My Tech-Related Photography Posts
- My Lightroom-to-iPad Workflow
- Lightroom Goodies (lots of plugins)
- Digital Image Color Spaces
- Online Exif (Image Data) Viewer
- Jeffrey's Autofocus Test Chart
- Photoshop Calendar-Template-Building Script
- How to Prepare Photos for an iPad
- A Qualitative Analysis of NEF Compression
- Tripod Stability Tests
more...
This page lists my Lightroom-related plugins and posts.
Note: everything here is for Adobe's venerable photo-workflow desktop application started in 2006, named at various times “Lightroom”, “Lightroom CC”, and now “Lightroom Classic”.
Nothing here applies to Adobe's new desktop app, debuted in Oct 2017 and given the original application's “Lightroom CC” name.
Plugins for Lightroom: (All-Plugin Update Log via RSS )
Export & Publish:
Export Plugins:
- Export to Google Photos
- Export to Tumblr
- Export to Twitter
- Export to Photobucket
- Order Prints Locally — Upload to LifePics for printing and pickup at a local retailer
- Export to Expono
Other Publish Plugins:
- Collection Publisher — Replicate a collection heirarchy to local disk
- Folder Publisher — Replicate images to local disk in their Lightroom folder heirarchy
Export Add-Ons:
- Metadata Wrangler — Control what metadata is/isn't included during any export
- Creative Commons — Inject Creative-Commons license data into exported images
- Run Any Command — Custom process each image during an export
- Snapshot on Export — Develop-setting data backup, sort of
- Smart-Preview Support — Avoid unintential low-quality exports
- Crop for iPad and other Devices — Device-specific cropping on export
Geoencoding Plugins:
- Geoencoding Support — Geoencoding, and working with geoencoded photos
- Proximity Search — Search for photos taken near a location
Utility Plugins:
- Data Explorer — What the Library Grid Filter should have been.
- Smart Collection Sync — Allows smart collections to sync with Lightroom Mobile (sort of)
- People Support — How old are people who appear in photos?
- Folder Status — Track your personal workflow on a folder-by-folder basis.
- PhotoSafe — Protect selected photos from accidental deletion
- Collection Mechanic — A collection of tools relating to collections
- Bag-o-Goodies — A collection of various small tools
- Timelapse Support — Fade develop settings across a large set of images.
- Workflow Delete Options — Lightroom sometimes deletes more than you ask for; this helps.
- Metadata Viewer — See all metadata within a master image
- Bulk Develop Settings — Context-based develop settings (noise reduction, etc.)
- Metadata-Viewer Preset Builder — Configure Lightroom's metadata display
- Photoshop Layers — As close to non-destructive layers as Lightroom allows
- JPEG Quality Tester — Experiment and learn about JPEG quality settings
- Folder Watch — Auto-import from select folders, auto processing, and auto export
- Megapixel Sort — Add an ability to sort by post-crop image size
- Focal-length Sort — Add an ability to sort by focal length
- Data Plot — Plot lens and exposure settings across your library
- Extended Search — Some fringe catalog searching
- Video-Asset Management — Manage videos along side photos in Lr2
- Preview-Cache Image Extraction — Extract preview images from a Lightroom catalog.
- System Info — Info about Lightroom and the system it's installed on, for debugging.
- iPhoto Collection Fixer — Fix the silliness that the iPhoto import creates with respect to “Event Photos” collections
Plugin-related Info:
Tools for Lightroom:
Etc...
