Basic Premise of Publish: Ongoing Relationship

The premise is simple: drag a photo to a special collection in Lightroom, and voila, it's sent to PicasaWeb. From then on, changes that you make to the photo in Lightroom are automatically kept up to date in the copy at PicasaWeb.

Ah, but the devil is in the details...

First of all, Publish is an extra feature in addition to the “normal” export offered by Lightroom via this plugin (and earlier versions of this plugin all the way back to Lightroom 1). Publish allows you to set up an ongoing relationship between specific images in your Lightroom catalog and their appearance at PicasaWeb. This kind of ongoing relationship makes a lot of sense for some situations, while the normal export we've had since Lr1 makes more sense in others.

Here's a hint: if it's a situation where you'd consider setting up an export preset that you'd use via “File > Export with Preset”, Publish is worth a look.

Because Publish involves setting up an ongoing relationship, it's more complicated than simply firing off an export. The length of this document, which covers only Publish and assumes you're already familiar with normal export, attests to the extra complexity. But once the initial up-front fee has been paid with your time and attention, you'll reap the benefits from then on.

Introduction and Important Definitions

Generally speaking, Publish functionality is provided by a Publish Service Provider. Lightroom comes with a few publish service providers: the built-in “Hard Drive” provider, a bare-bones Flickr plugin and a Behance plugin. You can add additional publish service providers by installing appropriate plugins, such as my fuller-featured Flickr plugin and this PicasaWeb plugin. (I have plenty of other publish plugins available on my Lightroom Goodies page, and there may well be other Publish plugins available on Adobe's Lightroom Exchange site.)

After installing the PicasaWeb plugin, you
can configure your publish service

Before you can use Publish to send images to PicasaWeb, you must first configure the particulars about how the exports are to be done, such as deciding on the size and quality of the exported images, and the details about which account at PicasaWeb they should be sent to. This configuration, which you generally do only once, creates a Publish Service in your Lightroom catalog.

You can have multiple PicasaWeb publish services (all provided by the one plugin), but it makes sense for most people to have only one. However, if you have multiple accounts at PicasaWeb that you'd like to send images to with Publish, you'll need to configure multiple PicasaWeb publish services.

Important details about creating a publish service are covered below, but for the moment, let's wave our hand and say that the publish service has now been set up as you like.

After you've configured a publish service in your Lightroom catalog, it is represented in your Lightroom library as one or more publish collections, each holding the group of photos that are to be sent to a particular album in your PicasaWeb account. Just drag a new photo to it, press the “Publish” button, and the photo is rendered and uploaded to the associated album at PicasaWeb.

Several publish collections in a
PicasaWeb publish service

Just like regular Lightroom collections, a publish collection can be either a regular publish collection that holds whatever photos you manually add to it, or a smart publish collection whose list of photos is computed by some criteria that you set up (e.g. “all five-star photos taken this year”).

A published photo is a photo that's part of a publish collection. At any particular time, a published photo is in one of four publish states:

1. New Photos to Publish — photos that have been added to the publish collection, but have not yet actually been sent to PicasaWeb. They'll be sent to PicasaWeb the next time you launch Publish (via the “Publish” button).

2. Published Photos — photos that have been sent to PicasaWeb and have not been modified in your Lightroom catalog since.

3. Modified Photos to Re-Publish — photos that have been sent to PicasaWeb, but which have been modified in Lightroom since. They will be re-sent to PicasaWeb the next time you launch a Publish action.

4. Deleted Photos to Remove — NON_FACEBOOK { photos that have ostensibly been removed from the publish collection, but have not yet been removed from PicasaWeb. (Whether to actually remove a photo from PicasaWeb when it is removed from your publish collection is controlled by publish-service options, discussed below.) }

Segmented grid showing photos in a publish
collection in various states of Publish

When viewing a publish collection in Grid mode, you can see the photos partitioned into their various states in the segmented grid with headers as listed above (and illustrated in the screenshot at right).

You can add and remove photos from a normal publish collection as you like (and they are automatically added and removed from smart publish collections as per the criteria that you've set up), but nothing is actually done with them until you launch Publish, via the “Publish” button. The Publish button appears in the lower left of Lightroom, in place of the “Export” button, when viewing a publish collection, as in the screenshot at right.

There's also a “Publish” button in the upper right of the segmented grid.

When you actually launch a Publish action, Lightroom fires up an export under the hood, and photos are rendered as per the various settings configured when the publish service was created (the details of which follow in the next section of this document). As each photo is uploaded to PicasaWeb, it's moved to the “Published Photos” section. You can click on each segmented-grid section's header to expand and collapse it; if they're all collapsed you can watch their photo counts, shown at the right side of each segmented-grid header, update in real time.

