

— comment by Mike Wren on February 23rd, 2009 at 1:37am JST (11 months, 18 days ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey-
First of all, thanks for the plugin! I downloaded it a while back and finally used it about two weeks ago to get a gallery up to PicasaWeb. I wanted to add some more pictures yesterday, but all of a sudden got a message that “This plug-in is not installed on your computer or is not functioning properly.” I saw that an upgrade was available and upgraded the plug-in, restarted LR2, same message. I deleted the plug-in and tried again, but no change. Any idea what’s going on?
I am using “Export to PicasaWeb 20090305.65″ with LR 2.2 on a MacBook Pro.
Thanks for your help.
Paula
Are there any diagnostic messages in the lower-right section of the Plugin Manager? When you “deleted the plugin”, was that from disk or just from the Plugin Manager? If not the former, please try deleting the entire plugin folder, unzipping a newly downloaded copy, and repointing the Plugin Manager at it. (Sometimes, the auto-upgrade stuff can get all goofed up and it needs a full restart.) If it still doesn’t work, contact me via email… —Jeffrey

— comment by Paula on March 6th, 2009 at 9:49pm JST (11 months, 3 days ago) comment permalink

I am using the latest version of the Picassa plug-in in Lightroom 2.0. I’m not sure if I am missing something obvious or if this is actually a bug. However I figured I would report it.

If I make a smart collection and use the “Exported to Picassa” filter, Lightroom successfully identifies all of the pictures which I have exported to Picassa. Now, if I go to this collection and edit a file (Metadata, etc) and then re-export the updated image from this collection, the export goes just fine but for some reason it is REMOVED from the collection. I don’t understand why as it should still be tagged as ‘exported to picassa’.

If I then delete the Smart Collection and re-make it, Lightroom once again successfully identifies all of the images – included whichever one I just edited.

Does that make sense?

-martini

— comment by Ryan Martini on March 19th, 2009 at 11:02am JST (10 months, 21 days ago) comment permalink

20090313.67

Update on my previous comment – I don’t have to delete the collection to get the Smart Collection to re-recognize the images which have been uploaded to Picassa. If I exit Lightroom and re-enter, it will also figure it out. May just be a Lightroom Bug.

It sure looks like a bug. I’ll test it, and submit it to Adobe if need be.

Second comment: If I have an image which has been uploaded to Picassa, and I wen through the hassle of setting up the ‘faces/people’ things on the images in Picassa, is there anyway to update and re-export the image from Lightroom without losing all of the faces, etc that I added?

I don’t think the PicasaWeb API allows for image replacement (because I think I would have added a “replace” checkbox if it had been there when I first developed the plugin), but I’ll take a look and see… —Jeffrey

— comment by Ryan Martini on March 19th, 2009 at 11:09am JST (10 months, 21 days ago) comment permalink

Version 20090325.68
Hey, thanks for this plugin!
I export edited pictures to picasa, but the original, unedited versions were exported.
To recreate:
1. Edit a picture with the “Develop” tools of lightroom
2. Switch back to the “Library” tab
3. Select the pictures and export it
4. Picasa shows the unedited version rather the exported “fixed” version of the picture

In the “File Settings” section of the Export Dialog, did you have “original” selected for the Format? —Jeffrey

— comment by Joe on March 28th, 2009 at 2:27am JST (10 months, 12 days ago) comment permalink

Version 20090429.75
For some reason I can’t get watermarks on my photos when they export, I put the copyright in the meta data then when exporting i check add copyright watermark and still nothing comes up… how do get the watermarks on?

thanks,
Essex

Lightroom’s watermarking support is very limited, and not at all influenced by the plugin, so I suspect that if you’re not seeing them, you wouldn’t see them even if you did an export to local disk. Two possible problems come to mind: you can’t control the color of the copyright notice (I believe it’s always white), and you can’t control the size. The size is always the same (something like 12-pixels), so if you export very large images that are white in the corner where the copyright notice is placed, you won’t see the minuscule white text on top of the white background. To put it bluntly, Lightroom’s support for this is pathetic, but then, it’s only a Version 2 product and so they can’t be perfect everywhere (or even anywhere). I’m sure Adobe will address this in a future version of Lightroom. Until then, you might find Tim Armes’ LR2/Mogrify plugin very useful. —Jeffrey

— comment by Essex Prescott on May 1st, 2009 at 6:39am JST (9 months, 10 days ago) comment permalink

Mac OS. Lightroom 2.1. Picassa Web Plugin.

