Jeffrey’s “Export to Photobucket” Lightroom Plugin

This plugin for Adobe Lightroom Classic allows you to export images from Lightroom directly to your Photobucket account.

This plugin works in Lightroom Classic, and older versions as far back as Lightroom 3, though some features depend on the version of Lightroom.

The same download works for both Windows and Mac. See the box to the upper right for the download link (in orange) and installation instructions.

Functionality

The screenshot below, of the plugin's Export Dialog, gives some idea about its functionality, at least as of the initial public release version, 20090721.1.

After downloading, installing, and enabling the plugin (download link is in the orange box, in the upper-right of this page; install instructions are here), you can activate the Photobucket export by clicking on the Export Dialog's masthead, as illustrated here.

You can add additional functionality to the Photobucket export (and to all exports) with export-filter plugins. On my Lightroom Goodies page I have export-filter plugins related to Geoencoding support, metadata management, and running external apps on images as they export.

The plugin also adds a File > Plug-in Extras > Photobucket Extras menu-item dialog.

Availability

This plugin is distributed as “donationware”. I have chosen to make it available for free — everyone can use it forever, without cost of any kind — but unless registered, its functionality is somewhat reduced after six weeks.

Registration is done via PayPal, and if you choose to register, it costs the minimum 1-cent PayPal fee; any amount you'd like to add beyond PayPal's sliding fees as a gift to me is completely optional, and completely appreciated.

Note: a Lightroom major upgrade, such as from Lr10 to Lr11 de-registers the plugin in the upgraded version, so if you want to maintain registration, a new ($0.01 if you like) registration code is needed in the upgraded version. It makes for a hassle every couple of years, I know. Sorry. See this note for details.

For details on plugin registration and on how I came into this hobby of Lightroom plugin development, see my Plugin Registration page.

Version History
( Update Log via RSS )

20220309.142

Work around a bug in Lightroom 11.2 that causes publishing to get stuck. The workaround is to switch the view away from the collection being published. If the user does that switch manually, the bug goes away. This plugin update notices if the bug is being triggered, and if so, momentarily switches the view to the quick collection and back.

Removed a bunch of debug logging that was slowing down the LUA token.Newline

20220224.141

Work around a Lightroom "lua_gettop( L ) == 1" bug.

20220120.140

Added the WEEKNUM token, along with DAYNUM, weeknum, and daynum.

Whack-a-mole with PayPal's random changes.

20211219.139

Warn when PayPal seems to have given a bogus code in the web-confirmation page.

Fixed that the Province template token did not respect the plugin-specific geo-privacy settings.

Fixed an issue with the {Newline} token, and added {Comma}, {Hyphen}, and {Space} for good measure.

Fixed a problem with filters on the {Keyword} token.

20210415.138

Added 'separated by' to the People token.

Added the ImageViewDirection and ImageViewBearing tokens.

Reworked the Keywords token to better accept filters.

working around 'constant table overflow' error

20201103.137

Added the PF filter to turn typographic fractions into plain-ASCII fractions.

20201017.136

Updates for Lr10

Added the SpeedKnots token.

Worked around an "unknown key captureTime" error.

Added the {PlusCode} and {GeoHash} tokens.

20200529.135

Handle the "All Except Camera & Camera Raw Info" metadata option WRT geoprivacy.

Work around a Windows bug related to canceling out of the registration dialog.

Some of the filename-related tokens could be incorrect in rare situations.

Added some extra debug logging to note whether the plugin is enabled.

20191011.134

Added the LensInfo template token.

Updated the Exposure token to allow customization.

More token work: added {Urls}, and updated {ISO} and {Copyright} to allow customization.

Added the {RelativeFolder} token.

20190810.133

Fixed the SST1 and SST2 tokens.

20190731.132

Updated the PublishCollectionName token (and CollectionNames and CollectionFullNames) to remove the MIRROR: prefix from the name that mirrored collections within my Collection Publisher plugin automatically get.

20190708.131

Added functions uc(), ucFirst(), lc(), and lcFirst() to the LUA token.

20190519.130

When not logged in, make it more clear what you're not logged into, and how to fix it.

Updated the alphabetical sort to be "sorta-smart alphabetical sort", whereby names that differ only by a number are sorted numerically. For example, "album2" properly falls between "album1" and "album3", but "album20" falls after. The former straight-up alphabetical sort put "album20" before "album3", which is ugly and unpractical.

Added the PEOPLE variable to the LUA token.

Fixed a problem with the SpeedKPH token.

Finally figured out the “Assertion failed: packed” error.

Added TempC and TempF to the template tokens that my plugins understand.

Added the TempC and TempF tokens.

Updated the keyword-related tokens to accept standard filters.

Work around a bug that sometimes causes plugins to be disabled when starting Lightroom via clicking on a catalog file.

Fix an "Unknown key: captureTime" crash.

Added the GPSCoords token.

Fixed a problem related to template tokens and photos without capture times.

20181017.129

Make the template-editing window a big bigger in the caption editor.

20181015.128

Updates for Lr8 (Lightroom Classic CC Version 8).

Added the special PP() function to the {LUA} token.

Added hierarchical options to the Keywords token.

Try to work around a Lightroom bug related to photo timezones and how Lightroom handles accessing plugin data.

20181004.127

Added the 'nicknames' modifier to the {People} token.

Added the SST1, SST2, and SS3 tokens to the template tokens that the plugin understands.

Input fields that accept a location can now handle a What3Words code and a Plus Code.

Fixed a bug when 'Token Examples' invoked in certain situations.

Added the IptcDateTaken token.

