Still some users choose to go to the effort of rolling their own Lightroom catalog backup solution instead. Why? There are many potential reasons but two that stood out for me were the amount of disk space the uncompressed backups consumed, and the awkward steps required to trigger a backup outside of your regular schedule.

My TPG LR Backup plugin was created to help resolve these backup limitations. It reduces the disk space consumed by Lightroom’s catalog backups. And now it can also help trigger those catalog backups whenever Lightroom 4 users need them!

With the introduction of Lightroom 4 my plugin can now schedule a catalog backup at the next shutdown, regardless of your regular backup schedule. In fact you don’t even need a backup schedule to use this new feature. Once the TPG LR Backup plugin is installed you simply open up the File –> Plug-in Extras menu and select the new Offer to Backup Catalog at Next Shutdown menu item. Once you OK the resultant dialog Lightroom will now show you the standard catalog backup dialog when you next exit Lightroom. Simple!

Currently the only other ways I know of to backup a Lightroom catalog on demand are to:

• temporarily change Lightroom’s catalog backup schedule to “Every time”, and then reset it to the normal schedule after you next restart Lightroom
• set Lightroom’s catalog backup schedule to “Every day” or “Every time” and cancel the backup dialog when you don’t need to run a backup
• copy the catalog file to a new location while Lightroom isn’t running

I know which approach I’d rather use to keep my Lightroom catalog safe!

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

Easily backup your Lightroom 4 catalog on demand

Related Posts:

• Quick and easy way to back up Lightroom (15)
• Config Backup Plugin Updated… To Backup More Configuration Settings (Version 20090606.002) (12)
• The Quick Way to Reclaim Disk Space and Backup Your Lightroom Configuration (13)

Overview

This latest version adds a number of significant features to the product:

• A Map module for managing location information
• A Book module for creating photo books
• Advances in image processing via a new Process Version (PV 2012) and controls
• Soft Proofing for a better colour management workflow
• Emailing images directly from within Lightroom
• Enhanced Video capabilities and format support
• Enhanced DNG capabilities and workflows
• New Adobe Revel (formerly Adobe Carousel – see here for details) export workflow

More details about these and other features later.

With the latest beta the minimum system requirements have been changed with support being dropped for some older operating systems. The new minimum requirements are:

Mac:

• Multicore Intel® processor with 64-bit support
• Mac OS X v10.6.8 (Snow Leopard) or v10.7 (Lion)
• 2GB of RAM
• 1GB of available hard-disk space
• 1024×768 display

Windows:

• Intel® Pentium® 4 or AMD Athlon® 64 processor
• Microsoft® Windows Vista® with Service Pack 2 or Windows 7 with Service Pack 1
• 2GB of RAM
• 1GB of available hard-disk space
• 1024×768 display

If your system is up to specification why not start the download while we dive deeper into what is included in the beta?

My Five Favourite Features

Rather than provide an exhaustive overview of the beta I’ll be talking though some of my favourite features instead. At the end of the post I’ve include links to other Lightroom 4 beta resources that will help fill in the gaps for those interested in the features not covered here.

Enhanced Video Capabilities and Format Support

While Lightroom 3 already includes some support for video files this beta has significantly expanded those:

• Lightroom is now able to directly playback video within the Library module
• Videos can be trimmed using the new controls visible within the Library module’s Loupe view
• Most Quick Develop tools can be used for processing a video, including the application of presets. See screen shot below for further details.
• Publish and Export services now fully support video and can optionally convert to H.264 or DPX formats during export.
  

   

   

   

   

• Most popular DSLR, compact camera and smart phone video formats can now being imported, including 3GP and AVCHD.
• The video frame (“Poster Frame”) used for the Library module’s thumbnail can be chosen by the user. 
• Individual frames can be extracted from a video as standalone images.
• A new Video Metadata Tagset has been added to the Library module’s Metadata panel, containing a variety of new video specific metadata fields. For the metadata geeks these fields appear to be a subset of those defined by the XMP Dynamic Media namespace.

These additions make Lightroom a much more useful part of a photographer’s video workflow. It is now capable of importing, playing, trimming, processing and publishing videos so could become the main video digital asset management tool for many photographers.

