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

Config Backup Plugin Updated… To Backup More Configuration Settings (Version 20090606.002)

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• Backup Your Rendered Images When Exporting From Lightroom 2 To The Web (0)

Update: Newer version(s) of this plugin are now available. 
Please visit the Config Backup plugin page to download the latest version.

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 Config 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

The Quick Way to Reclaim Disk Space and Backup Your Lightroom Configuration

Related Posts:

• Config Backup Plugin Updated… To Backup More Configuration Settings (Version 20090606.002) (10)
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My Export Backup plugin for Lightroom 2 (in Adobe speak, a post-process action) has been updated today.  The new version contains some usability updates:

• Destination folder now has a “Most Recently Used” (MRU) drop down list to help you quickly export files to your favourite folders.  A delete button (the minus sign next to the drop down arrow) helps you clean up folders you no longer want kept in the list.
• A separate subfolder field has been added, similar to that found in the Export to Files Export Service.
• Windows Explorer or Finder can show the backed up files once the export completes.

With this release I now have all of the main features I need for my own purposes.  Please leave a comment if you have suggestions for other features that should be added.

Installation

1. Download the plugin: export-backup-20090208_003.zip
2. Copy the file where you want the plugin to permanently reside, then unzip the file.  This should create a sub-directory called export-backup.lrplugin.
3. Open Lightroom 2, then select the File\Plugin Manager menu option.
4. Press the Add button, select the export-backup.lrplugin directory created in step 2, then press OK.
5. The plugin is now installed and enabled.  Press Done.

Usage

Next time you export files you will notice an Export Backup entry in the Export dialog’s Post-Process Actions list.  

To use this feature:

1. Select the Export Backup entry, then press the Insert button.  Note: The Insert button will remain inactive if you select the wrong Export Backup entry.  This will add an Export Backup Location section near the end of the Export dialog.
2. Either manually enter or choose the base directory where the rendered files should be copied. 
3. If desired, specify a subfolder to be appended to the folder name.  This is typically used to enter the album/collection name or any other folder name that changes from export to export.
4. Select either Overwrite or Skip option, depending upon how you want to proceed if the same files already exist in the destination directory.
5. Continue with your file export as usual.

When you export your files to Flickr, Gallery 2 or whatever photo hosting service you use, you will now also have a local copy of the rendered output for your own records. 

I hope you find this plugin 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

Export Backup Plugin for Lightroom 2 Updated (Version 20090208.003)

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Today I’m publicly releasing my first Lightroom 2 plugin.  Its a simple export post-process action that addresses an oversight in the Lightroom 2 export functionality – that there is no way to backup the images rendered while exporting from Lightroom to a web site.  These images are generated, uploaded then discarded without giving the user any option to intervene and keep these images.

While it is possible to use the “Files on Disk” export service to achieve a similar result, I found this to be a cumbersome workflow. A second export is required to make up for the missing functionality, and this approach is error prone because you may not remember to reapply all of the same settings.  Not to mention the time it takes to run the export and wait for it to re-render the files.

There are many reasons you might want to retain these files. 

• If you have read and follow advice in Peter Krogh’s The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers, you will be keeping copies of all derivative files you deliver to your clients. 
• As a Lightroom user you are probably shooting photos using a raw format, and your family members might not be using image viewers that can cope with these formats. 
• If you are anything like me you won’t want people in your household to download your photos from the web when they could quickly and easily copy them from your PC. 

For these and other reasons I decided to write a plugin to fill this gap.

Installation

1. Download the plugin: export-backup-20090131_002.zip
2. Copy the file where you want the plugin to permanently reside, then unzip the file.  This should create a sub-directory called export-backup.lrplugin.
3. Open Lightroom 2, then select the FilePlugin Manager menu option.
4. Press the Add button, select the export-backup.lrplugin directory created in step 2, then press OK.
5. The plugin is now installed and enabled.  Press Done..

Usage

Next time you export files you will notice an Export Backup entry in the Export dialog’s Post-Process Actions list. 

To use this feature:

1. Select the Export Backup entry, then press the Insert button.  Note: The Insert button will remain inactive if you select the wrong Export Backup entry.  This will add an Export Backup section near the end of the Export dialog.
2. Either manually enter or choose the directory where the rendered files should be copied.
3. Select either Overwrite or Ignore option, depending upon how you want to proceed if the same files already exist in the destination directory.
4. Continue with your file export as usual.

When you export your files to Flickr, Gallery 2 or whatever photo hosting service you use, you will now also have a local copy of the rendered output for your own records. 

I hope you find this plugin 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

Backup Your Rendered Images When Exporting From Lightroom 2 To The Web

Related Posts:

• Export Backup Plugin for Lightroom 2 Updated (Version 20090208.003) (14)
• New Plugin Brings Lightroom and Photoshop Elements Together At Last (16)
• Config Backup Plugin Updated… To Backup More Configuration Settings (Version 20090606.002) (10)