- Adding Your Own Custom Photo-Metadata Fields to Lightroom
- My Lightroom-to-iPad Workflow: Now a Lot More Refined
- An Analysis of Lightroom JPEG Export Quality Settings
- Creating Photo Books with Lightroom, InDesign, and Blurb
- Stupid Tone-Curve Tricks: A Half Dozen Develop Presets for Lightroom
- Gettin’ Freaky With Lightroom Tone-Curve Presets
- Funky Joy With Adobe Lightroom (negative clarity)
- Panning a Timelapse with Lightroom and Perl
- Freaky Raw Processing: From Sunset to Moonrise
- Accessing Yahoo! Maps from Adobe Lightroom
- Accessing Lightroom's SQLite DB Directly
Old Plugin Resources for Lightroom 1 (no longer supported)
- Lightroom 1 Export Plugin for Zenfolio
- Lightroom 1 Export Plugin for SmugMug
- Lightroom 1 Export Plugin for Flickr
- Lightroom 1 Export Plugin for Picasa Web
- How to Install a Lightroom 1 Export Plugin
- “Piglets”, Lightroom 1 Plugin Extensions
- List of Known Piglets
- My “Run Any Command” Piglet
Other notable sources of Lightroom plugins include:
- Photographer's Toolbox
- alloy photo
- John Beardsworth
- Capture Monkey
- lightroom-plugins.com
- Adobe Addons
Please do not report bugs or other comments related to my plugins here. Please do those on the appropriate per-plugin page (linked from my Lightroom Goodies page).
Hi Jeffrey,
i am looking for a way to compare the development data of two or more photos inside LR.
There is a plugin from 2014 on Bitbucket (lrdevsettingscompare), but it is not supported anymore and does not work correctly in LR 9.2 (Windows 10). Do you have an idea?
Thanks and many greetings, Ulrich
I just tried the copy of LrDevsettingsCompare from here and it seemed to work. It wouldn’t have support for develop settings added since then, but it’s something. Have you tried reaching out to the authors? —Jeffrey
First, thank you for all that you’ve done for the photography and Lightroom communities Jeffery!
Long story short I think I need a way for Metadata Wrangler (or another tool) to also write the Caption field data to the IPTC:Caption-Abstract field in addition to the EXIF:ImageDescription field. I think I’m observing that Google Photos only looks at the IPTC:Caption-Abstract field so trying to use Metadata Wrangler to modify the photos’ description field only works for Google Photos if Metadata Wrangler is also writing to the IPTC:Caption-Abstract. There’s a note about how Metadata Wrangler works in this regard on the change log, reproduced below.
Is there a setting or way to force Metadata Wrangler to also overwrite the IPTC:Caption-Abstract field even if there was no text in there originally?
Best regards,
R. Moore
“20190817.180 – Added “Artist” to the “Add/Overwrite” section, and updated the internals so that when overwriting an item, it overwrites all copies of that item in the metadata (e.g., when updating the “Caption”, the tag actually filled in is “EXIF:ImageDescription”, but if “IPTC:Caption-Abstract” and/or “XMP:Description” exist, they are also filled in). Also fixed the “Speed” item in this area.”
This ended up being a minefield, so I’m reticent to change semantics now. Consider instead using the Run Any Command plugin to invoke ExifTool to copy the metadata fields as you like on each exported copy. —Jeffrey
Regarding “lrdevsettingscompare”: No I didn´t try to reach the Author as I don´t know how to do it @ Bitbucket. Sorry.
Hi from Belgium,
I saw your geocoding plugin for lightroom (v4 for me)> Unfortunately Icannot geocode from GE. As Google has change the way to works with maps years ago, is it in your pkan to move from google to openstreetmaps for getting info for geocoding ?
Thanks,
You can use Google if you get your own API developer key and enter it into the Plugin Manager. The plugin also already lets you use OpenSteetMaps. —Jeffrey
Hello there from Alabama,
Is it possible to hack a Lightroom 6 (and newer) plugin to work with Lightroom 5? I have a Loupedeck+ that I’m trying to get to work on LR5 and so far I’ve just modified “Info.lua” to say “LrSkdMinimumVersion = 5.0” and Lightroom went from saying it wasn’t supported to it is enabled, but has encountered some problems. Upon exporting an error report, the only errors (3 of them total) are relating to “Could not find namespace: LrApplicationView”
The Loupedeck requires features not available in Lr5. Most of the “control Lightroom from another app” features came in Lr6 and Lr7…. —Jeffrey
Hello there from HK,
I am going to geo tag my old Nikon DSLR (D7000) photos taken in past 10 years. Over 20,000 of them. Your Geotagging plugin for LR is really a time saving tool. Wouldn’t even think about this daunting task without your tool. 100% well worth for the denotation I made in registration!
Thank you!
