{"id":2319,"date":"2013-10-11T22:08:10","date_gmt":"2013-10-11T13:08:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2013-10-11\/2319"},"modified":"2013-10-11T22:08:10","modified_gmt":"2013-10-11T13:08:10","slug":"the-joy-of-a-fast-photo-proximity-search-in-lightroom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2013-10-11\/2319","title":{"rendered":"The Joy of a Fast Photo Proximity Search in Lightroom"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
<\/a>\nNikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f\/2.8 @ 31mm — 1<\/sup>\/<\/big>60 sec, f<\/span>\/3.5, ISO 6400 —\nmap & image data<\/a> — nearby photos<\/a><\/span>\nBoring Sunset Over Kyoto<\/span>\nthe Shogunzuka overlook (\u5c06\u8ecd\u585a)\n— Today —\n<\/div>\n\n

I popped up to Kyoto's Shogunzuka Overlook (\u5c06\u8ecd\u585a)<\/span> today for the first time\nsince March<\/a>, hoping\nfor a nice<\/span> sunset.<\/p>\n\n

As you can see above, I didn't get it.<\/p>\n\n

However, due to my blog's\nproximity search<\/a> feature, we can follow the “<\/span>nearby photos<\/a>”<\/span>\nlink under the photo to see other shots from Shogunzuka that I've posted over the years, including:<\/p>\n\n

<\/a>\nNikon D700 + Nikkor 70-200mm f\/2.8 @ 70mm — 1<\/sup>\/<\/big>320 sec, f<\/span>\/6.3, ISO 5000 —\nmap & image data<\/a> — nearby photos<\/a><\/span>\nJune 2012\n<\/div>\n\n
<\/a>\nNikon D700 + Voigtl\u00e4nder 125mm f\/2.5 — 1<\/sup>\/<\/big>320 sec, f<\/span>\/11, ISO 320 —\nmap & image data<\/a> — nearby photos<\/a><\/span>\nNovember 2011\n<\/div>\n\n
<\/a>\nNikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f\/2.8 @ 70mm — 1<\/sup>\/<\/big>1500 sec, f\/3.2, ISO 640 —\nmap & image data<\/a> — nearby photos<\/a><\/span>\nJuly 2007\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>\nNikon D700 + Voigtl\u00e4nder 125mm f\/2.5 — 1<\/sup>\/<\/big>8000 sec, f<\/span>\/2.5, ISO 200 —\nmap & image data<\/a> — nearby photos<\/a><\/span>\nNovember 2011\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>\nNikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70 mm f\/2.8 @ 70mm — 1<\/sup>\/<\/big>200 sec, f<\/span>\/2.8, ISO 3200 —\nmap & image data<\/a> — nearby photos<\/a><\/span>\nNovember 2008\n<\/div>\n\n

I added the proximity-search feature to my blog several years ago<\/a>, and I\nuse<\/span> it often in various ways because proximity search can be extremely\nuseful, but my blog proximity search is obviously limited to photos I've\nactually published on my blog. My full catalog<\/span> of photos in Adobe Lightroom\nis much, much bigger.<\/p>\n\n

Over the years I've written a bazillion (~45) plugins for Lightroom<\/a>\nthat supports a photographer<\/span> in all kinds of helpful ways,\nbut one of the first (already five\nyears ago!) was my Lightroom catalog Proximity\nSearch plugin<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

To take advantage of proximity search, your photos have to be geoencoded to begin\nwith (that is, each photo must be associated with latitude\/longitude\ncoordinates of where it was shot). At the time<\/span> I first<\/span> released the plugin,\nthere was no way to geoencode photos within Lightroom, so one had\nto somehow take care of it before importing photos into your catalog. It was a<\/span> pain.<\/p>\n\n

