New Plugins at the Photographer’s Toolbox

Since my last update two more of my plugins have been migrated across to the Photographer’s Toolbox and relaunched with updated names. They are TPG LR Backup, formerly known as Config Backup, and TPG Metadata Panels, formerly known as Metadata Panels . These naming changes mean existing users will need to manually remove the old version of the plugin when they first upgrade to the latest release of the rebranded plugin. Hopefully the new automatic upgrading feature users gain will make up for this inconvenience. 

In addition to the new automatic updating feature TPG LR Backup includes the following improvements:

• Ability to automatically run backup and compression tasks at Lightroom startup.
• Improved support for Lightroom 3 users, especially on the Mac OS/X platform
• Numerous UI improvements.
• Integrated help that displays at first run, can be accessed from dialogs, and also from Lightroom’s Help menu
• Improved robustness and checks for invalid configuration attempts.

and TPG Metadata Panels now includes:

• Added or improved tagsets to be task focussed and only display relevant metadata for that task.
• Lightroom version awareness so newer IPTC Extension fields are available to Lightroom 3 users, and version specific tagsets only display on compatible systems.
• Removal of SDK documentation tagsets that were useful only to developers. Lightroom 3 SDK documentation improvements have made these redundant.

Updated Plugin at the Photographer’s Toolbox

The TPG Elemental plugin has received a few updates, and since the last post here has received the following improvements:

• [Lightroom 3 only] Each photo is now automatically saved before opening in Photoshop Elements (PSE), removing this previously manual step.
• Now supports PSE 10, and the Mac App Store (MAS) variants of PSE 9 and 10.
• Updated Lightroom and PSE version awareness better detects PSE versions installed at default locations.
• Plug-In Manager and configuration dialogs now indicate compatibility and potential limitations of the selected PSE editor, and suggests actions to resolve these limitations. User is able to override these checks if desired.
• A new configuration setting allows control over the channel bit depth used for an image, and a dialog explains the implications of this setting when first used.
• Help is now available via Lightroom’s Help menu.
• Various error handling and robustness improvements.

If any of these updates sound relevant to you then please head over to the Photographer’s Toolbox and download a copy to try out now!  More features are currently under development so be sure to keep the automatic update feature active to receive new functionality as soon as it is available.

This work by The Photo Geek is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License

My Recent Lightroom Plugin Activity over at the Photographer’s Toolbox

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My TPG Elemental and TPG Snapshotter plugins are now distributed primarily by the Photographer’s Toolbox. The major features add in their most recent releases:

• automatic updates: the plugins will automatically check for and notify the user of updates at startup, or when manually requested by the user
• registration capabilities: the plugins are both donationware, and now have built in functionality for requesting and verifying registration information

In addition the TPG Elemental plugin has:

• Improved detection of Photoshop Elements installations, especially on Photoshop Elements 9 or 64 bit systems.
• Improved robustness.

and the TPG Snapshotter plugin has:

• 20+ new tokens for use when naming snapshots, and a selection popup menu to simplify finding the token you want.

If any of these updates sound relevant to you then please head over to the Photographer’s Toolbox and download a copy to try out now!  More features are currently under development so be sure to keep the automatic update feature active to receive new functionality as soon as it is available.

This work by The Photo Geek is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License

Recent Lightroom Plugin Updates over at the Photographer’s Toolbox

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The move to Timothy’s site has resulted in a few changes here at The Photo Geek.  First the practical matters. 

To aid with the transition all my plugins will have a slight naming update.  Elemental has become TPG Elemental.  Snapshotter has become TPG Snapshotter.  And so forth.  This naming change means existing users will need to manually remove the old version of the plugin when they first upgrade to the latest release of the rebranded plugin.  Hopefully the new automatic upgrading feature users gain will make up for this inconvenience.

Also users need to ensure all future donations for plugins are made using the plugin’s homepage on the Photographer’s Toolbox.  Currently that means donations for TPG Elemental and TPG Snapshotter will need to be made via their respective homepages.  This is necessary to allow the new registration functionality in the plugins to operate.  Those who have already donated and “bought me a coffee” should have heard from me via email. Thank you again for your generosity.

This brings me to matters of a more philosophical nature.