First Things First: Knowing Your Current Vantage Point

Before creating a Publish Service to reflect an ongoing relationship we'd like to have between this Lightroom catalog and PicasaWeb, it's probably a good idea to make sure that any information about photos at PicasaWeb already in the catalog is correct, and that it has all the information about all the photos at PicasaWeb that it should.

These catalog-maintenance features are not specific to Publish, but particularly worthwhile before setting up a Publish Service (though you don't have to worry about this if you just want to play around with Publish to give it a try).

Of course, if you're new to PicasaWeb, you don't need to worry about this section at all.

The PicasaWeb maintenance has two general steps, followed by one Publish-specific step:

1. Refresh — Refresh the per-photo PicasaWeb data already in the Lightroom catalog.

2. Associate — Add per-photo PicasaWeb data for images in your catalog that are already at PicasaWeb that the catalog doesn't know about.

3. Populate — Pre-populate Publish Collections with appropriate photos on a per-album basis, so that Publish reflects the current status at PicasaWeb.

Steps #1 and #2 generally need be done only once, and are discussed in this section. Step #3, Populate, might be done every time you create a new Publish Connection, and is discussed later in this document.

File > Plugin Extras > PicasaWeb Extras

Steps #1 and #2 are accomplished via the File > Plugin Extras > PicasaWeb Extras dialog, which is shown at right. The two items we're concerned with for the moment are highlighted by the red outline.

The maintenance items in this dialog work with the PicasaWeb account that the plugin has most recently worked with. If you work with multiple PicasaWeb accounts in Lightroom (or have not worked with any yet), you'll want to first visit the normal Export Dialog or a Publish Service's Edit Settings dialog to make sure you're authenticated to the PicasaWeb account you want to work with here. The account name is shown in the upper-left of the dialog, under the logo graphic.

Maintenance Step #1: Refreshing Urls

The “Refresh All Remote Urls” item in the dialog looks at every photo in the catalog that already has PicasaWeb-related data, and confirms with PicasaWeb that the data is up to date, correcting it if it's not. This "correcting" includes marking a Published photo to be republished if its copy at PicasaWeb is found to have been deleted.

If you've got a lot of PicasaWeb/Lightroom history it might be a good idea to do this once, but otherwise, you probably need to do it only after making sweeping changes at PicasaWeb “out from under” Lightroom, such as doing mass deletions of photos at PicasaWeb, changing album names, etc.

Because this involves contacting PicasaWeb for every photo, be prepared that this step can take a long time if you have a lot of photos. But it's important to do at least once if you have PicasaWeb history in this catalog, because the next step, “Associate Images” needs the currently-correct URL of each photo at PicasaWeb to work.

Maintenance Step #2: Associate Images

Step #2 involves checking every photo at PicasaWeb against every photo in your catalog, finding and remembering pairings that Lightroom didn't already know about. This also generally needs to be done only once, and only if there are photos at PicasaWeb that you uploaded outside of Lightroom.

You can have the plugin inspect photo dates and/or filenames for the pairings. Because of the risks, the plugin is very conservative about it:

• Photos that share the same capture time are paired up when there's an exact one-to-one correspondence.

  If there are multiple photos taken at the same time at PicasaWeb, or in Lightroom, none of them are paired up. Times are compared down to the second, but not sub-second, which means that shots taken during a high-speed burst can not be paired up.

• Photo filenames (without the filename extension) are compared, and if there's an exact one-to-one correspondence, they are paired up. If you change the name of the file during export to PicasaWeb, it makes no sense to attempt filename pairing, nor does it if most of your filenames are not unique.

This step can take a very long time. One test I did with 10,000 images in Lightroom and 5,000 at PicasaWeb took about three hours. At least it can now complete — plugin versions prior to July 2010 hit a Lightroom bug that often caused the process to essentially lock up, but with some pointers from Adobe, I think I've worked around that now.

Maintenance Step #3: Populating Images

This publish-specific step is covered below, beginning with the creation of a Publish Service...

Creating a PicasaWeb Publish Service

Let's look in detail at configuring a publish service to export to your PicasaWeb account. Make sure that the PicasaWeb plugin is installed and enabled, then click on the “Set Up...” of the PicasaWeb header in Library's list of publish services.

This brings up the Lightroom Publishing Manager, a dialog that looks like a cross between the normal export dialog and the Plugin Manager...