Clicking on the version number in the Plugin Manager now copies version info to the clipboard

Added the folowing template tokens: {home}, {desktop}, {temp}, {pictures}, {documents}

Added the 'PCH' variable to the {LUA} tag.

Added the {NonSmartCollectionNames} and {NonSmartCollectionFullNames} tokens to the data templates that my plugins understand.

When encountering catalog corruption, present a better error message.

Added a bunch of token filters: F2D F2S F2X B2D B2S B2X S2X A2D A2S A2X

Updated the Keywords token, and added the KWf function to the {LUA} token.

20171019.126

Oops, more Lr7 stuff.

20171019.125

Updates for Lr7.

Better handle some character-encoding issues related to template tokens.

Allow the "If Exists" feature of Templat Tokens to work with the PluginProperty token.

Update registration support to handle a stupid bug at PayPal that PayPal refuses to fix )-:

20170710.124

Fixed a bug introuded the other day in template tokens, related to Windows filenames.

20170621.123

Added the Newline template token.

Enhanced the FolderName token

Added the "only if it has a value" feature to template tokens.

20170309.122

Added the following tokens to the template tokens that my plugins understand: Artworks, ArtworkTitle, ArtworkCopyright, ArtworkSource, ArtworkCreator, ArtworkDateCreated, ArtworkInventoryNum, ISO8601Date

20170109.121

Oops, yesterday's update caused all photos sent to Twitter to be marked as sensitive.

20170108.120

Retooled to use a new Twitter API, allowing photos not to take up any characters in a tweet.

Added the following tokens to the templates that my plugins understand: FileModYYYY, FileModYY, FileModMM, FileModDD, FileModHH, FileModMIN, FileModSS, FileYYYY, FileYY, FileMM, FileDD, FileHH, FileMIN, FileSS, Weekday, Wday, weekday, wday, FilenameNumber.

Fix for Lightroom 2. Support for older versions of Lightroom will be stopped soon.

Got around a situation where Lighroom would crash duing an export of large images.

Better dialog real-estate managment for the meatadata section.

Fixed a bug with the keyword tables in the LUA token.

Added Russian-langauge support for the People-Support {People} tag.

20160207.119

Added ChildOf and DescendantOf filters to the {Keywords} and {KeywordsAll} template tokens that my plugins understand.

Fixed a bug with the 'edit saved credentials' dialog.

Fixed how custom {People} formatting works with people keywords that have no birthday associated with them.

Try to avoid yet another place where Lightroom gets hung because it can't handle certain kinds of dialogs at the same time.

20151019.118

Updated the Caption part of the dialog to show up to three lines of text, and the full text in the tooltip.

Updated Twitter support to better count lengths of tweets that include URLs.

Added {SpeedKPH} and {SpeedMPH} to the list of template tokens supported by my plugins.

The {People} token wasn't working properly for some keywords without a registered birthday.

20150517.117

Fixed the "SpecPeople:259: attemt to index al nil value" error.

Clicking on the example caption in the export dialog now brings up a dialog showing the whole example caption, which is useful to see the full thing when it contains multiple lines.

20150206.116

In the POODLE-vunerability dialog, display a raw URL of a page on my site that discusses the issue, so that folks can be independently sure that the dialog is indeed from me and not malware.

20150126.115

Added support for the {People} template token, which works in conjunction with my People Support plugin to automatically include in upload captions and the like the names and/or ages of people in a photo.

Fix to the date_diff() function supported by the LUA template token.

Updated the camera-name code to try to guess the actual camera model of Hasselblad H5D files, since in their infinite wisdom Hasselblad decided to encode three distinct models with the same internal code, making it impossible to know for sure what camera produced a given image file.

20141219.114

If the remote site sends back garbage during the authorization handshake, properly report the error instead of crashing.

Use a compressed view on the Plugin Extras dialog if the screen is not very tall.

Better debug logging of Twitter interaction.

Very long tweet text could break the dialog display.

Don't allow expert when we know ahead of time that the tweet is too long.

If twitter rejects a tweet (e.g. because it's too large), show the tweet and offer to allow the user to edit/resend at twitter.com

Added extra logging to debug why Lightroom might fail to render for export.

20141019.113 Windows Only: Add a one-time check for the POODLE security vulnerability, and alert the user if it exists.
20140923.112 Added the LrMD5, LrLocalization, LrSystemInfo, and LrMath packages to the {LUA} template token.
20140922.111 When deleting from a publish collection, properly maintain the 'Uploaded to...' metadata field.
20140902.110 New build system
20140802.109

Updated the Twitter support to allow my plugins' template tokens in the tweet text.

Made the {GPSAltitude}, {Altitude}, and {GPSCoordinates} tokens subject to the geo-privacy settings like the other geo-related tokens.

20140731.108 Registration fix for Lr5.6
20140729.107 Previous updates broke support on Lightroom 2
20140720.106 More Creative-Cloud support.
20140715.105

Fixed an issue with Creative-Cloud revalidation.

20140712.104

Lr5.5 and later Creative-Cloud installs can now revalidate themselves if needed.

20140710.103 Sigh, had a bug in the Creative-Cloud support.
20140708.102

Now supports Lr5.5+ Creative-Cloud Installs.

20140704.101 Sigh, introduced an error for some folks with the rebuild the other day.
20140630.100 Build-system update
20140613.99

Added date_diff() and raw_time_diff() functions to the special {LUA} token understood by the plugin.

20140605.98

Add a note to the Keyword options to highlight that only exportable keywords are considered

A missing 'automatic destination' could cause the plugin to crash.