Hi Jeffry, I’m looking for a plugin helping me to stack photos in lightroom with more detailed options than lightroom does by itself. Lightroom could stack photos automaticaly, but it will stack them with “more or less” the same creation time, means if make a lot if photos in burst mode it may put them all in one stack. I often create dng files out of the raw files. Ok wasting some disk space but I like to stack these dng files with the associated raw file(which have exactly the same photo creation time as the raw file) and only those. When using the automatic stacking option in Lightroom it often creates stacks which contain more photos than I like to have in a stack (for example because I shot in burst mode).
Are you interested to build a plugin which could handle that?
Best regards
Stef
The “Find Next Photo Group” feature of my Bag-o-Goodies plugin can help, but it can’t actually make the stacks, as Lightroom doesn’t allow a plugin to create stacks. —Jeffrey
Hi from Sedona, USA,
Any chance you’ll develop an export plug-in creating webp files, with improved browser support I’m think of serving these up instead of jpegs for browsers that support them.
Thanks, I use your geocoding plug-in all the time
No, sorry, Adobe will have to add it to Lightroom natively. —Jeffrey
Hello from Italy,
firstly thank you for all the great plugins you produce, they are very useful!
In the past I have created smart collections with “companion” normal collections for syncing and then I manually update the normal collection when required. Only now I’ve noticed you have a plug for syncing smart collections 🙁
My question(s) are:
1) how does you plugin handle custom order in the synced companion collection:
2) is there any way to integrate my custom order if I implement your plugin or would I need to manually custom order them again, given I could custom order them (see question 1).
Keep up the good work, it is most appreciated!
Saluti
Walter
Hi Jeffrey,
I wrote to you earlier today asking about custom orders in synced collections. Anyway, I decided to try it out for myself (with success) and confirmed the following (FYI):
1) you can create a custom order in the resulting “companion” collection which doesn’t change when you sync updates from the smart collection. New photos are placed on the end:
2) I was able to maintain my custom ordered collections I’d already made by giving the smart collection and companion collection the same name:
3) the plugin doesn’t “companion” subfolders from a parent folder, I had to “manage” each subfolder individually (no big deal):
4) consequently the companion set doesn’t divide into subsets… I had to place all the companion collections into one folder (again no big deal).
Thanks again for they great work.
Walter
Hi Jeffrey, I’m writing from San Antonio, TX USA. Staying isolated and trying to organize my lightroom. I hope you’re healthy and practicing safe isolation!
I’m wondering if you have a tool and/or have at least investigated a way to copy the configurations of “Publish Services” into a separate catalog.
My catalog theses days loads very slowly (yes, I know some people think Lightroom should be able to handle any size catalog, but, alas, it just doesn’t) so I started separating out various topics into their own catalogs (ex: sports, wildlife, junk). Today I tried to use a publish service on one of these new catalogs and only just came to realize all my publishing services need to be set up. While I can swap to the old monolithic catalog and take screenshots of all the settings in each publish service, it donned on me that you of all people might have figured out a way to copy the configurations. Even if you just have some insight as to where in the catalog these might be saved, that would be really helpful.
Publish services simply can’t be copied, but you can make a copy of the catalog (a copy of its LRCAT file brought to an empty folder), open that catalog, and then remove all the photos from it. (Be sure to “remove” and not “delete from disk”!) You then have an empty catalog with all the publish services set up, though empty. —Jeffrey
I can’t get the “Smart Colection Sync” plug-in to work. I just get the message “The catalog has no smart collections to be processed by this plugin.”. What am I doing wrong?
You have to be sure to mark the smart collections that you want to work with. The default is with “<!>” in the title, but it can be changed in the plugin settings. See the docs on this page. —Jeffrey
I know the Facebook is DOA in terms of LR Plugins, but I am upgrading from LR8 to LR9 and even though I can’t use the plugin to manage images on Facebook site, I do still want to use the Publish Service collections as a reference to what I had uploaded there prior to their trashing their API.