Lightroom’s video editing capabilities are no match for a full Non Linear Editor (NLE) but even larger projects requiring more full featured video editing tools could benefit from Lightroom’s video management and publishing capabilities. Smaller video processing tasks (e.g. cleaning up and publishing a video from your smartphone) can be quickly completed in Lightroom’s Library module.

TIP: When attempting multiple edits to a video at once it can be useful to capture a “Poster Frame”, use the Develop module to adjust the captured frame to the desired look, create a preset from the edits then use the Library module’s Quick Develop to apply the preset to the whole video.

Map Module

The beta adds a new Map module for working with location information in a visual and engaging way:

• View recorded locations for images directly within Lightroom, using satellite, street, or terrain maps
• Add location information to photos by dragging and dropping them only the map
• Save favourite map locations for use when searching for or tagging image locations (see screen shot below).
• Manage publication of location information selectively, through checking the private flag on a saved location, or broadly by checking the Remove Location Info option in your Publish or Export service.
• Load GPX tracklogs and use them to tag images with matching date/time stamps (see screen shot below).

The Lightroom Map module is fun to play with, but strangely enough it is the location information privacy features that are making GPS location capture a more regular part of my photography. I try not to attach location information to photos taken at the homes of my friends and family for privacy reasons but I frequently forget to turn tracklogs on or off and it made this a fairly frustrating experience. Now I can save these locations in Lightroom, and enable the privacy setting to hide their location information, and always capture location information safe in the knowledge this will never be published outside of my personal catalog.

Advances in Image Processing (Process Version 2012)

Lightroom 3 introduced some major improvements to the product’s image processing capabilities (officially known as “Process Version 2010”), and Lightroom 4 has taken this even further with the new Process Version 2012 and associated controls:

• Controls in the Basic Panel have been simplified (no more Fill Light or Brightness adjustments) (see screen shot below)
• Content aware Shadow and Highlight controls extract greater dynamic range from a single image
• Improvements to the operation of the Clarity and Chromatic Aberration controls
• Additional settings can be applied as Local Adjustments, including Noise Reduction, Temperature and Tint (White Balance), Shadows, Highlights and Moire (see screen shot below)
• Curve adjustments can now be applied per channel
• Soft proofing is now available in the Develop module (a separate headline feature)

The new controls may require some time to get used to but the results that can be achieved make this well worth the effort!

Book Module

Lightroom 4 adds the oft requested photo book creation feature via its new Book module:

• New Book module helps users create Blurb and PDF photo books directly within Lightroom
• Auto layout feature quickly creates initial book layouts using your preferred presets
• Easily adjust page and photo locations via drag and drop
• ~180 page layouts have been built-in for use in your creations
• A Favourites feature is available for easy access to your preferred page layouts
• Advanced layout, formatting and type features are included to give you the flexibility to customise your photo book’s appearance
• Easily add photo metadata (e.g. captions) to your pages
• Tight integration is provided to the Blurb book printing service allowing you to prepare, cost and upload your book directly within Lightroom

Initially the Book module will provide deep integration with the Blurb book printing service only, but I suspect this will expand over time just as Lightroom 3’s tethering feature started with a restricted set of camera makes and models and slowly expanded from there.

Personally I’m looking forward to spending more time with PDF photo book creation, to produce electronic photo books to share online with family and friends or view on my tablet.

JDI (“Just Do It”) UI Refinements

In addition to all of the major features added by the beta, there are a number of small refinements that help make the product more usable and deserve calling out. Some that I personally appreciate:

• Develop preset lists displayed by the Import dialog and Quick Develop panel are now hierarchical, making large sets of Develop presets (e.g. collections bought from third parties) much more usable.
• Metadata Status can now be used in Smart Collections and the Library module’s Filter bar. Very handy for those who don’t use the “Automatically save to XMP” preference but still want their Develop settings saved to their images once they have finished with a set of images.
• Additional options for restricting metadata Published or Exported with your images (e.g. “All except Camera & Camera Raw Info”). 