But, while working on that plugin I figured<\/span>\nout a tricky<\/span> way to build another plugin that\nallows you to geoencode within Lightroom, and my Geoencoding Support\nplugin<\/a> was released a couple<\/span> of weeks later;\nit remained the only way to geoencode within Lightroom until Adobe\nintroduced the Map Module last year. (My Geoencoding Support plugin is all\nthe more useful now that Lightroom supports location editing, because it\nextends the usefulness of location information far beyond what Lightroom\nprovides.)<\/p>\n\n

Anyway, I was happy that I could do a\nproximity<\/span> search on my photos, but the unfortunate reality was that\nLightroom's catalog interface for plugins was simply too slow, creating\na high<\/span> barrier to use: I'd use it sparingly, only\nwhen it was worth the several-minute<\/i> wait for a\nresult.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

Still, even today it's better than what Lightroom itself now supplies,\nat least on my machine. If I set<\/span> Lightroom's Map\nModule to an area I'm interested in, then switch to Library and select\n“<\/span>All Photographs”<\/span>, then go back to Map to see which ones show up,\nLightroom completely locks up for eight minutes. Locks up. Eight minutes. Painful.<\/p>\n\n

(I hear that Lightroom is faster in this respect on Windows; someone who\ntested my catalog said the lockup was only two minutes there.)<\/p>\n\n

I don't understand why plugin access to the Lightroom catalog is so\nslow, but to gain some insight I tried<\/span> accessing the Lightroom-catalog\nSQLite database directly. The results? The same search<\/span> that locked up\nLightroom for eight minutes<\/i> took 0.6 seconds<\/i>.<\/p>\n\n

Even though the very first Lightroom-related article on my blog was a\npost<\/span> in 2006 about accessing the Lightroom\ndatabase directly<\/a>, I've purposefully stayed away from doing so within\nmy plugins as a matter<\/span> of principle, keeping instead to the official plugin infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n

But come on, an 800-fold speedup is just too much to pass up, especially\nfor a feature<\/span> that blooms in usefulness when you can use it on the spur of\nthe moment with little friction. So for the<\/span> first time in my\nplugin-development life, I did an<\/span> end around Lightroom's interface, adding\na “<\/span>Fast Full-Catalog Proximity Search”<\/span> plugin-extra feature to my Proximity\nSearch and Geoencoding Support plugins last week. This is the fast search\nthat I mentioned<\/span> on my\nprevious post<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

The search is nominally invoked from the “<\/span>File > Plugin Extras >\nGeoencoding Support > Fast Full-Catalog Proximity Search”<\/span> menu, but on my system I mapped<\/span> it to a keyboard<\/span>\nshortcut, so while looking at an image that's geoencoded, a quick<\/span> tap\nbrings up this dialog:<\/p>\n\n

<\/div>\n\n

Upon activation, the plugin goes outside of Lightroom to grab the data,\nthen import just those results back in, creating a collection<\/span> with them. It took just<\/span> a few<\/span> seconds to isolate the 548 photos from that general area over the years.<\/p>\n\n

<\/div>\n\n

(Update: in modern versions, it works on Windows as well.)\n\nOne bummer about the workaround that achieves this: it doesn't work on\nWindows, nor on Lr4 or earlier, so in those situations the “<\/span>Fast\nFull-Catalog Proximity Search”<\/span> plugin-extra item reverts to the slower,\nofficial, much-less-compelling method. )-:<\/strike><\/p>\n\n

Still, if you're using Lr5 on a Mac<\/span> and find this useful, please let\nAdobe know; perhaps they'll add this kind of thing directly into Lightroom.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I popped up to Kyoto's Shogunzuka Overlook (\u5c06\u8ecd\u585a) today for the first time since March, hoping for a nice sunset.<\/p>

As you can see above, I didn't get it.<\/p>

However, due to my blog's proximity search feature, we can follow the \"nearby photos\" link under the photo to see other shots from Shogunzuka that I've posted over the years, including:<\/p>

I added the proximity-search feature to my blog several years ago, and I use it often in various ways because proximity search can be extremely useful, but my blog proximity search is obviously limited to photos I've actually published on [...]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1,13,6,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2319"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2319"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2319\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}