I’ve been developing Lightroom plugins on and off for almost two years now.  It has been a great little hobby spending time on the code and developing functionality useful for my own photographic workflow.  Over time I’ve been spending more and more of my effort on functionality for the benefit of others, and less on the personal workflow/hobby side.  As Jeffrey Friedl so eloquently described the “unfun” side of development can take its toll.  For me it has slowed the rate of plugin releases, leaving feature requests languishing on the shelf longer than they should have.

You might have noticed the donation button on the right side of the blog and and plugin pages.  Following in Jeffrey’s footsteps I’ve experimented with the PayPal donation concept and even made it possible to donate from directly within the plugins themselves.  The hope had been that users would “buy me a coffee” to encourage further effort on my plugins.  Unfortunately that experiment wasn’t particularly successful.

After teaming with Timothy I am now adopting his “donationware” model.  Plugins are released with restricted functionality – typically working with a reduced number of images at a time – to allow evaluation of the plugin’s functionality.  If you wish to remove the restrictions you can make a donation on the plugin’s homepage, and you will be emailed a registration code to unlock the plugin.  A donation will only be required once and all future updates are free.

Early signs from the move are promising, not only from the donation side but also from the impact of this added encouragement, as Jeffrey put it.  Having an automatic update mechanism makes it more feasible to publish smaller, more frequent updates to plugins.  Having peers such as Tim, and now John, to talk things over with is helping keep interest levels high and momentum going.  I’ve even been inspired to get access to a Mac and devote time to testing releases on both Windows and Mac platforms, with Lightroom versions 2 and 3, to catch more issues before updates are released. (You would be amazed how many tiny inconsistencies are found across the 4 main Lightroom/operating system combinations.)  All in all I’m feeling more energised and ready to work on plugins. 

Thanks for your support and understanding as I continue the move through to this new plugin development and delivery model.  Hopefully you will enjoy the results of the energy and enthusiasm your encouragement generates!

This work by The Photo Geek is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License

Jumping into the Photographer’s Toolbox: Teaming up with Timothy Armes and John Beardsworth

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I’ve recently created a Snapshotter plugin for Lightroom 3 that allows you to bulk create Lightroom snapshots while within the Library module. Lightroom’s interface will only let you create snapshots from within the Develop module, one image at a time.  This is fine if you are using snapshots only for recording creative interpretations of an image but is too restrictive when considering other uses for snapshots such as:

• Creating snapshots to identify the exact develop settings used when printing, exporting or publishing a group of images (e.g. creating a FlickrUpload-20100610 snapshot for all images uploaded to Flickr on that date)
• Converting virtual copies back to snapshots so all interpretations of the master image are stored in a way accessible from Photoshop.

Personally I create virtual copies (VCs) to experiment with different image develop settings and then compare the results side by side.  Once I’ve chosen the best I’ll create snapshots for each of the VCs worth keeping, then delete the VCs, because all of those snapshots are actually stored against the master image so will not be deleted.  This is also a great approach for dealing with multiple crop sizes for the same image.  My family have three different sized digital photo frames in use and converting VCs to snapshots is a great way to ensure this doesn’t clog my catalog with more thumbnails than truly necessary.

The Snapshotter plugin assists the snapshot creation process by adding a new Create Snapshot(s) from Images menu item to the File –> Plug-in Extras menu.  Selecting this opens a dialog allowing configuration of the snapshot name to be used, and the option to restrict snapshot creation to virtual copies only, when creating snapshots for all selected photos.  The snapshot naming function currently supports one substitution variable:

{CopyName}    Virtual Copy name

that will be replaced with the relevant metadata from each image.  Information about how this and the other elements of the dialog operate are described in the online help accessible using the button labelled with a question mark (?).

Please leave a comment below to let us know how you use Lightroom’s snapshot feature, and how the Snapshotter plugin helps this or could be improved to help it more.

This work by The Photo Geek is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License

The Easy Way to Create Snapshots in Lightroom 3

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It immediately shows the impact of code changes as you make them.  This might not sound like a big deal at first, but when hunting tenacious bugs the repeated interruption of reloading a plugin and restarting its test scenario is disruptive.  You can now test code by making a change in your favourite text editor, saving the file, and hitting the Run button.  Contrast that with the additional steps of opening the Plugin Manager, reloading your plugin, closing the Plugin Manager, and invoking the plugin to start the test again and you will get a sense of how much simpler your coding sessions can become.

