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It's been nothing but plugin development in the Friedl household since Lightroom 3 was released, mostly bringing my many plugins up to speed. Frankly, it's drudgery work, so I took time off to indulge in the simple pleasures of development: building something new.

This new plugin, PhotoSafe, allows you to protect photos from accidental deletion from your Lightroom catalog.

In my case, I never want to delete a photo I've posted on my blog, no matter how boring or mundane. Because I post a lot of boring and mundane photos, I have a lot in my catalog that I might otherwise want to clear out during a purge to reclaim disk space, so this plugin ensures I'll never accidentally get rid of one.

Initially it was a fairly simple plugin whose development time was dominated by my futzing in Photoshop trying to come up with a nifty-looking lock icon. Once the plugin and the nifty icon were done, I started to create the new plugin's web page in preparation for release, but in keeping with a recent attempt to better document my plugins (such as the monumentally lengthy documentation for the Publish aspects of my Flickr plugin), I set out to document the simple plugin.

I started creating screenshots and text, but as I got into describing the various limitations of the plugin, I came up with ideas for overcoming or mitigating the limitations, which then led to more development. It became a “vicious cycle” of development and documentation, with screenshots becoming obsolete almost as soon as I created them.

The result is something much more useful, but also more complex under the hood. At least I've gotten it well documented.... at least until the next round of enhancements pops into my head.

Instructions and download are on the PhotoSafe plugin home page.