Jeffrey’s “Export to PicasaWeb” Lightroom Plugin
picasaweb-20081204.48.zip
· Version History
· Installation instructions
· More Lightroom Goodies
· 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.
| 20081204.48 | Try to work around a fairly rare Lightroom bug that sometimes causes large exports to fail with the note Whoa, exported image doesn't exist after waitForRender by pausing for a few seconds to see whether the image shows up. If not, then you still get the error and the export fails. |
| 20081128.47 | Added the "auto destination" feature. |
| 20081127.46 | The counting of previous uploads (for the All/Update/New of the Upload Destination section) was not working right. |
| 20081125.45 | Another fix for a bug that had disabled plugin presets (for captions, etc.) |
| 20081124.44 | Perhaps fixed a problem whereby the "Upgrade Now" button didn't work for some Windows users. We'll see whether it works when those users upgrade from this version to whatever version is next. |
| 20081123.43 | Fixed a plugin crash when using the plugin's built-in preset system. |
| 20081122.42 | No problems from the upheaval recently, so pushing back the expiration a bit. |
| 20081118.41 | Fix album-creation bug. |
| 20081117.40 | Oops, wouldn't let you log in / authenticate if you weren't already. Doh. Fixed. |
| 20081117.39 | No new functionality in this version, but a huge upheaval in the underlying code to repair an unfortunate design choice I made early on in the development that had limiting consequences I'd not foreseen. There are likely bugs introduced in this version, and as such, it has a short expiration date to encourage updates as those bugs are reported and fixed. If you do run into an error, please send (via email) the log referenced in the upper-right of the Plugin Manager. Thanks. |
| 20081113.38 | Fixed yet another list-of-upload-destinations bug. There are sure a lot of edge cases here. |
| 20081111.37 | Fixed a crash that happened sometimes when there are not yet any preexisting destinations at PicasaWeb. |
| 20081104.36 | Perhaps squelch a spurious error dialog |
| 20081103.35 | I don't know what's causing the slew of networking problems that have been reported, but I've gone ahead and added a retry mechanism. It'll retry operations that failed due to network problems indefinitely, but you can cancel out of the retries if you like. If the problems are some kind of flakiness on the machine (somehow introduced in LR2.1???) this may allow operations to complete. |
| 20081031.34 | Now works properly with the shadow GPS data maintained by my geoencoding plugin. |
| 20081024.33 | Added an option to not add Lightroom keywords as metadata when uploading images. This allows you to not send any keywords if you also have them stripped from the image itself, such as when enabling the "Minimize Embedded Metadata" option, or when stripping keywords with my Metadata Wrangler. This applies only to keywords in the Lightroom library that are marked for export; those not marked for export are never sent. (Also related, recall that due to a Lightroom bug, images in a catalog upgraded from Lightroom 1.x with Lightroom 2.0 lost the ability to export keywords until a fix is applied.) |
| 20081022.32 | Addressed (and perhaps even fixed) a bug introduced in the previous build. |
| 20081021.31 | Small update so that a stuck background version check does not disable the plugin. Added the ability to put the "select at time of export" item at the top of the destination list, as had been requested a few times. Added some items to the template language that had inexplicably been missing: {HH}, {MIN}, {hh}, {min}, {ss}. |
| 20081015.30 | Added back the ability to set the print size via DPI and inches/cm. I think it's more confusing than anything (because it has nothing to do with what size something gets printed at unless you take care to set the printer DPI the same), but someone asked for it and I should really leave it up to the user. The plugin now allows you to use any color space registered on your computer when generating images to upload. I don't think this will be useful for very many people, but perhaps it might be a benefit when combined with some printing services(?) |
| 20081010.29 | Changed the PicasaWeb login method to not exclude users of Google Apps (which, apparently, had been happening until now). Internal change to the user-agent string that the plugin sends when uploading, to better conform to web standards |
| 20080924.28 | I created a "Metadata Management" section in the dialog, and moved some things into that from other sections. Fixed a race condition that sometimes caused the export destination to not appear in the synopsis of a closed "Upload Destination" dialog section. Removed the "replace" option, which had been inadvertently displayed (but disabled) for everyone. Google's "replace" operation requires HTTP support that Lightroom's plugin API doesn't provide. Moved the items in the "Upload Management" section into the "Upload Destination" section, since they are really quite related. |
| 20080923.27 | Sigh, just realized that the "check for new version" stuff did break in 2.1. Totally my fault, sorry. Fixed. |
| 20080921.26 | Oops, the ability to use my template tokens in the 'extra keyword/tags' area, that I added last week, didn't actually recompute the tags on a per-image basis, applying the tags computed for the first image to all the others. That's now fixed, and tags are recomputed with each image. |
| 20080920.25 | Enhanced the {Rating} token to allow {Rating=*} to create "*****" through "". You can put most anything instead of the asterisk, so you might consider {Rating=great } to end up with "great great great". Since these forms result in nothing for an unrated photo, you can use the "|" pipe to provide a default "when empty" value, such as "rating": {Rating=*|"unrated"} |