On LR9, your Facebook Pub Service is dimmed. I know I can still open the collections and see them but it is very hard to read which instance of the Facebook Publish Service to go to as it is so dim I can’t read it. Do you have a way to activate this PS on LR 9 even though it can no longer be used to interface with Facebook? I guess what I’m looking for is an update where the code doesn’t complain about running on a newer LR version. Maybe just disable the version number check
Thanks — Dan
Fair enough, I’ve just pushed out a new version that should work. —Jeffrey
Hello hello Mr Friedl;
Hoping all’s as well as can be with you & yours.
I have enjoyed your Flickr photo sync tool greatly over the years and have watched with pleasure and & joy as you continue to improve it. Thank you.
I have begun to integrate Capture One (version 20.0.4) into my photo workflow and am really enjoying the multitude of differences between it and LR CC. Tho it has a scripting function I am extremely loath to try my hand as those tasks end poorly for me, always. I wonder if you might consider the challenge. I’d be (and likely there’d be others) happy to pay for your fine work, along the lines of your current LR plugins.
Best regards,
Michael Mazzola
Lighting Designer
Portland, OR, USA
IG: mjmazzola
Thanks for your kind words, but I won’t be expanding to anything beyond Lightroom. —Jeffrey
I am using the bulk develop setting and have been for quite a few years, all of a sudden it is removing my radial tool and altering my exposure in the latest version of lightroom. Please let me know what to do.
Thanks
Please send a plugin log after experiencing the issue, with details about exactly which settings were changed in error, including their exact values before and after. Thanks! —Jeffrey
Do you know of any way to export a text file of your Collection Set/Collection tree?
I’m just looking for something that looks like the output of “dir > tree.txt /a” but for Collections…
I’ve used a number of your plugins over the years, and I know how useful and skilled as a programmer. My scripting days/programming days died in my brain many years ago.
Thanks in advance.
I’m afraid that I can’t think of any way to do this, sorry. —Jeffrey
Hey Jeffrey – I hope you are well! I saw on a “recent” post that you had not gone to the cloud version yet. I made a partial move due to the pandemic since I was away from my desktop computer for about 9 months. Curious about your thoughts on the Cloud version these days? I am in purgatory between the two versions and trying to decide how to use the two together or go back to Classic. The cost to go full cloud is a bit crazy and I miss Classic features such as your plugins, Compare, etc…. Thoughts appreciated. Jonathan
I’ve not looked at the cloud version since. It’s just not for me, so I’ve no further opinion on it, sorry. —Jeffrey
This is some excellent work. I just registered and donated $25 for your Collection Publisher. It’s kind of mind-blowing that this functionality is not part of core Lightroom. You’re doing work Adobe can’t be arsed to do and ask for essentially nothing in return. Amazing!
It’s also such a basic functionality, really… yet, here we are.
Your plugin allowed me to reach what feels like 90% automation in my flow: take new photos, import, edit, add to a new, manual collection. Then hit “refresh and publish” so that new collection is picked up by the mirrored collection from your plugin. This publishes it to the NAS, which my Nextcloud can access. Visit Nextcloud, hit “Share” on that folder, done. Takes seconds. Through your addon, I have constant peace of mind that full sync is reached (or know when it’s not). Through Nextcloud, I can track exactly what stuff is shared with whom, set passwords, expiration dates etc. All at full JPG resolution, too. No more duplicates, SSOT all the way. This is the world I always dreamed of, facilitated through your excellent plugin. Amazing what one can do with some spit and Lua, in the Adobe-constrained playground.
The only bitter pill in all this is that your work ties me down with Adobe even more, receiving my money that in fact you earned for a good part.
Greetings from Germany
Just wanted to let you know that I appreciate your work on the free tool for viewing metadata.
Thanks a lot and have a good day.
Hi, do you do custom development for lightroom plugins?
I have specific needs if you’re interested. email me.
thanks!
No, sorry, I don’t. —Jeffrey
I’m using Metadata Wrangler with LR Classic and for years have used Metadata Wrangler without issue. Now it works as normal except it won’t give me italic text in the watermark. I’ve re-installed it but the problem persists. The italic box is definitely ticked. Any ideas, please? Anything else I could try?
