I still get the same type of error message using V20101208.5 with Lightroom 3.3 that I did using V 20100829.4 with LR3.2, as reported on September 23rd:

“Plug-in error log for plug-in at: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3.3\tree-publisher-jfriedl.lrplugin

**** Error 1

This plug-in’s post-processing task did not finish successfully.
Move returned false: copy(C:\Users\Gary\AppData\Local\Temp\53C5902A-16F5-4A1D-8B5E-BE8AEACFECFB\FRONT.jpg, M:\Photos\D_0248 1606 Edward\TEMP\FRONT.jpg)”

Just guessing, but it’s probably a permissions issue, either in removing the image from the temporary location, or in writing it to the target on your M: drive. —Jeffrey

Great Plugin, however, if I enter a folder name which contains the letter “Z” I get an error, that “Z” is not allowed. I have seen, that this was posted before. Will you find the time to fix it in the near future?

Rudolf

Since you didn’t tell me what version of the plugin you’re using, I assume it’s an old one before this bug was fixed, so please upgrade. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey,
I’m interested in this plug-in, because it fits ideally in my workflow. I publish selected pictures which have “basic settings” from one folder to a second one and profit from the plug-in as it replicates the tree structure, except root of course. The published images are imported in a second catalog for fine-tuning and generation of derivatives.
So far so good.
As the published images in the first catalog are no longer needed after having been “published”, I wish to remove them from the first catalog and from disk. But here starts the show stopper : the plug-in also deletes the images from the replicated structure, and that’s definitely not what I want.
My question : does this behavior work as designed, or am I missing some point(s).

Thanks for your advice, and by the way thanks for your great plug-ins.

Patrick, Luxembourg

A workflow that exports copies that are later imported for further refinement goes against the whole concept of what Lightroom is about (which is non-destructive workflow). I suppose that it’s possible for some uncommon workflows to work best that way, but it seems unlikely and fringe. The plugin is definitively designed to keep the replication of copies on disk in line with copies in the catalog, so if you remove from the catalog, you remove from disk. —Jeffrey

Bug #2 – I selected the majority of my collection using smart filters (filter out directories named ‘reject’, pictures marked w/ reject flag, and pictures marked with color yellow == don’t publish). On the initial publish it came back with “not enough memory (893)” out of 6000+ pics. I have 3G of memory on Windows 7, LR 3.3 32-bit. The images are mostly 14Mp NEFs.

Regardless, I’m loving this plugin.

Not sure why this would happen, but in the mean time you can get around it by selecting a subset of a few thousands pictures, then hold down the ALT key and you’ll see that the “Publish” button changes to “Publish Selected”. I’d think it’s better to do that than to let it crash. —Jeffrey

Jeffrey — it would be helpful if one could select multiple leaf folders and publish them all at once, with one click. I realize that you would probably want to have some heuristic model to figure out just how many can be done in parallel vs sequentially, but even if all were done sequentially, it would cut out a lot of workflow inefficiencies when using this utility. I’m a huge supporter of yours as you know!

Lightroom should allow you to do exactly that, but in any case, a plugin has no influence over that kind of stuff, much to my dismay. A plugin can only respond to requests from Lightroom to conduct a publish operation. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey,

I’ve recently picked up this plug in. Boy, I wish I had it before now, would have saved a lot of time creating manual publish collections for every event I store raw images for. I have 2 usage cases, the same one you mention above, SAF, and second one which is iphone/ipad.

My raw images are stored like:
Year -> Date-Event

Which works very well for storing the raws and for browsing from our various pc’s/tv streamers and your catalog folder replication option serves this perfectly. However, itunes (iphone/ipad) only support one directory level so I had setup a hard drive publish service where I use folder names to create smart folders that put everything from all years into one folder, so I just get Date-Event in that folder (No Year -> directory in there). I don’t mind maintaining that, although I’d prefer to do away with it. I don’t thin your plugin can help with that but I was hoping it could help me avoid having to create 2 of these manual publish lists.

Where I thought your plugin could help was I could create that publish service for say my ipad (one resolution) and use your tree feature to duplicate it for iphone (different size photos, this all by the way is in the interest if saving iphone/ipad flash space) through the “Collection replication” feature. However, when I tried to do this, I filled a smart leaf folder by using “Published via” and the name of my hard drive collection “ipad”. This pulls out all of the photos, however, when I publish, every photo goes into the same directory and I lose the Date-Event directory which means I lose the album capability on the iphone.

Is there any way to accomplish this with the plugin as it is now?

thanks!

I would have thought that a “folder” tree-publish publish service would always refer to the folder of the master image on disk, regardless of what kind of collection was used to indicate inclusion in the publish service. Perhaps you picked the wrong kind when creating the service? BTW, I had the impression that iTunes resized photos for the device, so the same JPG on disk ends up taking a different amount of space on an iPad vs. an iPhone. This has always bothered me about viewing images on my iDevices, because I want the full resolution but it’s not there. In your case, it’s a welcome effect. —Jeffrey

After enabling “Renaming to: Filename – Sequence”, all behaviors are as expected. Thanks for the help. Paul

Yikes, I have no idea what “sequence” will do with the non-linear over-time export of Publish. It’s possible that it’ll (somehow?) do the right thing (whatever that is), but I doubt it(!) —Jeffrey

Re: my earlier report, this was in the LR 3.4.1 Readme as a fixed bug,
“Virtual Copies added to a Publish to Hard Drive collection could fail to export properly if
the original image had already been published”.

