New Plugin Releases and Support for Lightroom 2
We have been writing plugins for Lightroom for some time now. Our first plugin was the Export Backup plugin published back in January 2009 and since then Adobe has kept rolling out new releases of Lightroom to keep us interested.
With the release of Lightroom 5 earlier this year we now needed to support our plugins on 4 releases of Lightroom. Or more accurately 8 releases, as the Mac and Windows versions of Lightroom behave slightly differently so we needed to test on both operating systems to ensure correct plugin behaviour. As you can imagine testing each plugin release 8 times eats into the available time to make improvements to the code.
We have decided to cease testing support for Lightroom 2 in all future releases of our plugins. This will allow us to focus on delivering new features to the Lightroom versions in active use today. What exactly does this mean?
- Users of Lightroom 2 will no longer receive auto-update notifications when new versions of our plugins are released.
- New releases of our plugins will not be tested on Lightroom 2.
You will notice that we aren’t actually preventing users from trying newer plugin releases in Lightroom 2, and we won’t intentionally do anything to break Lightroom 2 support, but there are no guarantees it will work either.
Does this impact support of Lightroom 2 by our older plugin versions? Not at all. They will continue to work, and if you ever need to download these older plugin versions again please refer to the plugin’s FAQ page. There we will retain a direct link to the last supported plugin version for each Lightroom release.
In the IT industry it is common to adopt an “n minus 1” support policy, meaning that only the current and immediately prior releases of software are supported. At this stage we have yet to clarify how many of our current plugin users are still on Lightroom 3 and would miss out on new features under such a policy. We will be looking into this further and once we have better information about our user base’s demographics we may need to revise this policy further.
Thanks for your continued interest and support over the years, and we are hoping this change to our testing regime will allow us to deliver new plugin features and versions to you more frequently.
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In: Project · Tagged with: lightroom, lr2, plugin
New Post: New Plugin Releases and Support for Lightroom 2 | The Photo Geek http://t.co/A7QXGeofVr
@Matt,
you are totally right about your plan to not worry about LR 2 as you build out new plugins. I’m an executive in a software company, and i’ve worked in the software business for many years. Your actions are consistent with how software companies operate. It would be a waste of your time to worry about supporting LR 2. You should focus your efforts on building cool new plugins. Anyone who really cares about photography should stay current with LR, or at least be at most one or two releases back. LR 2 is ancient, and you should put it behind you.
I fully support your plan
@Eric, Thanks for the support and taking time to share your experience with us.
@Matt, I need a little help. I’ve been using your backup plugin and i now i need to recover after having to reinstall Windows and LR 5.6. I’ve got LR running, but i need to recover all the stuff your plugin backed up. How do i do that (i’ve dug around your site and can’t find how to do it). thanks!
@Eric, I need to write up a post about this. Thanks for the reminder.
The steps to restore your Lightroom configuration really depend on which operating system you are using. Basically you unzip TPG-LR-Backup’s backup somewhere on your computer, making sure that all the folder information in the unzipped package is retained (should automatically do this), then move the restored backup to the correct location.
The correct location is actually multiple locations. The locations are listed here on the user guide for the plugin:
http://photographers-toolbox.com/products/mdawson/tpglrbackup/index.php?sec=guide
@matt, thanks for the reply. I got it all working except I can’t find my develop, export, and import presets. the folders are in the backup but there’s nothing there …any idea why?
@matt — you can ignore that last post. I found them. I must’ve had the “store presets with catalog” option checked because i found a bunch of preset folders there that i copied to the right directory and all is good. i’ve unchecked it now.
@Eric, Thanks for confirming this. I suspected this was the case when you described the symptom.