Items show up in the list of Publish Services (highlighted in the upper left) when their plugin is installed and enabled in the Plugin Manager. Old Lr1 or Lr2 plugins won't provide this new feature, of course, but most of my “export to...” plugins, including PicasaWeb, do.

If any of the plugins you have installed provide export filters, they are listed in the middle-lower-left section of the Publishing Manager, just as they are in the normal export dialog. Lightroom does not come with any export filters built in, but they can add powerful features to your exports — both normal and publish — so it behooves you to know what's out there. Popular ones include my Metadata Wrangler for controlling exactly what metadata is included in exported copies, my geoencoding support shadow injecter for ensuring that the geoencoded location is properly included, and Tim Armes' LR/Mogrify plugin for advanced watermarking and image borders.

The main panel of the Publishing Manager shows the export/service settings for the Publish Service that's about to be created (an export-to-PicasaWeb service in the example above). Like the normal export dialog, it has numerous sections; let's look at them in detail....

Naming your Publish Service

The first section allows you to give your export service a name, so you can keep them straight if you have more than one.

If you have only one PicasaWeb account, you probably want to leave it at its default of “jf PicasaWeb”. It looks ugly in this dialog, but when left at its default it won't even be shown in the list of publish service in Library, as seen in the screenshots above. If you set your own name, such as “My PicasaWeb Stuff”, it shows up in the Library list as “jf PicasaWeb: My PicasaWeb Stuff”. So if you need just one PicasaWeb publish service, it's cleanest all around to just leave the name at its default. You can always change it later.

However, if you have multiple accounts, you'll want to name them, e.g. “PicasaWeb Work” for one and “PicasaWeb Play” for another.

Which PicasaWeb Account?

The next section is where you authenticate to your PicasaWeb account. (Before starting the authentication, be sure that you are logged in to PicasaWeb in your system-default web browser, to the PicasaWeb account that you want to use with this Publish service.)

Once the publish service has been created, you can not change the associated account for the publish service, and this section becomes deactivated during a publish-service edit. (You can make another publish service for use with a different PicasaWeb account, or even for use with the same PicasaWeb account but with different export options.)

Export Location

The next section is also available only at publish-service create time: setting the export location:

Most people leave the export-location setting at the default of “Temporary folder”, but you might set it to some specific named folder if you want to keep a local copy of all the images that have been published to PicasaWeb. Again, Lightroom does not allow this setting to be changed once the publish service has been created.

Various Standard Lightroom Export Settings...

The next sections are all the same as in the standard Lightroom export dialog...

These settings, such as the image size and quality, can be changed later, but doing so means that you have to re-publish (re-render and re-upload) everything you'd already sent to PicasaWeb, at least if you want the setting changes to be reflected in the images already at PicasaWeb. More on this later, but it's best to pick the settings you want up front, so you don't have to change them later.

Export Filters

The next sections are for export filters you have installed and enabled, if any. Here's an example illustrating what some sections from Metadata Wrangler, Run Any Command, and LR/Mogrify might look like...

The blue rectangle marks Lightroom's controls for adjusting the order that the filters are applied, and for removing them altogether.

Each section can be opened to reveal the filter's particular settings, of course, but the filter details are not relevant to this overview about Publish, except to note that like the standard Lightroom settings (image size, etc.), changing these filter settings after a publish service has been established means that you have to republish everything if you want the changes to be reflected in images previously published to PicasaWeb.

PicasaWeb Albums

Now we begin the PicasaWeb-specific sections. The first allows you to pick which existing albums at PicasaWeb you would like to appear in this particular publish service...

For each album at PicasaWeb, you can choose a normal collection, a smart collection, both, or neither.

Creating a Normal Publish Collection

The publish-collection version of a PicasaWeb album starts out empty, which is perfectly fine if the album at PicasaWeb is actually empty, or if you don't mind that the publish-service manifestation of the PicasaWeb album shows only images you add from here on in.

However, if you'd like the current collection of images in the PicasaWeb album to be reflected in the newly-created publish collection, it's a three-step process. The first two steps, discussed above in “First Things First: Knowing Your Current Vantage Point”, need be done only once per Lightroom catalog, but this third step should be done each time you create a new Publish Collection, at least if you want it to be populated to reflect images already at PicasaWeb.

By enabling the

option (or clicking on the “repopulate now” links that appear when editing Publish settings), the plugin fetches the list of images for each album from PicasaWeb, finds the associated image in your Lightroom library (via the knowledge gleaned from steps #1 and #2), and adds it to the publish collection for you. As a bonus, it puts it into the "Published Photos" section, to reflect that it doesn't need an initial render and upload.