What are the reasons for a REJECTED USER LIMIT error when exporting to picassa web?

Thank you,
Barry

As far as I’ve ever been able to determine, no one knows why Google sends back that error. It seems completely random (which makes it completely frustrating). —Jeffrey

— comment by Barry on June 19th, 2009 at 4:49am JST (7 months, 22 days ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey, I love your plug-ins! Would you take a look at my error?

OS: Windows XP SP3
Software: v2.3 539407 Camera Raw 5.3
Plug-in: Jeffrey’s “Export to PicasaWeb” Lightroom Plugin v20090717.88
Error: 11226: wrong number of arguments to ‘insert’

I only get the first picture exported on local disk, and the process stopped after the above error message appears. I have no problem using the LR’s original export features.

Doh, sorry about that. Typo on my part. I just pushed .89 to fix it. Thanks for the report. —Jeffrey

— comment by Puputabu on July 17th, 2009 at 5:36pm JST (6 months, 23 days ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey, thanks for the quick fix (this might be the fastest response from the developer I ever experienced!) It works perfectly now!

Although it is working all the time but, when I update the plug-in it always give me an

“Internal Error: Can’t load “Version.lua” (cannot open C:\Documents and Settings\________\デスクトップ\download\picasaweb-20090714.86\picasaweb-jfriedl.lrplugin\Version.lua: No such file or directory)”

error, then if I restart LR the plug-in seem properly updated (as I’m getting “You have the latest version” when I hit the update button.) As long as it’s working nothing major but thought you might want to take a look.

Odd, it seems something went wrong with the upgrade? Could you try a manual upgrade, and see how it goes? If you still have troubles, please send me the plugin log (via the “Send to Jeffrey” button in the upper-right of the Plugin Manager). —Jeffrey

— comment by Puputabu on July 17th, 2009 at 6:00pm JST (6 months, 23 days ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey -
I just discoverd your plug-in about a month ago and it has made my life so my easier. Thanks so much! I am using quite a bit and was planning to register in the next few days (says my registration is due within 10 days)

Untill last night it worked great. Now I am getting the following error message and cant upload anything to picassa.

AgNegative: render image: AgNegative: renderToFile:
dng_error_file_not_found

I have the latest version: 20090717.89

Any suggestions?
Thanks, Petra

The “DNG file not found” error is from Lightroom, and well, it can’t find the master DNG that you’re exporting. Perhaps the volume it’s on is offline? In any case, I expect you’d get the same error if you did a vanilla export to disk… it’s a Lightroom thing, not a plugin thing. —Jeffrey

— comment by Petra on August 15th, 2009 at 12:38am JST (5 months, 25 days ago) comment permalink

I’m trying to export my images to Picasa and I have a number of Virtual copies with different exposure settings or some creative b/w settings. Only the main image is exported. If I select a virtual copy and choose export, the plugin says there are no images found that need updating. Is this a known issue?

Picasaweb 20090717.89 in Lightroom 2.4 64 bit

Hmmm, I’ll have to check. I’d think that each virtual copy is considered its own unique photo by the plugin (with the same filename, of course). I’ll take a look… —Jeffrey

— comment by Jesse Houwing on August 18th, 2009 at 6:34am JST (5 months, 22 days ago) comment permalink

Hmmm it seems that when I choose update and the original image is up there, nothing happens, but when I choose Add, the files are added none the less. Anyways. Files uploaded :) .

— comment by Jesse Houwing on August 18th, 2009 at 6:40am JST (5 months, 22 days ago) comment permalink

Hello Jeffrey,

I’ve found you plugin very usefull to share pics with my friends via picasa. Unfortunately, I have discovered, that it does not transfer GPS location data to picasa therefore leaving me with terrible manual job.
LR used: 2.4 build 572242 Windows XP
Plugin: 20090717.89

Photos were taken with Eos 40D as RAW and geotagged with Geosetter v.3.1.16 (www.geosetter.de)
GPS data is visible in EXIF data of the file (checked with ExifPilot), however I didn’t manage to see it directly in LR.