The Test Harness provides a framework for managing and running individual LUA scripts.  This makes it possible to write small, single purpose scripts to focus in on a new feature you are experimenting with or a bug you are trying to squash.  Without the Test Harness you either need to experiment directly within the plugin under development, trying not to get distracted by or trip over code extraneous to the task at hand, or write your own test plugin to host the code  Either way you end up losing time that would be better spent adding features to your latest masterpiece.

Need help with a particularly thorny coding issue?  One click and the Test Harness will turn your script into a plugin you can zip up and post to one of the online communities for developers.  This makes it easier to give Lightroom SDK forum members, Lightroom Forums Plugin Discussion members, or even Adobe’s supporter staff a simple and self-contained demonstration of the issue you are working on.  When asking someone to lend you a hand make it easy for them to give you what you want.

Those are just some of the reasons I invested the time to write the Test Harness plugin.  It has already paid me back for the development time I’ve put into it, and with a new version of Lightroom (and an updated SDK) just around the corner I’m confident it will end up paying for itself many times over.  I’m sharing it with other Lightroom developers in the hope it will help you spend less time fighting bugs and more time extending the functionality of a great product!

This work by The Photo Geek is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License

Spend More Time Writing and Less Time Debugging Lightroom Plugins

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The Lightroom 3 beta is taking a step in the right direction with its new Publish Services.  The included Flickr plugin will synchronise ratings and comments back to your catalog but only time will tell if this capability will support retrieval of individual client selections from Publish Services.  In the meantime Lightroom 2 users can make use of web galleries to achieve a similar outcome.

Matt at The Turning Gate has developed a number of web galleries, including TTG Client Response Gallery, TTG Highslide Gallery and TTG Highslide Gallery Pro, that can help Lightroom publish self-contained web sites that automatically email a client’s selects.  Articles and tutorials regarding web gallery usage are available on Matt’s site so I won’t repeat that information here.  These galleries cover part of the workflow gap – allowing clients to inform you of selects – and my TTG Client script addresses the remainder by converting the response emails into Smart Collections ready for import into Lightroom.

New TTG Client Script features

I first published this script as part of my Working with a Wedding Client’s Photo Selects in Lightroom 2 post last year.  This revision provides the following functionality improvements over the original version.  Usage of the script remains unchanged and is described on the TTG Client script homepage.

Support for TTG Highslide Galleries

Over the past year Matt has released new Highslide galleries that can email client selects to the photographer.  The TTG Client script now supports client select emails from these galleries.

Workaround for Lightroom 2 (LR2) bug when hyphens (-) are used in filenames

LR2 has a minor bug that means it quietly renames files to replace hyphens (-) with underscores (_) when producing web galleries.  While the gallery itself will work fine it makes it difficult to match the client selects back to the original file names in your Lightroom catalog.  The Turning Gate recommends file naming conventions to avoid this issue but this could require renaming of files imported before you started using these galleries.  This new release of TTG Client script allows you to continue with your current file naming scheme and instead treats every underscore as a search wild card so the Smart Collections can locate the selects.

This work by The Photo Geek is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License

Capturing your Client’s Selections in Lightroom

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Update: A newer version of this plugin is now available. 
Please visit the Elemental plugin page to download the latest version, and find the latest documentation for the plugin.

Lightroom’s non-destructive editing capabilities support most of my digital photography workflow needs.  I rarely need to resort to external tools to edit my photos, but rarely is not quite the same as never.  There will always be some situations where Lightroom needs a little help.  For me stitching together panoramas, correcting lens distortion and correcting perspective issues are the main culprits.

Before Lightroom I was a Photoshop Elements (PSE) 6 user.  I had been hoping to completely migrate away from it and remove it from my system, but I still keep it around as an external editor to pair with Lightroom.  I’d love to be able to splash out and use Photoshop instead but as I’m only a hobbyist I simply can’t afford it.  An upsell version (from PSE) of Photoshop CS4 would cost me over $1200 AUD at the Adobe store.  That’s a lot of money for a piece of software I would rarely need to use, especially when my couple year old version of PSE does everything I really need at a fraction of the price.  My photography would benefit more from me investing that cash in a brand new Nikon DSLR camera body, lens or flash than a software upgrade.

