Snapshotter Plugin
|
Download the latest Snapshotter Lightroom Plugin version here (20100610.001) Released as "donationware". If you use this plugin a donation via this page or the plugin entry in Lightroom’s Plugin Manager would be appreciated. Requires Lightroom version 3 or greater. Installation instructions here. |
The Snapshotter plugin 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.
Snapshotter adds a new Create Snapshot(s) from Images menu item to the File –> Plug-in Extras menu. This opens a dialog allowing configuration of the snapshot name to be used, and the option to restrict snapshot creation to virtual copies only.
Please note this plugin is only compatible with Lightroom version 3.0 and above.
Usage
When you open the File menu’s Plug-In Extras sub-menu, a new Create Snapshot(s) from Images menu item will be available. This will allow you to create develop snapshots for all currently selected photos. If you are a Windows user you will also be able to open this sub-menu using the Alt + F, then S, then N key sequence.
This menu item opens a dialog containing the following elements:
- The dialog title indicates the number of photos for which snapshots are to be created
- Snapshot Name allows you to specify the name to be used when creating the snapshot. It accepts the following variables that will be replaced with the value for the current image:
{CopyName} Virtual Copy name - An example of the resultant snapshot name (with variables substituted) is provided below the Snapshot Name field. This is updated whenever the user exits the Snapshot Name field e.g. clicks on another control.
- Virtual Copies Only? checkbox to toggle whether snapshots will only be created for images that are virtual copies.
- OK and Cancel buttons to start or abort creation of snapshots, respectively.
Please note that adding a snapshot to a virtual copy also adds the snapshot to the master photo as well. This is a feature of Lightroom and is not configurable through the Lightroom preferences or the supplied SDK.
History
| Version | Change Log |
|---|---|
|
20100610.001 |
Initial public release |
16 Responses to “Snapshotter Plugin”
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 has been Released! | The Photo Geek - June 13th, 2010
[...] release Snapshotter plugin – my first Lightroom 3 specific [...]
The Easy Way to Create Snapshots in Lightroom 3 | The Photo Geek - June 15th, 2010
[...] recently created a Snapshotter plugin for Lightroom 3 that allows you to bulk create Lightroom snapshots while within the Library module. [...]
This plugin is a lifesaver! I was looking for this exact feature. Thanks!
@Brian, Glad you found it useful. How are you applying it to your workflow?
oude catalugus imorteren naar LR 3 lukt niet - Belgiumdigital forum - Digitale fotografie - July 15th, 2010
[...] xmp's bewaard worden. Er bestaat zelf een plug-in om je virtuele kopies om te zetten in snapshots: http://thephotogeek.com/lightroom/snapshotter/ Nog een andere oplossing is wachten tot LR 3.1 [...]
I’m looking for a way to replace a functionality present in an early beta version of LR that they dropped for some reason–when I create a new snapshot I want the snapshot name to be automatically populated with the current date and time, rather than the unhelpful “Untitled Snapshot-1″.
Can your plugin do something like this? if not, could it possibly in the future?
Thanks!
@Jonathan, It doesn’t do it yet but I am planning to add many more variables for use in naming so it is definitely on the cards. I’ll see if I can make some progress on this soon.
Virtual Images Part 1: Snapshots | Lightroom Secrets - August 31st, 2010
[...] check out the two excellent plugins from Matt’s comment below. The first is Matt’s own Snapshotter Plugin which will make snapshots of all selected images in a single step! Also, Jeffrey Friedl’s [...]
This is exactly what I was looking for, thanks. I’ve had a few issues with it crashing Lightroom when applying to large numbers of images (I’m snapshotting all my images before switching to the new LR3 processing engine). All seems good though.
@James, sorry to hear about the crashes. Obviously this should not be happening, and it should not be possible to crash the product via the SDK, so I might add some sort of throttling mechanism to work around the bug. What Lightroom version are you using (3, 3.2 RC or 3.2?) and are you a Mac or PC user? Approximately how many photos were you creating snapshots when it crashed and did you find a relatively safe batch size that wouldn’t crash? This would help me pick a number of snapshots to create before introducing some form of safety mechanism.
