Lightroom Extras

Plugins and other tools to enhance Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 and 3.

 

Plugins

Config Backup plugin Adds 1-click and customisable methods to backup your Lightroom configuration and manage and compress your catalog backups.
Elemental plugin

Helps Photoshop Elements version 6 onwards to work seamlessly with Lightroom, similarly to the native integration between Lightroom and Photoshop.  Enables Lightroom to launch Photoshop Elements directly into photo merge (panoramas), open photos as layers, create smart objects, and start various features with a single click.

Export Backup plugin Adds a post-process action to backup rendered images generated during an export.  These are discarded for many export services.
Metadata Tagsets plugin Adds six new tagsets to the Metadata panel in the Library module.  These configure the metadata fields you can view and/or modify at one time.
Snapshotter plugin
(LR3 and above)
Creates snapshots of the current develop settings for all selected photos in a single step.    Snapshots capture a permanent record of an image’s current develop settings and can be accessed from the Snapshots panel on the left hand side of the Develop module.
Test Harness plugin Helps Lightroom plugin developers by providing menu items to execute and generate standalone plugins from LUA scripts.

 

Miscellaneous

TTG Client Script Converts TTG Client Response Gallery, TTG Highslide Gallery and TTG Highslide Gallery Pro gallery selection emails into smart collections that can be imported into Lightroom.

 

Plugin Installation

To install a plugin:

  1. Download the plugin’s zip file.
  2. Copy the zip file where you want the plugin to permanently reside, then unzip the file.  This should create a sub-directory called <plugin name>.lrplugin.
  3. Open Lightroom, then select the File -> Plugin Manager menu option.
  4. Press the Add button, select the <plugin name>.lrplugin directory created in step 2, then press OK.
  5. The plugin is now installed and enabled.  Press Done.

5 Responses to “Lightroom Extras”

  1. New Plugin Brings Lightroom and Photoshop Elements Together At Last | The Photo Geek - July 5th, 2009

    [...] Lightroom Extras [...]

  2. Rich San Diego, CA - July 31st, 2009

    Hi,

    I have installed the latest config backup plugin for LR2 and I was wondering…
    Should I have both the Configuration files backup and the LightRoom Automatic backup set configured to save to the same folder on my External HD?

    Does the LightRoom Automatic backup save to both a compressed and an uncompressed directory or is compression a feature of your plugin? If so does your plug-in automatically compress the files or must it be set to do so?

    Thanks.

  3. Matt - July 31st, 2009

    A quick summary of the discussion we had over at Lightroomforums.net. Given you are using Mac OSX and have Time machine backing up your main system, having the Config Backups, Lightroom’s inbuilt catalog backups, and the compressed versions of those catalog backups all going to the same (RAID 1) external HDD seems reasonable. I would recommend taking occasional backups to optical media as an extra safety precaution though.

    The uncompressed directory needs to be set to where the Lightroom inbuilt catalog backups end up. The plugin will then copy or move (depending upon the settings) those backups to zips in the compressed files directory. You must call up the plugin (via one of its items in the File -> Plugin Extras menu) to trigger the compression of backups. Adobe hasn’t documented any SDK hook to allow me to do this without user intervention.

    Hope this clears everything up.

  4. Craig Wall - May 12th, 2010

    hi matt…. firstly, thanks for creating this plug in & making it available for everyone. there’s not enough people out there like you giving selflessly to the online community out here.

    i’ve run into a problem though – i’m trying to find a way to archive shots from each of my jobs to 2 separate external hard drives in 1 click.

    i’ve managed to work out how to do this by re-importing all of the files i’ve processed back into lightroom & then in the export dialogue window having the “file settings” tab locked to process the files as “original”, thereby copying them across to 1 external drive without changing the original file format. i’ve then set your “export back up” location to copy the same files to the other external drive. this works fine & that’s great, except for the following issue:

    having re-imported those files into lightroom so that the catalog includes files i’ve retouched in photoshop, as well as storyboards i’ve created; when i run this plug in, it won’t recognise the individual folders & sub folders i’ve created & therefore throws everything into the one folder. although this is better than nothing, i’d rather be able to archive individual files into the subfolders i’d created for them.

    is there any way of forcing the lightroom export process to recognise individual folders & sub folders when processing & archiving?

    thanks in advance,

    craig

  5. Matt - May 12th, 2010

    @Craig, I’m assuming you are referring to the export backup plugin here.

    The quickest way to backup to a second HDD would probably be a scheduled job running in the background. e.g. I use SyncBackSE for all my validated transfers. If you read The DAM Book it is even advisable to let software like this copy/move files between HDD because it can verify the files are a bit for bit copy of the original files.

    But taking the question at face value there is no way to force Lightroom’s export to copy to multiple destinations, or to maintain part or all of the folder structure when writing to disk. The export dialog always assumes you are writing to a single directory or the original directory the file existed in.

    Some plugins do exist (e.g. Tree Exporter) that try to work around these limitations. YMMV. I’ve considered adding some of this functionality to Export Backup but that has been put on the back burner for the moment. One other possible change I’ve considered is allowing more than one Export Backup post process action to be included in a single export dialog. You could then write to both HDD at once though that would still be to a single output directory.

    Hope this helps.

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