Thanks,
John
I’m afraid I don’t understand what Metadata Wrangler has to do with watermarks. Are you confusing two plugins, perhaps? —Jeffrey
Hi, thanks for your geo plugin. After Adobe has stopped support of maps for LR 6 it helps me a lot. It’s much clever anyway. Do you have plans to develop any plugins for Capture One Pro?
No, sorry.—Jeffrey
Hi, Jeffrey,
This is a follow up to my query of 26th March 2021 about watermarks in Metadata Wrangler no longer showing as italics. You had responded that watermarks are not part of MW.
I’m not very technical and your response surprised me as I’ve always adjusted my watermarks from within MW (as I thought). I had no idea that watermarks are part of LR, itself.
Having Googled the problem, I see that Adobe has been advised of this problem many. many months ago but does not seem to have fixed it.
Sorry to have bothered you with this Adobe issue.
All the Best (from Surrey, UK).
Jeffry
Do you have a plugin for the capacity to Publish directly from LR to Instagram?
Thanks
Doug
dougtesta@comcast.net
Facebook doesn’t allow it, except for official Business accounts. (At least they allow that, now; for a long time, they required uploads to be from a phone.) I haven’t made a plugin for Business accounts, but I’m considering it…. —Jeffrey
hi, Jeffrey how have you been? it seems like you just left the com
Just busy busy busy with things behind the scenes. —Jeffrey
Hello Jeffrey,
I’m Olivier from Canada, first thing first, thank you for your fabulous work in the photography community. I’m a big fan of the LR sync adon and I wonder if it will be available for the latest version of Lightroom classic ?
Thank you for your work again and have a great day
Olivier
I’m not sure what plugin you’re referring to, but it doesn’t sound like one of mine… —Jeffrey
Hi, can I please ask whether your Lightroom plug-ins will continue to work if installed on a new Apple MacBook Pro with an M1 chip running Lightroom Classic natively ? Thank you for your help.
I’ve had no reports of any problems along these lines. —Jeffrey
CT, way too close to NYC
I have used Downloader Pro (Breeze) to download files from my card and change the file name. It has been an integral part of my workflow. I like meaningful names rather than generic camera names and I like to include the date and time in the file name. I recently got a MacBook with Apple silicon to replace my old Win10 system. Unfortunately MacOS does not support Downloader Pro.
I know LrC can download files and change names but the time is limited to one second granularity and I occasionally shoot bursts. Downloader Pro can handle sub second time in names. I tried the Community Adobe forum but aside from several others with the same problem, there were no solutions that I thought were viable. I know Nikon cameras include sub second data in the EXIF.
The best solution would be for Adobe to add sub second capability to the file renaming since then everything could be done in one program. Barring that, it might be possible to have a plugin that does the job. Since you have demonstrated an ability to write such plugins, I thought it might be useful to plant a seed in your mind.
I recently learned a little Python and wrote a program that does what I want, but it’s separate from LrC and I thought a plugin would be a better solution. Note that I said “a little” Python, so my program is pretty crude and I don’t feel up to writing a plugin but of course I could share my feeble attempt if anyone is interested and able to polish Python.
Plugins can’t rename files once they’re in Lightroom. My Folder Watch plugin can rename files the way you suggest, but it’s not really the appropriate hammer for this nail. Your Python script is about the best I can suggest at the moment. I use something similar myself, renaming my files in between copying them from the card and importing into Lightroom. —Jeffrey
Hello Jeffrey. Wondering if you take requests? I’d love something for Lightroom Classic, similar to Mogrify, where you can export with text baked onto the photo, but I would like to be able to select LR info from the caption, filename, title, date, etc. to be the text that gets added. Mogrify requires that you type in the text you want exported, which is redundant for me since I’ve usually got the same info already in LR. Thanks for all your work!
I’m pretty sure that Lr/Mogrify can do what you want; please see its docs again. —Jeffry
Hi Jeffrey. I am Frank from Philadelphia, USA. I just want to tell you how much I love your Lightroom Smart-Collection Sync plugin. I just installed the new version yesterday and left a donation. You have accomplished something with that plugin that Adobe should have done a long time ago!
I am happy to keep donating for you to keep updating this plugin. It really is awesome! Thanks again!