Added new tokens to the template language the plugin understands: LrVersion, LrVersionMajor, LrVersionMinor, LrVersionRevision, LrVersionBuild, Location, CatalogName, CatalogPath, OperatingSystem, OS

Added new token filters: NS and LO

Added a new "Location Privacy" section to the Exprt/Publish dialogs.

Updated the location-based tokens in the template language the plugin uses — City, State, Country, Location, Latitude, Longitude — to respect new privacy options in the Export dialog, and in the resend-metadata dialog. You can override those options on a case-by-case basis with the evenIfPrivate filter.

Added locationIsPrivate variable to the environment available to the LUA token.

The {Empty} template token wasn't working properly.

Make the revalidation process smoother, especially for folks using Lr5.4 and later.

Enable a new feature internal to Lr5 for large exports that keeps the CPU from running too far ahead of the upload. Prior to this, Lightroom would go ahead and peg the CPU to pre-render all the images even if they weren't being uploaded at nearly the same speed. Now Lightroom pauses the behind-the-scenes rendering if it has gotten too far ahead of the upload.

Added the “:EMBED” token filter to the template language.

20130926.97 Oops, fix a bug introduced in the previous update
20130925.96

Added a bunch of tokens to the preset templates supported: ExportFormat, ExportColorSpace, ExportBitDepth, ExportQuality, ExportSharpeningLevel, ExportSharpeningMedia, IpernityUrl, GoogleDriveUrl, and TumblrUrl.

The token-examples dialog had been broken. Also deprecated Folder and Path tokens in preference to FolderName and FolderPath tokens.

20130909.95

Work around a Lightroom bug concerning the determination of whether a photo is offline.

20130820.94

Made big updates to the "Export with Smart Previews?" section; you can now pick to be asked whether to export via Smart Previews, and can differentiate between when the Smart Previews are "good enough" for an export and when they are not.

Fixed the KW/KWE tables in template tokens; they had been broken when using load for the script.

Better handle very long user account names, so that the [Logout] button doesn't get cut off of the Export dialog.

20130701.93

Work around a bug that causes the export-related progress bar to not show up right away.

20130613.92 Better support for plugin revalidation.
20130611.91 Sigh, previous update for Lr5 broke things for the Lr5 beta.
20130611.90 Yet another Lr5 update
20130610.89 Better logging to try to understand catalog-write-access contention under Lightroom's hood
20130524.88 Apparently, a recent change broke things on Lr2, which some folks apparently still use.
20130520.87

Added the ability in Lr5 to export images even if the master image file is not available, so long as there's a smart preview available.

20130501.86 Update for Lr5
20130412.85 Fix to the Twitter fix.
20130412.84

Sigh, Twitter yet again made an unannounced undocumented change to their API that immediately breaks apps that have worked for years, and doesn't even bother alerting developers after the fact. Lord knows how many developers wasted how many hours trying to debug something that should have been announced on the developer's blog. Days later, it's still not announced there. Twitter is not worse than Facebook, but seems to be trying.

20130328.83 Fix for the registration system.
20130319.82

Export could crash if a too-big-for-the-remote-service video upload was attempted.

Fixed a possible plugin crash in Lr2 that might happen if the remote site's servers are failing.

20130220.81

Added support for some new template tokens: FlagStatus (requires Lr4.1 or later), and for Lr3 and later, a bunch of IPTC extended metadata: AdditionalModelInfo, CodeOfOrgShown, DigImageGUID, Event, ImageSupplierImageId, MinorModelAge, ModelAge, ModelReleaseID, ModelReleaseStatus, NameOfOrgShown, PersonShown, PlusVersion, PropertyReleaseID, PropertyReleaseStatus, and SourceType.

20130214.80 Small fix for Lr2
20130209.79 Update to handle new Twitter url-length settings.
20130206.78 Update the Twitter-related code to handle their new API. Their old API goes away next month.
20130201.77

A lot of work on the upload datapath, making it more efficient and restoring the ability to retry the attempt on certain errors.

Added the ability to set the caption on a one-off basis by just typing it in, avoiding the need to make a preset each time.

20121020.76 A recent optimization for Lr4 broke support for Lr2.
20121017.75 Plugin was blocking export due to DPX-video format in some cases where Lightroom didn't allow the format to be changed.
20121014.74 Added a help dialog when encountering the mysterious 'handle in the wrong state' error.
20121009.73

Workaround for an "attempt to call field 'getProgressScope'" bug introduced in Lr4.2.

Disallow DPX-format video export, since that totally breaks things.

Enhance the {EMPTY} template token so that it interrupts the squelching of superfluous joining characters.

20120821.72

Updates to the environment in the {LUA} token (in the template tokens in my plugins) to include photoTime() and currentTime(), and other changes to match the updated docs at that link.

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Wow, it seems some people using Lr2 are still using very old versions of Lr2 that aren't up to snuff feature/bugfix wise. I don't want to support gratuitously old stuff, so I put a minimum of Lr2.6 to use the plugin.

20120614.71

Very slow uploads in Lr4.1 could cause the new progress bar stuff to blow up.

Twitter support now allows suppressing "Private" geoencoded locations in Lr4.1+

20120602.70

New upload engine in Lr4.1 that greatly increases the efficiency of large uploads. In Lr4.0 and older versions, upload handling is inefficient and large uploads can crash Lightroom.

With Lr4.1 and later, you also get an upload percent-complete report in the task progress bar, and the ability for upload cancels to take effect immediately.

20120526.69

Update to handle the Mac App Store version of Lightroom.

