Announcing a New Plugin for Adobe Lightroom: Smart-Collection Sync to Adobe’s Lightroom CC Cloud

part of the plugin explanation from its home page

I've released a new plugin for Lightroom Classic (Lr6 and later) to help users wanting to sync smart collections to Lightroom's cloud ecosystem. Lightroom Classic allows syncing only normal collections, so you can't sync smart collections such as all five-star photos or the like.

This plugin works around this restriction by allowing you to keep a set of normal collections automatically synced with your smart collections; you then add those automatically-mirrored normal collections to Lightroom's cloud.

It sounds simple, but the devil's in the details... the same details, I'm sure, which caused Adobe to not support smart-collection sync in the first place. It's all explained at the plugin's home page:

Jeffrey’s “Smart-Collection-Sync” Lightroom Plugin.

As with most of my plugins, it's released as donationware. It can be used freely by all forever, but becomes slightly less convenient after a while to encourage thinking about a gift.

Special thanks to Gerhard Wolf for suggesting a realistic way to approach a plugin like this in Lightroom. I took his suggestion and threw it out, building something completely different that made more intuitive sense to me, but in the end just didn't feel elegant. Indded, Gerhard reported that my approach worked, but again urged his. I gave his approach a try, and upon implementing it finally saw it for the more-satisfying approach that it was. Thanks Gerhard.


All 5 comments so far, oldest first...

This looks like this will solve a big problem for me. Thanks

— comment by Dan Kabat on December 25th, 2017 at 4:27am JST (6 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink

Thanks, this seems useful! I will definitely try this.

At the same time it reminds me of another thing that’s been in my head for a while. Is there a way to make automatic syncing / exports to hard drive? I’m thinking my photo backups and would like to have certain photos synced to Dropbox, iCloud Drive, OneDrive or other similar service. However, I don’t have space in those services (or upstream bandwidth) for complete photo library. I’d need only collections like in this plugin, for baby photos, wedding photos and such important photos. Full resolution jpeg is sufficient, raw would be better.

Any to-disk publish service (such as the built-in Hard Drive service, my Collection Publisher, or my Folder Publisher) can be automated to some extent with the “Publish At” feature of my Bag-o-Goodies plugin. FWIW, with SmugMug and Zenfolio you can save your raw file along with a JPEG for display, and as a bonus then have all the other photo-web-site features they offer. There are multiple plugins available for both, including one for each by me. —Jeffrey

— comment by Mikko on December 30th, 2017 at 6:46am JST (6 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink

Thanks for pulling this together. I’ve been using AnySource which you actually told me about in early November but I will definitely give this a try! Looks a little more configurable and dedicated to just this function.. AnySource has a bunch of other features I don’t use.

I’m sure this will make many people happy!

Mark

— comment by Mark on January 3rd, 2018 at 11:54am JST (6 years, 9 months ago) comment permalink

Jeffrey,
I hereby christen you Fukurokuju, god of wisdom.

I’ve been looking for ages for this feature (including in the prior iterations of LR). Tried it. Works perfectly for me.

Thank you!
Jay

— comment by Anonymous on January 6th, 2018 at 8:24pm JST (6 years, 9 months ago) comment permalink

Dear Jeffrey Friedl,

I like this new plugin so much that I made a video tutorial all about it for my students. Once again you are pushing the technology into new places. Your skills are amazing!

Here’s a link to the video: https://www.focusphotoschool.com/adobe-photoshop-lightroom/lightroom-mobile/smart-collection-sync-plugin-lightroom-classic/

Have a very Happy New Year and feel free to share the video if you like it. I can send you the embed code too if needed.


David Marx

That’s awesome, thanks for the kind words (and kind gift)! I appreciate your suggesting that folks register the plugin, but I’d prefer they not bother with that at the beginning, since they don’t know whether they’ll end up really using it or not. —Jeffrey

— comment by David Marx on January 10th, 2018 at 2:22am JST (6 years, 9 months ago) comment permalink
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