Hi Matt,
I’m not certain whether the cause of the crashes is your plugin or Lightroom itself. In the first instance I selected LOTS of images and created a snapshot… after not that long Lightroom stopped responding and when I ran it again I found not that many images had a snapshot created. The second time I selected a smaller number of images but the same thing happened. I then launched LR again, and noticed that my photo disk was going crazy as LR wrote changes to XMP… I waited and LR crashed on its own (I didn’t re-run the plugin). I then relaunched LR yet again, my disk was still going crazy, and then eventuall yLR seemed to update all the images I’d changed in attempt two and they now have snapshots. Since I have LR configured to write changes to XMP automatically, and since LR crashed once when I didn’t interact with the plugin at all, I’m thinking the issue was actually just LR crashing due to extreme writing to XMP.
This was with LR3.2 (full release, not rc).
Cheers,
James
Hi Matt,
Good work, I use a few months ago and this plugin is a great lifeline.
It could be added in a futur version, a check box to clear the history after the creation of the snapshot?
Cheers,
Seb
@Seb, Thanks! Unfortunately the official SDK doesn’t give me a way to do that. I will add it to my feature list in case this ever becomes possible though.
@James, That is rather interesting and it does sound like Lightroom had an issue rather than the plugin directly. That said the sheer volume of changes that can be generated by the plugin can’t help so I might still provide some way to throttle this. This might have to be a manual option end users can configure. Out of curiosity what size are most of your images (how many Mbs), which of raw or DNG or JPEG are most of your photos, what platform do you use, and what real time virus scanner do you use on that system? Also do you use disk encryption or a desktop search engine? I’ll report this issue to Adobe and all of these factors will contribute to how much disk contention will interfere with Lightroom writing that information to disk.
Hi Matt,
I’m running LR 3.2 x64 on Win7 x64. No disk encryption and whilst Win7 has a built in search engine I am not indexing the image folders (but maybe it’s indexing the Lightroom previews? will check). Image wise it’s a bit of a mix, I’ve got ~4000 JPGs from a Canon S1is (~1MB each), ~5000 JPGs from a Canon 350D (2MB-5MB each), ~3000 JPGs from a Canon 40D (2MB-5MB) and ~8000 RAWs from the Canon 40D (~12MB each). I initially selected all ~20000 images and used the plugin (probably overly optimistic). This crashed and seemed to only have written to the first few thousand… LR did not seem to be attempting to access my disk so I narrowed my selection to only the RAW images (the ones I most wanted to protect anyway) and applied the plugin just to those 8000. After a little while LR crashed again but this time when I restarted it it continued to write changes to disk. Interestingly, when I restarted LR and checked the status of my images it said it had NOT created a snapshot for most of them, but then continued to update them in the background and when I checked later they did have snapshots. LR crashed again without my interaction while it continued to write changes to disk so I relaunched yet again and this time it seemed to complete fine (some time later). As far as I can tell all 8000 images have a snapshot but obviously I haven’t checked every one individually.
It’s odd that LR crashed while writing changes to disk even though the “changes” weren’t being displayed within the LR GUI (ie the snapshots didn’t appear to exist). I guess this leaves open the question of whether the crash is caused by the API calls stacking up or the writing to disk overloading.
Happy to elaborate.
Cheers,
James
Hi Matt,
Another quick update. If it wasn’t already clear I have “Automatically write changes into XMP” enabled (I know this slows things down but I’m more interested in protecting my changes than LR being snappy). I also checked and the Lightroom previews folder was being indexed by my Win7 indexer. I doubt the previews were actively involved in the snapshot process, but even so this would seem like a bad idea and I’ve removed the Pictures\Lighroom folder from the indexer.
Cheers,
James
Leave a Reply