Lightroom Beta Learning Resources

To help get you started with the Lightroom 4 beta Adobe has provided a number of resources:

• Beta download site on Adobe Labs
• Forums for discussing the beta
• Official post announcing the beta and the features it offers. There is also a list of resources available regarding the beta, including a number of non-English resources for our international friends.
• Lightroom video channel on YouTube

Lightroom regulars have also been preparing learning resources so if you are looking for additional information I’d recommend checking out the following:

• Victoria Bampton’s Lightroom Queen site will have an exhaustive “What’s New” post and an updated keyboard shortcuts sheet.
• John Beardsworth has launched his new Lightroom Solutions site and will be covering the beta. I’m particularly looking forward to his thoughts on the new Book module.
• Laura Shoe will be covering the beta on her blog and has a knack for being able to explain product features and usage in an easy to understand fashion.
• Usual suspects Rob Sylvan (Lightroomers), Gene McCullagh (Lightroom Secrets), and Sean McCormack (Pixiq) will be providing What’s New posts and more content over the next few weeks.
• Andrew Rodney (Digital Dog) provides a  colour geek’s view of Lightroom’s new Softproofing feature
• If you prefer your beta information in video form then check out David Marx’s contributions at The Lightroom Lab and Terry White’s walkthru of the beta.

I’m sure lots more great content will be coming from these Lightroom legends over the coming weeks!

Hopefully this post has piqued your interest and you will try out the Lightroom 4 public beta. Have fun experimenting with the latest and greatest imaging tool from Adobe, and please let us know either in the comments or official forums about your personal experiences with the beta!

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

Adobe Releases Lightroom 4 Beta!

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• Easily backup your Lightroom 4 catalog on demand (2)
• My Recent Lightroom Plugin Activity over at the Photographer’s Toolbox (0)

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

Related Posts:

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Personally I used to find it daunting to sit down to edit a largish photo shoot. Confidence in your critical judgement and editing process is something that doesn’t come easy to everyone and as with most things it takes practice to develop. When you shoot irregularly it can be difficult to build up that experience and a repeatable process you can be confident in. That is why I found this post on Chase Jarvis’s blog so intriguing.

I’m a mere mortal. I don’t have to deal with 15000 photo shoots, and it is rare I have any larger than 500. And the post isn’t the first article or book I’ve seen discussing volume photo rating and culling. But it did resonate with me for a number of reasons:

• it requires multiple passes over a shoot. Initially this felt inefficient but I’m seeing the wisdom of it now. It really helps develop a sense of the whole shoot while cutting down on the temptation to double back and second guess myself I experience when trying to use a single pass approach. Multiple passes help you gain confidence you are making the right choices and can be quicker in the long run.
• each pass through the shoot indicates a speed it should be performed at, not just the type of photo you are trying to eliminate during the pass. It helps remind me to spend less time agonising over the photos that never had a chance of making it anyway.
• the way Scott presented the process made it feel real and achievable. Sometimes a clinically described process makes sense but you trip over the details when trying to implement it. No such issues encountered here.

Scott uses Aperture when describing his photo editing process but I found it quite easy to implement using Lightroom. Some suggestions for those interested in trying it out:

• you might already (like me) be using stars as a permanent rating system for your photos. This isn’t a problem – you can use both rating schemes together! Pick a label colour and keep it just for your bulk photo editing process and use this new star rating system with that colour label only. When you have finished editing the shoot change the label applied to the photos and reset the star ratings to align with your permanent rating system. I recommend using the purple label colour, as it is the only label without a keyboard shortcut so is a perfect choice for setting as your initial, unprocessed colour label via an import preset.
• you might be tempted to use pick flags (pick, unflagged, rejected) and the Refine Photos command instead of stars. While this could work I’d suggest only trying it after you are thoroughly versed with the process and confident you can edit a complete shoot in a single session. If nothing else it would be difficult to remember which pass you were working on when you next open this shoot, and thus what the pick flag signifies in this pass.
• create a set of Library module filter presets to help you step through the process by hiding photos eliminated by previous passes. You can download mine to use as a starting point and update the criteria to match your environment. Install them by opening your Lightroom presets (preferences) folder and extracting the zip file’s contents into the Filter Presets sub-folder. These new filter presets will be visible after the next Lightroom restart.
• while you are still familiarising yourself with the process why not repurpose the panel end marker as a reminder? I first saw this technique applied by John Beardsworth (here and here) and figured this bulk editing process would be a perfect candidate for its own panel end mark. You can download mine here. Install it by right clicking on the current panel end mark, select Panel End Marks –> Go to Panel End Marks Folder, and extracting the zip file’s contents into the folder. You can then activate the panel end mark by right clicking on the current one, and selecting Panel End Marks –> FlourishCJBulkRate.png.