Tweak for Lr4.1RC2.

Fixed the “photo too large to tweet” dialog message, which had been all garbled up.

Enhanced the send-log dialog to hopefully make reports more meaningful to me, yielding, I hope, the ability to respond more sensibly to more reports.

Added to the template tokens supported by the plugin: {FullMasterFile}, {FullMasterFolder}, {FullExportedFile}, and {FullExportedFolder}.

20120330.68 Update to handle 4.1RC
20120309.67 Had broken registrations in Lr2; Update to the debug logging to better track down timing issues that might arise.
20120229.66

Lightroom's internal infrastructure doesn't handle large uploads well, and will most likely crash when trying to upload huge videos, so I've not added a warning and the ability for the user to decide when it kicks in.

Files that are offline are now detected before an export/publish begins, and if there are any, offers the option to abort the export, or just skip the offline ones. This is a lot more clear than the "dng_error_file_not_found" error you get from Lightroom if you follow through with an export attempt of an offline image.

More on the march toward Lr4, including upheaval in the code to handle Lightroom APIs being discontinued in Lr4.

Added the {AspectRatio} token to the token templates understood by the plugin, and added the Length=num filter.

Attempt to prepare for changes Twitter has announced will take place in how they return information about server errors.

20120114.65

Round #2 on the PB/Twitter.

20120113.64

Fix a potential PB/Twitter authorization issue introduced in the previous update.

20120112.63

Update for Lr4 beta: explain in the plugin manager that the plugin can't be registered in the beta.

Moved the Twitter code over to a new style of Twitter authentication, in hopes that it cures the authentication problems some people have been having.

Moved all access of Twitter to HTTPS.

Removed an obsolete reference to bit.ly from the Twitter help dialog.

20111216.62

Better error handling for video export, and for when images/videos exceed upload limits.

Warn about the need to update the list of albums if it's not been updated for a long time.

The Lightroom bug referenced in the version note for 20110623.42 was fixed in Lr3.5, so I've removed the special workaround processing for that version and later.

20111210.61

Added a system-clock check and reports to the user if the system clock is more than a minute out of date. An incorrect system clock can cause problems with various kinds of communication and authentication with some of my plugins, so I've just gone ahead and added this to every plugin.

Had issues with the registration button sometimes not showing.

20111106.60

Fixed a login error that I apparently introduced recently.

When doing a plugin upgrade, offer the ability to flush all the old copies of the plugin.

Fix an "attempt to concatenate field 'user_id_string'" error that pops up at rare times, and a few other similar issues.

20111012.49

Issue a more reasonable error message when Photobucket doesn't respond.

20110903.48

Added {PluginProperty} to the template tokens used by my plugins.

Some internal optimizations to handle large gallery sets.

20110819.47

Added the ability to include a photo when issuing a tweet via Twitter.

Gave the Twitter tweet input UI some attention.

Twitter automatically replaces URLs with their own t.co urls, and the tweet-text character-counter now takes that into account, so pasting in urls of any length now "costs" a fixed amount (currently 19 characters for an HTTP url; 20 characters for an HTTPS url). The plugin no longer uses bit.ly.

Made it so that hitting ENTER while entering a tweet does not actually launch the export. This is a maddeningly-frustrating aspect of the Lightroom plugin infrastructure, but I've worked around it in a way that seems to work.

Fixed "attempt to compare nil with number" error that some users might have gotten in Publish.

Added a timeout to the upload call to hopefully get around a too-short default timeout that can interrupt long video uploads.

20110729.46 The 'refresh list' button was missing from the upload-destination list when it was configured to be a popup menu.
20110712.45 Had a minor plugin-crashing boo-boo in the previous update
20110711.44

More on the catalog-access errors that some are getting with Lr3.

Really long captions could cause a stack overflow.

20110703.43 For Lr2, fixes a 'must be called inside withReadAccessDo' error I'd recently introduced. For Lr3, tries to address a similar error that seems to pop up in rare cases.
20110623.42

There's a bug in Lightroom that causes it to sometimes include private keywords in exported copies. The plugin now detects these situations and alerts you to them, allowing you to avoid a privacy blunder.

Be more robust to errors during the gallery-creation process.

Fixed a bug that caused the export destination to not properly refresh in response to selecting a preset in the export dialog.

Better handle long album names by truncating at the beginning with '...', and having the tooltip be the full name.

20110512.41 Fixed a bug introduced in yesterday's update.
20110511.40

Added support for video.

Now tells Photobucket to extract geolocation info from images.

Fixed a bug whereby one couldn't export via preset to an account different from the currently-logged in account.

Fixed a problem such that long album names caused buttons to become inaccessible in the export dialog.

Not sure what happened to the export dialog since I last checked it in Windows, but it was in need of some UI love.

The list of upload destinations was sometimes getting cut off

Added the ability to select which metadata items cause a Publish republish.

Added the ability to sort the album list in the Publishing Manger

Fixed some plugin-crash asserts that some new users might get.

Fixed a bug in how some export errors are reported.

20110113.39 Added {CroppedWidth} and {CroppedHeight} to the template tokens used by my plugins.
20101217.38 Updated Twitter support for Twitter's new API endpoints
20101124.37

Fixed a crash sometimes encountered while updating remote-account data in the plugin.

Warn about the loss of metadata if the "resize to megapixels" option is used.

Fixes “Spec:343: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value)” error some were getting.

20100829.36 Made the revalidation process much simpler, doing away with the silly need for a revalidation file.
20100820.35 Discovered a bug in my plugin build system that caused horribly difficult-to-track-down errors in one plugin, so am pushing out rebuilt versions of all plugins just in case.
20100817.34

Added the {KeywordsAll} template tag.