One of the things I’m missing by not using Photoshop is tighter integration between my external editor and Lightroom itself.  The Lightroom Photo->Edit In menu contains a number of entries (see above) that allow you to work with files in Photoshop CS3 (or later), launching directly into the desired feature without having to render those files first.  This would not only speed up my editing process but also reduce the need to waste CPU cycles rendering files that will only be discarded later anyway.  With Photoshop Elements my only option is to use the standard external editor feature which doesn’t allow me to launch directly into the PSE feature I’m planning to use.

My new Elemental plugin resolves these issues.  It adds 5 new menu items to the File –> Plug-in Extras and Library –> Plug-In Extras menus, emulating the integration available to users of the full Photoshop product.  This includes letting the user select photos and launch them directly into the Photomerge dialog, or open them as Smart Objects (a feature Adobe doesn’t advertise is available in PSE).  It even adds some new options for good measure, namely Remove Lens Distortion and the ability to directly Open in PSE.  And it does this all while avoiding the Camera Raw dialog which should be redundant given your Develop module edits in Lightroom.  The only feature I couldn’t reproduce was Merge to HDR in Photoshop because PSE does not have a matching feature.  By all reports the HDR generated by Photoshop was of limited usefulness so I doubt many would miss it anyway.

Usage

When you first try to use one of these menu options the plugin will attempt to locate your installation of Photoshop Elements.  If you have used the default install location the plugin shouldn’t require any configuration.  If it can’t find PSE then it will open a dialog asking you to locate the PSE editor before you continue.

There are also a few other dialogs you may see during regular operation.

First is a reminder to save your files before opening in PSE.  Saving your metadata (Ctrl + S, or Cmd + S) writes the Lightroom edits to the photo or XMP sidecar making them available to other applications.  If you don’t save your files first PSE will show the initial, unedited image which is unlikely to be what you intended.  Once you’ve gotten into the habit of saving before opening you can configure the warning to not show again.

Next is a warning that displays if one of the selected photos is a virtual copy.  Virtual copies do not have a dedicated, matching image file so you can’t save the metadata to the file or sidecar and they can’t be opened in PSE.  For virtual copies you will be given the option of opening the master file instead, or ignoring the virtual copies entirely.  Once again the dialog can be set to not show again if you have a preferred option you will always use whenever virtual copies are selected.

The last dialog is one you will only see if you use the plugin for more than 3 weeks and it will only show once.  Its a “buy me a beer” donation request.  I’ve put a fair amount of work into this plugin (including learning a new programming language) to make Photoshop Elements do things its not supposed to be able to do, and to work not only on Windows but also the Mac platform.  I’m hoping you will find my plugin useful enough that you would consider saying thanks in a liquid fashion.  If you are extra keen you don’t even have to wait for the 3 week reminder.  You can donate (and update the configuration) at any time by opening the Elemental entry in File –> Plugin Manager dialog.

I hope you find this plugin useful and as always please leave comments below if you have any feedback you would like to offer.  I’d also like to send out a big thank you to Mark over at Rusticolus Images who quite patiently tested the plugin on OSX and helped me iron out a number of rather large kinks on that platform!

This work by The Photo Geek is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License

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Update: A newer version of this plugin is now available. 
Please visit the LR Backup plugin page (formerly Config Backup) to download the latest version, and find the latest documentation for the plugin.

My recently released backup plugin helps you backup your Lightroom configuration files and compress Lightroom generated catalog backup files.  To access these features you use one of the new menu items it adds to the File menu’s Plug-in Extras sub-menu.

1. Customisable Configuration Backups – Allows you to customise and manually trigger the backup and compression processes
2. 1-Click Configuration Backup – Immediately backs up the Lightroom configuration files and Catalog backups using your previously configured settings, and optionally displays the results of the backup process.

Due to the vagaries of my own personal experience, namely recent Blue Screens Of Death that corrupted my Lightroom preferences file, I focused on backing up that file and forgot to include presets, plugins and other important pieces of the Lightroom configuration information.  The latest release will now backup all of these and more.

This work by The Photo Geek is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License

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Update: A newer version of this plugin is now available. 
Please visit the LR Backup plugin page (formerly Config Backup) to download the latest version, and find the latest documentation for the plugin.