(If you had modified the photo in Lightroom after the earlier upload to PicasaWeb, those changes won't be reflected in the “published photo”, so you'll want to “Mark to Republish” those photos, via the thumbnail right-click context menu while viewing the photos in the publish collection.)

Unfortunately, limitations in Lightroom 3's publish architecture prohibit step 2 from being applied to smart publish collections, so photos that get computed into a smart publish collection must be rendered and uploaded to PicasaWeb, even if they already exist at PicasaWeb. If the smart collection has many initial images, this could require substantial time when you first publish it.

Defining a Smart Publish Collection's Rules

If you ask the plugin to create a smart publish collection, it does so with a dummy rule that matches no photos. Once it's been created and the publish-service dialog is dismissed, choose "Edit Smart Album" from the collection name context menu to replace the dummy rule with whatever rule or rules you want.

Deleting a Publish Collection

You can remove a publish collection from your publish service via the “Delete” item in the publish-connection name's context menu. Doing so does not remove the album or its photos from PicasaWeb: for such a major operation, please visit PicasaWeb directly.

Options for Deleting Images from PicasaWeb

Moving along to the next section, we have photo-deletion options:

The first option covers what happens when a photo is removed from a collection in this publish service, but still retained in the Lightroom catalog.

If you delete a photo from PicasaWeb, you can always upload it again, but all its “value add” at PicasaWeb will have been lost forever — comments, ratings, history, etc. — will be disassociated from the photo and lost. On the other hand, if you don't delete it at PicasaWeb, it's still there, which is perhaps not what you want if you're deleting it from a PicasaWeb-related publish collection.

Actually, to be clear, when a photo is removed from a PicasaWeb-related publish collection, it goes into the collection's “Deleted Photos to Remove” section, as mentioned above. It's only when you then initiate the Publish action on the collection that this option comes into effect, and that photo copies at PicasaWeb are deleted (if you've so instructed).

The second option covers the case where a photo that happens to be published via this service is deleted altogether from Lightroom. If you want to protect photos that have been published at PicasaWeb, choose “Disallow”.

For a more general way to protect images from deletion from the catalog, you might also want to consider my PhotoSafe plugin, which allows you to specify specific photos that can't be deleted from Lightroom, and/or rules describing the kinds of photos that can't be deleted (e.g. “all five-star photos”). You have to explicitly remove the restriction to remove a protected photo from the catalog, making it highly unlikely to do accidentally.

PicasaWeb Metadata Options

The next section configures various PicasaWeb-related metadata options, just as in a “normal” PicasaWeb export.

Phew !

Finally, you can press the “Save” button to create the publish service and the publish collections you selected.

Making Changes to an Existing PicasaWeb Publish Service

You can edit the publish-service settings via the “Edit Settings...” item in the publish-service name's context menu. You can change all settings except the account at PicasaWeb and the export location, but there's a catch: if the change relates to something about how each image is exported and uploaded (such as the size or image quality, metadata settings, etc.) and you want those changes to be reflected in photos already at PicasaWeb, it won't happen magically: you'll have to republish them all.

Republishing can take a long time if you've got a lot of photos, and not all changes necessarily need to be reflected in every photo, so it is not done automatically.

If you want to republish all or some previously-published photos, select them in their various publish collections and invoke the context menu's “Mark to Republish” item.

Adding Another PicasaWeb Publish Service

If you have another PicasaWeb account you'd like to publish to, or you'd like to publish with different settings (e.g. your first PicasaWeb publish service had full size exports, but you'd like to be able to upload to some collections with smaller sizes), choose

from the existing publish service's title context menu (where “Set Up...” had been before the first one was created.)

Issues to Watch Out For

The following issues are inherent shortcomings in Lightroom's initial version of Publish, and apply to all publish services:

• There's no way to tell which publish collections have photos awaiting action except by visiting each publish collection in turn and viewing the grid to see whether the “Publish” button is enabled or disabled.

• There's no way to invoke publish on all your publish services in one go; the best you can do is address each publish service in turn, selecting all its published collections and then invoking Publish on them.

• The photo-thumbnail “Go to Collection” context menu item does not list any kind of smart collection that the photo may be part of, including smart publish collections.

• The use of undo with publish-related operations is likely to not work and perhaps even corrupt the publish parts of your catalog. Take care.

• You can't import smart-collection settings to a publish smart collection; doing so creates a corrupt smart collection.

• I have not tested export-to-catalog yet, but I would expect that Publish information does not go along with the images.