Added code to allow plugin revalidation after having been locked due to a bad Lightroom serial number.

A few users found some photos to always be "stuck" as Modified photos in a Publish collection. I'm still not 100% what might be going on and can't replicate the issue myself, but this version of the plugin tries some things to hopefully alleviate the problem.

20100715.33 There was a bug on Windows that caused the warning about potentially-excessive JPEG quality settings to lock up Lightroom for an indeterminate amount of time. Only way I could fix it was to move the warning to the metadata management section (where it doesn't belong as much as it doesn't belong where it was before, but Lightroom doesn't let me put it where it should go, next to the jpeg-quality slider).
20100715.32

The plugin has long remembered your export settings from Photobucket export session to Flickr export session, overriding Lightroom's desire to always bring your recent export settings from non-Photobucket exports. However, I had neglected to update the list of settings for Lightroom 3, so this is now corrected, and so the plugin now also remembers watermarking settings, file-renaming and photo-stacking, and DNG compatibility.

Added a warning that blocks export when the JPEG quality is set needlessly high, referring users to my Analysis of Lightroom JPEG Export Quality Settings. You can bypass the warning if you like, and hide it forever, of course.

20100703.31 Fixed the errors one got after trying to export the first time after a Lightroom restart.
20100702.30 Some extra debug logging.
20100629.29 Lots more changes, especially related to auto destinations and replacing images.
20100629.28 Various fixes, including better handling of virtual copies (created on images uploaded with this version or later).
20100628.27 Had broken auto destinations.
20100625.26 Yikes, shaking out some more build issues.
20100624.25 Discovered a nasty build bug; pushing a new version in case it affects this plugin.
20100624.24 Some killer new debug logging, and maybe a few bug fixes.
20100621.23 Yikes, previous version was all dorked up, sorry. This one should work.
20100617.22

This version can be registered in Lightroom 3. It can run in Lightroom 2 or Lightroom 3; it does not work in the Lr3 betas.

It uses my new registration system when run on Lightroom 3, which avoids some of the silly issues of the old one. Please take care to note the details on the registration page: use of this version (or later) of the plugin in Lightroom 3 requires a new registration code, even if you had registered some older version of the plugin.

Lots and lots of changes under the hood.

Added some options to the Twitter <dest options> special code: add simple as an option to have it become just the name without quotes or other adornment; add short to par down the gallery name to just the leaf name. They can be combined, e.g. <dest short simple>.

Added some stuff to the LUA template token: a version of the standard os table (with date, difftime, getenv, es and time), and the standard Lightroom STK tables LrDate, LrPathUtils, and LrStringUtils). Also added a new functions TBL() (returns an empty table), ne(item) (returns true if the item is not empty), and nb(item) (returns true if the item is not blank; " " is blank but not empty, while "" and nil are both blank and empty).

20100323.21

Removed some LR3-related debugging stuff that's showing up now that LR3b2 is out. All plugin-related things should work in LR3b2 except Publish, which will likely change drasticly between now and when LR3 is actually released.

New when running LR3b2 is a new "Snapshots on Export" section, which is basically a built-in version of this new plugin.

Added new tokens to the templates used in my plugins: IfKeyword and IfExportedKeyword are supported for LR2 and later. For LR3b1 and later the very powerful LUA token, and for LR3b2 and later, a bunch of new localized date/time tokens. See the templates page for details.

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20100315.20

Title presets weren't getting saved across LR restarts in some cases (for definitions of "some" meaning "all", sorry).

Changed the semantics of the Places filter (in the tokens understood by the preset templates of my plugins) in two ways: if applied to a string value rather than a number, it works on the first number found in the string. Another is that you can now use something like Places=-1 to round to the 10s, Places=-2 to round to the 100s, etc.

Wholesale changes that attempt to honor the user's locale settings for numeric display (e.g. Europeans writing 3,14156 for pi). I've probably missed some spots, so let me know if you find some.

Added three new tokens to the templates that my plugins use, CameraName, IfGeoencoded, and Keywords. See the templates page for details.

20100205.19

Completely changed how the one-click upgrade applies the newly-downloaded zip file, in the hopes that it'll work for more people. Rather than unzipping over the old copy, it now unzips to a temporary folder, then moves the old folder out of the way and the new folder into place. Prior versions' folders are now maintained (with the version number in the folder) in case you want to revert a version; you may want to clear them out from time to time. Of course, it won't take affect until you try to upgrade after having upgraded to or beyond this version.

Caught a few more LR3b issues.

Fixed the {GPSAltitude} template token so that it should now actually work.

Oops, the upload date/time custom metadata items were swapped. Doh! With this new version, each catalog will auto-update to correct the issue the first time it's loaded. The format used for the date and time are restricted in LR2 to whatever I've chosen, but the first time you load the plugin in the real LR3 (whenever it comes out), the catalog will update itself again to write the dates/times in your user-customized, localized format.