It is vital that every Adobe Photoshop Lightroom user backup their catalog and configuration files.  If you don’t and your catalog gets corrupted, the results of all the time and effort you invested retouching your photos disappears.  While you can use the “Automatically write changes into XMP” setting to work around the catalog corruption issue you will suffer a performance penalty for enabling it.  Most find its easier to use Lightroom’s built in capability to regularly backup your catalog.

One obvious downside of backing up is the increased consumption of disk.  For example my backups for a ~10000 photo catalog are around 220Mb each.  Multiply that by 52 backups a year and 11Gb of my laptop’s limited disk capacity is spent on something I’ll hopefully never need to use.  Compressing each backup is an effective way to combat this, and in my experience catalogs zip to approximately 10% of their original size, but it is yet another task you need to undertake to keep disk space under control.

I’ve developed a backup plugin to help speed up and simplify backing up and compressing Lightroom files.  It adds two new menu items to the File menu’s Plug-in Extras sub-menu.

1. Customisable Configuration Backups – Allows you to customise and manually trigger the backup and compression processes
2. 1-Click Configuration Backup – Immediately backs up the Lightroom Preferences File and Catalog backups using your previously configured settings, and optionally displays the results of the backup process.

The Customisable Configuration Backups menu item calls up the dialog shown to the left.  It allows you to specify where preference file backups should be stored, displays summary details of backups currently found at that location, and to request a new backup be created.

The catalog compression section assumes you are using Lightroom’s inbuilt capability to create catalog backups.  You supply the details of where Lightroom stores those backups, choose a location for the compressed version of those backups, and then request the backups be compressed.  All backups will be compressed into separate zip files named after the catalog and date/time of the backup.  You can also choose to move, rather than copy, the backups into the zip files once you are comfortable everything is working properly.

The 1-Click Configuration Backup menu item automatically backs up the preferences file and compresses all catalog backups using the preferences last used in the Customisable Configuration Backups dialog.  It optionally displays the results using a cutdown version of the main dialog.  If you wish to enable or disable the displaying of the results dialog use the “Show Results After 1-Click Backup” option at the bottom of either the Customisable or 1-Click dialogs.

I hope you find this plugin useful and please feel free to share your experiences or suggestions in the comments section below.   A big thank you goes out to Sean over at the Lightroom Blog for testing the plugin to ensure it was Mac compatible.

This work by The Photo Geek is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License

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If you are:

• Sean “I want a restart shortcut key” McCormack, or any other Web Gallery developer for that matter
• Scott Photoshop In”sight"er Kelby [via Amanda Kern’s “Lightroom 2 Tour” sketch notes):

When something doesn’t work – QUIT! … fixes 99% of problems on Mac

• someone who finds that Lightroom 2’s performance or behavior slowly deteriorates during a work session

then you already know that Lightroom needs a “power nap” every now and then to get back into  perfect form.   Restarting the application is a simple, effective, and potentially time saving way to get LR2 back on track so you can process your photos at optimum speed.

Back when Lightroom 2.2 was released the performance degradation issues became frequent enough I wrote a script to speed up the restart process.  While Lightroom 2.3 has resolved the most significant of these issues, I’m still finding I need to restart regularly enough that others might find the script useful too.  When Lightroom really starts to grind it can take minutes to shutdown, and the script allows you to wander off to grab a coffee rather than babysit the restart process.  This should be especially useful for Web Gallery developers who by all reports need to restart way, way too often.

Installation

1. Download the script: LRRelaunch-20090324_001.zip
2. Open Lightroom 2.
3. Select Edit > Preferences > Presets (Windows) or Lightroom > Preferences > Presets (Mac).
4. Select Show Lightroom Presets Folder.
5. Open the Lightroom folder. If it doesn’t already exist, create a new folder named Scripts inside the Lightroom folder.
6. Unzip LRRelaunch-20090324_001.zip and drag or copy the LRRelaunch.lua file into the Scripts folder.
7. Close the Windows Explorer, or Finder window, to return to Lightroom 2.
8. Exit then reopen Lightroom 2.

Usage

When you open Lightroom 2 you should now see a new Scripts menu to the right of the existing Help menu. 

You can now open the Scripts menu and select the LRRelaunch menu option to restart Lightroom 2.

I hope you find this script useful and feel free to share your experiences or suggestions in the comments section below.

This work by The Photo Geek is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License

Even Lightroom Needs a Power Nap Every Now and Then

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