Actually, All EXIF data were ignored ano in info on camera or exposure are transferred to webalbums.

Hope you can fix it to further improve this great product.

Thanks,
Mateusz

The plugin does send it, but it gets the information from Lightroom, so if you’re not seeing it in Lightroom, that’s your problem. If you geoencode with an external app, you should do so before loading into Lightroom. Geoencoding after might work if you Metadata > Read Metadata From File…. give it a try. You can also geoencode within Lightroom with my geoencoding plugin. In any case, you must see the geoencoding in the Library (either via the normal view, or in the case of my plugin, the “shadow data” view) before uploading to Picasa. —Jeffrey

— comment by Mateusz Figat on August 29th, 2009 at 7:02pm JST (5 months, 10 days ago) comment permalink

Hello,

Just to report a small problem with pseudo display on release 20090717.89.
I changed my pseudo in Picasa (not the pseudo used to login, the pseudo displayed on the picasa web albums page).
My pseudo contains ‘&’ character. In the export plugin, it is displayed like that : ‘amp;’
Thank you for this great plugin !

Regards

Fabrice

Fixed in version .90. Thanks for the report. —Jeffrey

— comment by Fabrice on September 4th, 2009 at 2:23am JST (5 months, 6 days ago) comment permalink

Hello. Bo here from Copenhagen. I was happy to find your plugins for Flickr and for PicasaWeb.

I am on a Mac with Snow Leopard, using LR 2 and using PicasaWeb plugin 20090916.93 which I have a smaller problem with.

I uploaded a batch at jpg quality 60, which wasn’t satisfying, so I was happy to see that the was a obtion to replace new upload with existing pictures (delete copies previously uploaded)

But apparantly it doesn’t work because I get the following error messages (for every picture)

INTERNAL PLUGIN ERROR
unknown response (500) to delete query

Am I doing something? Or does this setting not work with PicasaWeb?

It worked for me… could be a temporary issue at Google. When I tried, the plugin had no problem deleting the previous version, and the new version showed up in the list of galleries at PicasaWeb, but when clicking through to the image itself, I got a 404. Because it showed up somewhere on PicasaWeb but not elsewhere, it seems evident that they’re having “issues”, so maybe you ran into a different version of that. If you get it again, please send the plugin log (via the “Send to Jeffrey” button in the plugin manager) and I’ll take a look, just to be sure. —Jeffrey

— comment by Bo Pedersen on October 12th, 2009 at 4:43am JST (3 months, 28 days ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey,

I got the following error when trying to export several images to PicasaWeb in LR 3.0b.

“An internal error has occurred: AgExportSession.photoExportSequence is obsolete; use photoIdExportSequence instead”

I’m using 20091023.97.

That’s internal to LR, so I doubt there’s anything I can do about it except to chalk it up to “beta”. I’ll see whether I can reproduce it, and if so, will see whether I can’t get Adobe to address it for the real LR3… —Jeffrey

— comment by Chris K. on October 25th, 2009 at 6:33am JST (3 months, 15 days ago) comment permalink

Hello,
I have dual boot on my PC, accessing the same lightroom library from the two OS’s. I registered two plugins on one OS, and they are “non registred” on the other OS…
Is there something simple to get the two plugins registered (by pointing on a common file or something) on both “sides” of my machine? (maybe just putting 0.01$ on each actually)
Thanks for your work
Greg
Plugins : Picasa export and the facebook export

Exactly as you suggested…. point to the same plugin folders from both sides (or to multiple copies of the plugin folders, one per side… doesn’t really matter). Enter the same registration code into the plugin manager on each side… it should all just work. —Jeffrey

— comment by Greg on November 10th, 2009 at 3:25am JST (3 months ago) comment permalink

hate to bother, but :-)
I am Lightroom user and have no need for Picasa EXCEPT for the new great face recognition.
I am looking for a way to transfer Picasa’s name tags into Lightroom.
Any help is appreciated!