| 20080918.24 | Added the ability to use template tokens like {Filename} in the "extra tags" input box. |
| 20080916.23 | Update an error message to reflect an apparent bug in LR that causes LR to hand off a file to my plugin for upload before the file is actually available. This seems to happen when using LR/Mogrify or other filters. Updated the url shown in the "status" section of the plugin manager |
| 20080916.22 | Finally have the upgrade button working on both Win and Mac. Since I returned home last week, I now have access to both kinds of machine for the first time since LR2 was released. I can sum up the 5 hours I spent wrestling with the unzip code in three word: I hate Windows. Microsoft owes me five hours of my life back. Note that you may have to install this one by hand in order to get the newly working upgrade button... it's the next upgrade that should be easy-as-click. |
| 20080914.21 | Added a few more descriptive tooltips to the example-token dialog |
| 20080914.20 | Oops, fixed a boo-boo introduced in the previous version. |
| 20080914.19 | Remember (again) the upload-destination across exports. It used to work, and I'm not sure when it stopped working, but it must have been really annoying while it was broken, sorry. |
| 20080914.18 | Fixed tokens "OriginalWidth" and "OriginalHeight" in templates. Added a bunch of new template tokens and a new token filter. Added a token-examples button, which brings up a dialog listing all tokens and their value for an example photo (the first photo in the export list). |
| 20080905.17 | Fixed an "undefined global: DestinationSynopsis" error that could happen when using a preset with a "select at export time" upload-destination setting |
| 20080831.16 | Handle a race condition in the upgrade logic that sometimes results in a superfluous "You have version XYZ, but version XYZ is now available" message |
| 20080829.15 | Added a bunch of new items to the template language. |
| 20080829.14 | Oops, left some debugging cruft that results in an "empty" dialog if the logged-in-user has no galleries or the like. Fixed. |
| 20080828.13 | Minor tweaks |
| 20080828.12 | A few more tweaks to report a failed upgrade attempt a bit more clearly |
| 20080828.11 | Whoo-hoo, finally figured out the "assert" problem that some people without albums were having. When upgrading, ignore a status of “50” (which means “out of disk space”) from the unzip the plugin performs. It seems Windows often reports this status even when there's plenty of disk space left, so until I can understand it better, I'll just ignore that code. |
| 20080827.10 | Fixed the Caption {Filetype} token (was broken for DNGs). Made some Layout tweaks in my preset dialogs. Added titles to the tools sections (were missing on OSX) |
| 20080817.9 | Lots of little tweaks as I cleaned things up. Added a bunch of stuff to the Plugin Manager, including a “What's New” button that shows up next to the “Upgrade Now” button when a new version is available. Removed the auto-destination stuff because I'm getting error-code 500 responses from Google with them. Will investigate. |
| 20080814.8 | Fixed infinite cycle of 'assert' messages one might get in odd situations |
| 20080812.7 | Fixes (I hope) a "bad argument #1 to '?' (table expected, got nil)" error |
| 20080811.6 | Moved and renamed the debugging logs to a temporary folder, and added log Show/Delete buttons to the plugin's custom section of the Plugin Manager. |
| 20080806.5 | Fixed {State} and {Rating} in preset templates. |
| 20080805.4 | Oops, the Windows versions had lost the ability to upgrade themselves. Once this version is installed manually, subsequent versions should be able to upgrade as discussed here. |
| 20080804.3 | Fixed "Access to undefined global: LrError" error that happens when trying to report a login-related problem. |
| 20080804.2 | Fixed a couple of internal errors related to the "choose destination at time of export" feature |
| 20080729.1 | Initial public release |
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. Seriously. I need the full version number or I likely can't do anything but ignore the message.
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
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
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
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!
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
For me it runs smoothly. No problem so far.
Thank you, Jeffrey!
Thanks Jeffrey! Works like a charm on WinXP SP3 + LR 2.0
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
Works like a charm! Thanks
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.
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
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?
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
Since .24 mine has been updating fine from the Plugin Manager. I too am on LR2.1 RC1.
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
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)
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
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
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
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
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
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
Works perfekt with LR 2.1 and Vista SP2.
Great work!
Thanks a lot!
Andreas
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
Jeffrey - What a great plugin. Many thanks for creating this and sharing it with us.
Best regards
Duncan
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
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
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