Back in Lightroom 2 days I had a plugin to extract JPGs from a Lightroom catalog's preview cache, something really useful when trying to recover something if you had somehow lost the master images. It wasn't my most popular plugin, obviously, because folks would use it only when trying to recover from the double disaster of losing their images and having no backups.

It was a lot of work and helped perhaps at best a few dozen people, but well worth the effort to help folks trying to recover years worth of memories. It was my only plugin to have [...]
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I've just released the new Lightroom Plugin that I've been working on for the last few weeks:

Jeffrey’s "Folder Status" Lightroom Plugin

It lets you create per-folder metadata flags that track personal workflow milestones as you work with images in a folder (for example, "Keywording Done", "Off-Site Backup Saved", "Geoencoded", etc... whatever you want), and through export-prerequisite rules based on these flags, to help ensure that you don't accidentally export photos from folders that haven't yet received at least whatever minimal processing you think is important.

How you work with it depends greatly on how you set [...]

This one is very much a matter of taste, but I came across this rendition of a fall-foliage scene while futzing in Lightroom as I tested my Lightroom plugins. I often need to make an image look completely different than before, so I can tell at a glance when it arrives at an upload destination I'm working on, and in doing this I usually just slam a develop slider one way or the other to its limit. I tend to not pay attention to which slider I grab, or what the result is, but sometimes the result does grab my [...]

I snapped this shot on yesterday's hike. It was very hazy, so the "layered mountain" effect that I like so much was strong. Perhaps too strong... I would have liked more contrast.

Taken from almost the same spot, looking a different direction, is a moody shot I like of the "Azalea Hillside" (つつじヶ丘), which can apparently be spectacular, but I missed it by a week:

Stéphane said that the previous week, the hillside was covered in every color except green, but now many of the other colors had been taken over by green. It was still pretty, so I'll have [...]

(The photos on this post, from my first visit earlier today to the small but elegant Koumyou-in Temple (光明院) in eastern Kyoto, have nothing to do with the prose of the post. They're just pretty pictures.)

The Problem

Historically in Lightroom, when uploading one's photos to an online service such as Facebook, Flickr, etc., one sees a little progress bar in the upper left that chunks along with each picture, such as the one shown at right. With my plugins, the progress bar makes two steps for each image, one after Lightroom has rendered the copy to be uploaded, [...]