— comment by Nose on November 12th, 2009 at 6:50am JST (2 months, 29 days ago) comment permalink

Hey Jeffrey! Enjoying your great plugins over here in northern California!

I’m using the PicasaWeb export plugin version 20091023.97 with Lightroom 2.5 on Mac OS. I want to make two PicasaWeb export presets: one that adds photos to a set album and another that adds them to an auto destination. However, I can’t seem to make two PicasaWeb export presets with different settings. Is there a way to do this?

You should be able to…. just set what you want for the first settings and create a preset, then set what you want for the second and create a new (differently-named) preset… they should each encapsulate their own settings. —Jeffrey

— comment by Vincent Mo on November 17th, 2009 at 6:52pm JST (2 months, 23 days ago) comment permalink

PicasaWeb export plugin 20091023.97
Lightroom 2.5 on Mac OS

I get a few photos uploaded before it stops uploading. I think it might be hitting an upload rate limit, in which case you might be able to watch for a REJECTED_USER_LIMIT error: http://groups.google.nl/group/macuploader/browse_thread/thread/2888cab64b753385/9177067745e1bb2f?lnk=gst&q=#9177067745e1bb2f

Google has similar rate limits on many of its apis, e.g. the Maps geocoding API. Is it possible to watch for this error and retry and/or rate limit the uploads?

The error I’m talking about here isn’t the STORAGE_UNAVAIL one, although I did get that one later when I ran out of PicasaWeb space. =)

As far as I can tell, both STORAGE_UNAVAIL and REJECTED_USER_LIMIT have nothing to do with the plugin or your account… they’re Google internal error conditions leaking out unmassaged. Consider them the same as “We’re down for maintenance; please try again later”. —Jeffrey

— comment by Vincent Mo on November 18th, 2009 at 6:29pm JST (2 months, 22 days ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey,

I have same error reported here before while exporting to Picasa web:
AgNegative: renderToFile:
dng_error_file_not_found
My version is picasaweb-20091118.98

I am able to export to local disk no problem.

Thank you.
Alexei

I very much doubt that you can export that same file to local disk if you’re getting that error during some other export.
In either case, though, it’s something you should report to Adobe… that error is way more basic than any plugin — it’s from the core of LR. —Jeffrey

— comment by Alexei on November 21st, 2009 at 1:01am JST (2 months, 20 days ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey,

It’s great working with your LR plugin’s. Now that Google has enabled collaborative web album, I would like to export directly from LR to a friend’s web album. Instead now I can only upload thru a web browser, 5 at a time.

Are you going to add this functionality to your plugin?

Cheers,
Peter

It doesn’t seem that they’ve exposed this to the API yet, but I’ll keep looking. The 5-photo limit you cited was for IE only, and seems to now be fixed, BTW. —Jeffrey

— comment by Peter on November 21st, 2009 at 6:58pm JST (2 months, 19 days ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey, the latest update of the Picasa Web Album exporter does weird things to the Aperture on export. For example, instead of Aperture 3.3 it says Aperture 3.3635857 now (I hope it’s really the plugin and not a new glitch in the Picasa Web Albums).

Regarding your comments on 20091203.100 – the 500 photo limit is only for the FREE version of Picasa Web Albums. As soon as you pay for extra storage, the limit is raised to 1000 photos per album (the other restrictions being 500 albums in the free version and 1000 albums in the paid version; I think this will eventually change now that Google has dropped the storage prices).

Keep up the good work.

Thanks for the clarification on the limits. About the aperture, where exactly are you seeing the problem? The plugin doesn’t touch the image’s embedded metadata, but can refer to it when creating captions if you ask…. —Jeffrey

— comment by Alexander Kunz on December 12th, 2009 at 5:37am JST (1 month, 29 days ago) comment permalink

Thanks for the great plugin. I’m using Lightroom 2.6 and your latest release and having trouble with timestamps. Photos exported through your plugin are marked with the export date, but photos uploaded directly into Picasaweb use the date in the file. Any ideas?

As best I can tell it’s a bug at Google. I’ve just posted version v110 that works around it. —Jeffrey

— comment by Stephen Detwiler on January 4th, 2010 at 11:52am JST (1 month, 5 days ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey, I was wondering how to have the original date & time from when the photo was shot listed in Picasa Web? Right now all the pictures I upload have today’s date (i.e. upload I assume – though it might also be date added to LR catalog).