Lots of updates to the Twitter support:

  • Better tweet-size estimates in line with recent processing changes at Twitter.
  • Added the ability to control whether to send a Twitter tweet with photo keywords.
  • Added <title> and <description> tags to the tweet-text template (they use the title/description from the first image exported).
  • Added the ability to geotag tweets with a static location, or with the geoencoded location of the first image. A static location can be specified with a latitude, longitude pair, a geohash, or a url from a mapping service like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. On the encoded side, geodata embedded in the image can be used, or the geodata maintained by my geoencoding-support plugin).
  • You can now configure the plugin to shorten URLs via your own bit.ly account, in case you want to track click-throughs yourself.
  • You can now specify that you want all URLs shortened. The default remains to shorten them only when required to get under the 140-character limit. You might, for example, want to forcefully shorten them all in conjunction with your own bit.ly account, for click-through tracking.
  • The plugin now goes to great lengths to report whether a tweet is accepted by Twitter. In their infinite wisdom, the folks at Twitter suddenly decided to start ignoring long tweets instead of truncating them, but (here's the brilliant part) they still report back to the plugin that the tweet was successful. Sigh.

    Furthermore, they might also ignore (yet report as successful) other kinds of tweets, such as those that are a repeat of a "too recent" tweet. Those crafty folks at Twitter implemented these changes more than three months ago, but in a truly cunning move, they still detail the old behavior in their API documentation, making no mention whatsoever about how their service now actually works.

    Only by doing a bunch of extra work can the plugin detect whether a tweet was accepted or ignored. If ignored, there's no way for the plugin to know why, so at this point it merely reports that the tweet didn't go through.

20100118.18 Added two new template tokens, {DaysSince} and {PhotoDaysSince}. They're a bit tricky, but could be useful.
20091230.17 Added a "Repopulate URLs" button to the Plugin Extras dialog, to allow correcting for the bug fixed in the previous push, and to correct for photos uploaded with old versions of the plugin.
20091230.16 Sigh, it seems 30,000+ lines of code are getting to be hard to keep track of, and I unintentionally removed the exported url from the custom metadata (from the 'At Photobucket' item) a few versions back. This should fix it, at least for images uploaded from now.
20091216.15 Figured out when the "AgExportSession.photoExportSequence is obsolete; use photoIdExportSequence instead" error was coming from. A bug in LR3 beta. I had to disable the export filter for the beta to avoid this.
20091215.14 Allow changing the font size of list of upload destinations. Those with long names might want to choose a smaller size to allow more text to fit on each row.
20091214.13 Added the special {NOJOINERS} token to the Template Language understood by my plugins.
20091209.12 A few small fixes for LR3b.
20091205.11 Minor internal debugging tweaks.
20091119.10 Removed a debugging message that gets in the way while reporting a bad network connection.
20091118.9 Added an {Altitude} item to the templates understood by the plugin. It's the numeric altitude in meters, as opposed to the {GPSAltitude} item which is a description of the altitude along the lines of 32.7 m. Also updated the Places filter so that it can be used on fields that merely begin with a number.
20091118.8 Bug unfix for LR3 beta on Windows. LR2/Win had a bug that I needed to work around, but it's fixed in LR3, so I had to unworkaround the bug to get it working again. Or something like that.
20091023.7 A bunch of UI fixes for LR3b, such as fixing the scrollbar and the token-examples dialog.
20091022.6 Added a first draft of some rudimentary support for Lightroom 3 Beta. See this important note about plugin support in Lightroom 3 Beta and Lightroom 3, including future plans for features and my registration system.
20090916.5

Some UI tweaks earlier in the month had an unintended side effect of breaking the "choose destination at export time" feature. Sorry... fixed! Also, added some prose to make it more clear that the "create gallery" part of the choose-destination-at-export-time dialog is not part of the export process, but merely a tool placed there for the convenience of those wishing to create a new gallery just prior to exporting.

(Sorry to everyone who couldn't contact my server for the last few days... it had "issues", that are now fixed.)

20090902.4

I'm back from a long trip and starting up the plugin machinery again. This push fixes the "failed signature" error that Windows users were getting.... it turns out that there's an insidious bug in Lightroom on Windows that silently dorks certain accesses to Photobucket. Wasted hours and hours and hours on this before I ran a network protocol analyzer and realized that Lightroom was being very naughty. Sigh. Should be fixed now.

One other minor update: the HOME album is now at top in the alphabetic list, even though "H" might fall after other album names. "HOME" is not really the name, but a description, so it makes sense to list it first.

20090823.3 Album creation neglected to respect the designated parent album ... it does now.
20090730.2 Fixes, I hope, some sloppiness evident in the first version. One unfortunate side effect is that the "visit destination album" feature has been removed. I hope to figure out a way to restore it in a future version.
20090721.1 Initial Public Release

All 25 comments so far, oldest first...

Please make one for DeviantArt too please.
It will be quite popular as DA has dedicated fan following in thousands.

— comment by rush on August 14th, 2009 at 5:46pm JST (15 years, 3 months ago) comment permalink

Hi,
Il first would like to thank you for your usefull plugins.
I’ve got a problem with the Photobucket plugin. If I send an image to the HOME folder it’s OK but if I send an image to a subfolder, it does’nt work and there is an error message in LR like that : http://i594.photobucket.com/albums/tt27/estragon34/Phtotobucket_export_problem.jpg
I don’t understand ?!?

If you get that again, please send a plugin log (via the “Send to Jeffrey” button in the upper-right section of the Plugin Manager), and I’ll check it out. —Jeffrey

— comment by Estragon34 on August 15th, 2009 at 12:42am JST (15 years, 3 months ago) comment permalink

Hi I’ve got a prblem uploading from LIghtroom into Photobucket – receive an error message ‘Authentication failed signature check failed’.

Tried reloading the plug in and checked all the log in details but to no avail…

I am thinking about changing the password on photobucket in case its that but thought I’d check in with you first

thanks Ben (London)

That sounds like a bug in my plugin…. if you get it again, please send the plugin log (via the “Send to Jeffrey” button in the upper-right section of the plugin manager). —Jeffrey

— comment by BenB on August 18th, 2009 at 3:51am JST (15 years, 3 months ago) comment permalink

Hi. I got that message too and did send the plugin log. Any update?