Perhaps this explains something. Paul

Dublin, Ireland

Brilliant plugin, has solved same problem for my wife (& rest of family 😉 – but now she also needs an export of a sub-folder in the catalogue with a different configuration – can this be done? A publish session to only action a particular branch & its subfolders, rather than the complete catalogue?

Many thanks,

Gary

You can create a second publish service with the plugin, with the settings particular to the needs of the subbranch, and add only that subbranch to it. —Jeffrey

Greetings from Greece!

Let me start by saying amazing plugins and excellent work! Although you must already know that by now!!! 🙂

Now on to my “problem/question”!

I gave the plugin a try but did not manage to accomplish what I needed, maybe I did not understand the post very well. I have my lightroom folder structure based on pic creation date(YYYY/YYYY-MM) and have sorted the “albums/events” through collections e.g. (Collection Root/2009/Sister’s Birthday).

What I would like to do, is to export/publish my images on an external hdd with the current collection tree structure as a folder structure on the external hdd. e.g. (My Pictures/2009/Sister’s Birthday)

I thought I could set the tree publisher’s ‘root’ folder to “sync” with my ‘Collections Root’ collection set and it would automatically make the underlying subcollections as folders on my destination.

Can this be done or must I make a leaf folder for each of my subcollections and manually move my images from my regular subcollections to the leaf folders?

Thank you for your time! And bravo once again for your excellent work!

Prokopis

It doesn’t automatically replicate the collections… Lightroom doesn’t really provide a way to do it. I could have the plugin move the collection tree, I suppose, into the Publish service, but a mirroring is not currently reasonably possible in Lightroom as it stands now. —Jeffrey

I have tried the plugin, and it does approximately what I need. However I have two questions:
– I want to use this as you do, but need to change the name of the smart leaf folder below the root. This isn’t yet implemented. Any idea when?
– If I set this up, I don’t want to do it again with another utility after 6 months when the free license expires. Could you give me an idea when this will be a permanent plug-in, and how much you will ask for it?

Thanks,

Bob Siegel

I don’t understand what you’re asking abut changing a name below the root… with a folder-structure tree, the name comes from the folders that the master images are in. With the collection tree, the names come from the collections you create, so you can just change them there. About the “license”, I’d actually forgotten that I hadn’t moved this plugin over to my “donationware” model. I’ll probably do that soon… it’ll remain free, but optional registration will require a (1-cent, if you like) transaction at PayPal. —Jeffrey

I have created the “tree” I need to do my export, but noticed one problem….. I choose the images from my collections by matching the name of the collection in a “leaf folder”. However the order in which the images are exported, and also the order in which i see them in the leaf folder, is not the “user order”. I have sorted the images in the original collection as I wish to have them, but this order is not preserved in the leaf folder. Am I doing something wrong, or is what I want not possible?

Thanks in advance.

Not easily possible. The ordering in the folder is up to the OS, but is usually a name sort, and there’s no reasonable way to force Publish to pick names that will sort in the order you want. Even worse, if you reordered photos, the plugin would have to rename all the affected files. There’s no easy solution here, sorry. —Jeffrey

Is it possible to create a published structure that has both folders and files at the sames levels of the tree?

At the moment it looks like a folder can only contain either more folders or pictures but not both. Is that the case?

(an example being that I want the root folder to contain several folders, but also an image that will be used by my website software as the background to the rest and this needs to be held at the top level)

many thanks,

Chris

When you create a non-leaf folder, it gives the option to have another folder represent the root of the non-leaf folder. If you didn’t make it at the time, you can do so by naming a leaf folder “root”. it’s a horrible kludge, but the best I could come up with given the severe limitations imposed by Lightroom. —Jeffrey

This is just what the doctor ordered for my routine batch exports. One thing though… I’m seeing the tree being exported as a series of dates (the default LR tree). My LR Catalog is as follows:
Photographs > Shoot Name > Year > Day. Year and Day being the default tree structure. Am I missing a setting or is there not yet a capability to get my custom tree structure exported exactly. It would save me quite a bit of work in resorting the exports. Thanks for the great work behind this and your other plug-ins.

The plugin has two modes, locked in on a Publish Service basis. One is where it mirrors the folder structure as seen in Lightroom (and on disk), and the other where it mirrors whatever collection hierarchy you create within it. —Jeffrey

Thanks for this plugin! I have the same problem as a few others here: When I remove the photos from the collection, the plugin also deletes the exported files. Luckily I didn’t delete the originals. Here’s what I am trying to use this plugin for: I export my DNG originals as compressed DNG’s. This way the settings follow the files and also file size is greatly reduced. Once I am done with that, I would import these files to my storage catalog. I want to keep my working catalogue as small as possible.

Hopefully there would be an update where you could choose whether the plugin deletes the exported photos after they are deleted from Lightroom catalogue or removed from the collection.

That seems reasonable… I just pushed a new version with that option. But by the way, look into Lr5’s “Smart Previews” to solve your small-catalog needs. —Jeffrey