I can’t imagine you haven’t implemented this, so I’m surely missing something, but I’d appreciate a pointer nonetheless!

Cheers for the great plugin!

Chris from Amsterdam (NL)

As best I can tell it’s a bug at Google. I’ve just posted version v110 that works around it. —Jeffrey

— comment by Chris on January 9th, 2010 at 5:21am JST (1 month ago) comment permalink

RFE: It would be nice if I could specify the date for a Picasa album (not the photo but the album) when creating it in Lightroom. Other metadata like location would be nice too, but at least Picasa sets that as unknown. However if no date is specified on the album creation, PIcasa picks the current date. Usually I want the date when the photos in the album were taken.

and the version of LR is 2.6 and the plugin is 20100130.110

Added in v111, but you’ll have to do a manual install if you’re using v110 —Jeffrey

— comment by Elliotte Rusty Harold on January 9th, 2010 at 10:09pm JST (1 month ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeff,

I notice that on Picasaweb the Aperture information is incorrect. Often A is close to the
largest aperture of the lens, but not quite. E.g 2.828427, see below
Example
Belichting: 1/160 sec.
Diafragma: 2.828427
Brandpuntsafstand: 100mm
Flitser gebruikt: Ja

See http://picasaweb.google.nl/MauriceSittard/UnusualFruit#5426319030935799474

Plugin version number is 2091216.107
Lightroom version 2.6 – 632038 – Camera Raw 5.6 – 64 bit
OS: Vista Home Premium / Service Pack 2

Another question:
- Is it possible to display in Picasaweb the name of the lens used next to the name of the camera used?
- Is it possible to display the focus distance?

Kind regards and thank you for the excellent plug-in,
Maurice

Exif allows for the aperture to be encoded in two ways, one that’s a nice neat number (“2.8″) and another that’s perhaps the more mathematically-accurate value for the specific case (“2.803826″). It allows the same for the shutter speed, which I’ve always taken to be the setting vs. the measured duration. In any case, you can see which Google is choosing to show. You can use my Metadata Wrangler plugin to strip the “Aperture Value” (the non-neat version) on export, and it seems that Google will then fall back to the neat version, “FNumber”.

As for the other Exif metadata, Lightroom doesn’t strip it unless you ask it to (if you ask, it strips almost everything, so if you see the aperture, it’s not being stripped), so it’s up to Google whether they’ll show it. You may want to ask them. If you’re desperate, you could use the template tokens my plugins support to include the info you want as keywords, or in the image caption. —Jeffrey

— comment by Maurice on January 15th, 2010 at 5:44am JST (3 weeks, 2 days ago) comment permalink

Using your PicasaWeb Export Plugin for Lightroom, I am more or less consistently getting an error message returned from PicasaWeb: Error: 10 STORAGE_UNAVAIL during export. It will happen at varying times, and each time I retry the export several more images (anywhere from 1 to 15) will be uploaded before the error is thrown again. I currently have over 460MB of available space on PicasaWeb.

Running v20100130.110 on Lightroom v2.4, Windows 7.

D’Arcy (Canada)

It’s a Google bug. Strikes all uploaders randomly, it seems. I think it’s related to their servers having issues with the back-end storage, but I don’t know. Nothing I can do, sorry. —Jeffrey

— comment by D'Arcy on February 4th, 2010 at 8:27pm JST (5 days, 3 hours ago) comment permalink

How about adding a configurable retry count to handle Error: 10 STORAGE_UNAVAIL (perhaps defaulting to 5 and respecting Google’s API guidelines of course)? That would take care of much of the pain…

— comment by D'Arcy on February 5th, 2010 at 12:17am JST (4 days, 23 hours ago) comment permalink
Leave a comment...

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.


All comments are invisible to others until Jeffrey approves them. Spam is never approved, and never makes it to the live site.

Please mention what part of the world you're writing from, if you don't mind. It's always interesting to see where people are visiting from.

More or less plain text — see below for allowed markup

You can use the following tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Subscribe without commenting