I have not been able to reproduce the errors, though I try to replicate everything I’ve seen in the logs. I’m a bit stumped. I just pushed a new version to fix something else, so it wouldn’t hurt to give it a try, but I don’t think I’ve yet fixed the “failed signature check” errors, which I don’t get. —Jeffrey

— comment by TimK on August 24th, 2009 at 9:59am JST (15 years, 2 months ago) comment permalink

On trying to use the plug in it hangs when trying to d/load my album list from Photobucket. and then times out. Any ideas what the problem is?

Where do I enter my un and pw for my Photobucket a/c?

Tom

You don’t enter your password and such in the plugin… there’s a browser-based dance you have to do. See the top section of the Export Dialog to authenticate the first time you use it. —Jeffrey

— comment by Tom on September 5th, 2009 at 3:56pm JST (15 years, 2 months ago) comment permalink

Thank you very much for your quick answer and your update it works very well now !

— comment by Estragon34 on September 10th, 2009 at 9:30am JST (15 years, 2 months ago) comment permalink

I am using LR 3b, and I too am getting the “Failed Signature” error for Photobucket, and was wondering if this issue was fixed?

Thanks for all the great work on the plug-ins!!

Garen

It works for me… if you get it again, send the plugin log (via the “Send to Jeffrey” button in the plugin manager). —Jeffrey

— comment by Garen on November 10th, 2009 at 5:37am JST (15 years ago) comment permalink

Export to facebook stopped working today. I get a message that says bad signature or something from facebook. Any suggestions?

A lot of people have suddenly started to get this. Evidence strongly points to problems at FB… difficult otherwise to explain the sudden rash of problems. Hopefully they’ll fix it soon. —Jeffrey

— comment by Charles Thomas on April 10th, 2010 at 5:53am JST (14 years, 7 months ago) comment permalink

I just upgraded to the final version of LR3 and tried to install the latest version of your Photobucket plugin. It shows up in the Plug-in Manager as installed and running but is invisible (does not show up) in the Publishing Manager. I have no access to the configuration screen.

Any ideas?

Let me know if you need the log files.

The Photobucket plugin doesn’t have Publish support, sorry. —Jeffrey

— comment by Robert Kent on June 20th, 2010 at 12:09pm JST (14 years, 4 months ago) comment permalink

Hi, installed this with lightroom 3.2 RC earlier and it worked first time – once I realized it was used via export, not via publish 🙂 The “Remove meta data” option leaves the copyright notice in place. Since I use photobucket for things I want to publish anonymously but my camera is set to tag put my name in the copyright feel that’s a bit of a pain.
Any chance that will change – or do I need to get your meta-data wrangler ?

You need the wrangler… most people want the copyright notice there, I’d think, which is probably why Adobe had “minimize” instead of “elide”. The metadata wrangler can indeed strip it all out if you want. —Jeffrey

— comment by James O'Neill on August 11th, 2010 at 8:56am JST (14 years, 3 months ago) comment permalink

I am having issues installing in lr3. I go to publishing manager, to plug in manager, then through all the steps there, including registration. Click done. It shows up in plug in manger list as installed and running. When I click done there and return to publishing manager, photobucket does not show up in the list of publish services.

The Photobucket plugin doesn’t support Publish, only normal Export. —Jeffrey

— comment by Stephanie Layne on January 6th, 2011 at 11:05pm JST (13 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink

Thank you very much for providing these plugins. I have one problem with the photobucket plugin though – when exporting, it tends to freeze up after 10 or so photos and won’t export the rest. Does it every single time I try to export multiple photos to photobucket (and has been going on for months if not a year now). Any idea why?

I’ve never heard of this, but I’d have to guess that it’s something with your networking… security or router. These kinds of things are notoriously difficult to figure out, even in person. Others are not reporting it, so it’s probably not the plugin…. —Jeffrey

— comment by Ashley on July 20th, 2011 at 11:13am JST (13 years, 3 months ago) comment permalink

Thanks for your great plug-ins! I’m currently having a problem with the Photobucket export plugin. Every time I try to upload (so far it’s been videos) it gets through the first one but then times out. It says it’s going to retry in a few seconds, retries, and then eventually times out again. It then proceeds to retry in the same way a second time. It never successfully finishes.

The interesting thing is that each of these times it is actually uploading the videos. So if I let it retry twice, I actually get three copies of the video on Photobucket. I confirmed this is the case by watching my bandwidth being used during these retries.

If I can do anything with logs, etc., to debug this, I’m ready to help.

Video uploads are working for me in my tests, though I haven’t tried any really long videos. Maybe PB is having issues, or there’s something with your network. I did run into a problem where BP was having troubles with video deletes… hopefully they’ll fix that one. —Jeffrey

— comment by cygnl7 on July 30th, 2011 at 4:10pm JST (13 years, 3 months ago) comment permalink

Just a word of thanks – your Photobucket Plug-in has made my life so much easier in getting images up to the various photographic forums I enjoy. Having registered I look forward making full use of it.

Keep up the good work – any help us old fogies get to make life easier.

— comment by Luddite on November 5th, 2011 at 4:50am JST (13 years ago) comment permalink

is there a way to create a photobucket button in the publish services menu? I downloaded the plugin and installed it. It works fine although I don’t know how to add it to the services already pre-loaded with LR 3. Thanks

No, sorry, that plugin is Export only, and does not support Publish. —Jeffrey

— comment by REGAN SINCLAIR on January 12th, 2012 at 11:07am JST (12 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink

Jeffrey,

I am getting an error:
Couldn’t render image: An unknown error occurred. This photo was not rendered.

This happens uploading Canon .cr2 files and their respective .jpg files processed in DxO.

I’ve used this plugin many times before without problems.

That error sounds like one from Lightroom, not the plugin, so I expect that there’s something wrong/unavailable about the master image. I suspect that if you try to do a vanilla export to disk, you’ll get the same error, but if not, after getting the error with the plugin, send a log… —Jeffrey

— comment by Brian Davies on January 17th, 2012 at 5:02pm JST (12 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey,
i’m trying to use the photobucket plugin and keep getting this error message:
“An error occurred while reading the schema for the plug-in “jf Photobucket”. The plug-in will be disabled”
I tried removing and readding the plugin..nothings worked.
Also, it worked for me just a few days ago, just now getting this message. any ideas?
alex

Not much to go on there… are there any diagnostics in any of the plugin sections? (Check them all). —Jeffrey

— comment by Alex on January 28th, 2012 at 7:04am JST (12 years, 9 months ago) comment permalink

Do you know how i can purge the login cache or make it forget what i previously logged in with?

Plug-in error log for plug-in at: /Users/jeff/Downloads/photobucket-jfriedl.lrplugin

**** Error 1

An error occurred while attempting to run one of the plug-in’s scripts.
LrPrefs: attempt to write complex table value to prefs key LoginCache4::alexandriaportfolio

Unfortunately, if you get this you have to delete your Lr preferences file, or upgrade past Lr2 (to Lr3 or Lr4). I’m not quite sure why this is happening, but Lr2 is sufficiently old that I’m reticent to spend time debugging an Lr2-only problem… —Jeffrey

— comment by Alex on April 20th, 2012 at 9:20am JST (12 years, 6 months ago) comment permalink

I’m writing from WV — just downloaded your Photobucket plug-in and sent you and Phil a donation. 🙂
When I set up the plug-in in Lightroom 4 I notice it says the path is to the plug in located in my downloads folder. I’m trying to keep that downloads folder cleared out lately and I’m afraid I’ll delete it if I forget. Is there something I’m missing to get it to another folder somewhere more permanent for a home for it???

Feel free to move it wherever you like, then re-point Lightroom at the new location (and delete the entry for the old location). —Jeffrey

— comment by Jill on November 4th, 2012 at 11:03am JST (12 years ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffry.
Tried to use your plugin. Kind of confused. I expected it to appear in publishing services since it publishes images to online location, but instead it appeared in export menu. I have few websites where I publish images to, and I’d like to have them in one place…
Another thing is when switching between catalogs it’s asking to “Update js Photobucket folder”. That’s also kind of weird behaviour. I am using LR 4.2.
Thank you.

My Photobucket plugin is Export only… it hasn’t been worth the work, yet, to add Publish functionality. As for the weird “update the catalog for the jf Photobucket plugin” behavior, I agree completely, but Adobe has decided to put that scary dialog for any plugin that can save per-image metadata, as mine does. —Jeffrey

— comment by Yuri on November 6th, 2012 at 4:02am JST (12 years ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffery.
Yesterday, I bought your Flikr plugin, and it went straight into Lightroom as shown.
Today I have just done the same with the Photobucket one.
However, despite downloading, when I opened it , it does not show in Publish ?
Yet the 4 photos, with the photobucket plugin, are showing in the library ?
Do I have to delete the Flikr Plugin to enable the Photobucket one ?
Or has something gone wrong ? I am on a macbook air, and my girlfriend has a mac.
To see if she could help out, she downloaded the photobucket plugin too , and hers is not opening either. SHe has no other plugins on her lightroom .
Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks Jan

Sorry, the Photobucket plugin is not a Publish plugin, it’s Export (File > Export) only. Flickr is both Export and Publish. —Jeffrey

— comment by Jan Hansen on February 16th, 2016 at 3:22am JST (8 years, 9 months ago) comment permalink

Hi

I’ve got Lightroom 5.6 – can I download an older version of the PhotoBox plugin? The latest one is asking me to update the catalogue which doesn’t sound a good idea.

Thanks

Andy

I don’t know anything about “PhotoBox plugin”, but Lightroom used to show that message when installing/updating almost any plugin. What’s going on under the hood is innocuous, which is why modern versions of Lightroom no longer bother with that message. —Jeffrey

— comment by Andy Holliman on August 14th, 2016 at 8:34pm JST (8 years, 3 months ago) comment permalink

I am getting the following error.

Create new album at Photobucket aborted: Internal error: could not create album.

It would be much easier if I could attach a file.

Roger

Right after encountering the error, please send a log. Thanks. —Jeffrey

— comment by Roger Gravis on December 6th, 2016 at 10:07am JST (7 years, 11 months ago) comment permalink

I’ve been getting a “networkConnectionLost” error for the last few times I’ve tried to export or refresh my albums. It will run 10 attempts or so and still not connect. I’ve updated my plugin. Not sure what else to do.

Please see this network-related FAQ —Jeffrey

— comment by Renee on October 16th, 2017 at 8:20am JST (7 years ago) comment permalink

Jeffrey would you have updates for LR 8?

Yes, I released it minutes after Adobe released Lr8. It’s the download link in the upper right. —Jeffrey

— comment by shawnie on December 12th, 2018 at 1:00pm JST (5 years, 11 months ago) comment permalink
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