Photo editing your own work is not only a practical necessity, it is also a great learning tool. It helps you better understand what works for you,  and just as importantly what doesn’t, so you can hone your photographic awareness and take better photos. Critically thinking about your own work isn’t easy but I found this post on Chase Jarvis’s blog helped make the whole process much more approachable. Hopefully you will find my suggestions for adapting the process to Lightroom helpful and like me you’ll be able to tackle that backlog of photos building up on your computer!

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

Photo Editing For Mere Mortals

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Those who do backup their systems might not be capturing everything they want to restore in the event of a failure.  Most Lightroom users who do backup would backup their photo files but not all will remember to backup their Lightroom catalogs, which contain all of the develop adjustments they have spent hours making while turning snapshots into masterpieces. Fewer still will remember to backup those templates and presets they have spent time collecting and creating, and the other program settings they have tweaked to their liking and help them efficiently execute their digital workflow.

The recent major update of my TPG LR Backup plugin (formerly Config Backup) can help make the backup of your catalog and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom configuration files painless, so you can work safe in the knowledge that your data is being safeguarded in case disaster strikes.

How I backup Lightroom

To backup my photos and Lightroom I use the following approach.  Your needs and environment may be a little different from mine so please treat this as a guide only and adjust the processes to suit your individual needs.

Pre-requisites

Before backing up Lightroom I use SyncBackSE to copy all image files to a separate system.  I’m not going to detail this aspect of my configuration because you can easily fill a book on this topic (and Peter Krogh already has – the highly recommended The DAM Book).  If you want to learn more about this I’d suggest starting with the Backup section of the dpBestflow.org site Peter contributed to. It not only explains the topic clearly (including videos) but also includes a number of example Backup System Configurations  to get you started.

Lightroom 2 and above includes a catalog backup feature.  I switch this on using the Edit –> Catalog Settings menu item and set it to backup my catalog weekly.  This ensures every time I start up (Lightroom 2) or shutdown (Lightroom 3) Lightroom checks whether it should create a new backup of the current catalog.

Plugin Configuration

Once I’ve enabled Lightroom catalog backups I then use features from my TPG LR Backup plugin to build upon this base level of protection. Installation instructions for the plugin are linked from the plugin’s home page so I won’t repeat them here. Please note the remainder of this post assumes you have registered the plugin to enable the automatic backup functionality.

Open the File –> Plug-In Extras –> Configure Automatic Backups menu item to show the following dialog:

The From folder needs to match the folder where you configured Lightroom to write its catalog backups.  The To folders indicate where you want the configuration and compressed catalog backups to be written. These can point to different locations but I prefer to write both types of backups to a single Lightroom backup folder.

TIP: If you use more than one Lightroom catalog consider using the Edit –> Catalog Settings menu item to configure all of your catalogs to write their backups to the same folder. This will allow the plugin to compress all of your catalog backups regardless of which catalog you have open when you start Lightroom.

I set the configuration to be backed up once per week, and the catalog backups (created by Lightroom’s inbuilt backup feature) to be compressed whenever they are found. The latter is particularly important because catalog backup files can be quite large and can quickly overrun your disk space. Compressing the backup files typically results in an ~90% size reduction so you can afford to keep more backups than you would otherwise.

It is recommended that your configuration and compressed catalog backups be stored on a separate hard drive from your Lightroom catalog and configuration files. Doing so will help increase your chances of recovering from a disaster. If your hard drive fails, backups will do you no good if both they and your Lightroom catalogs are stored on the failed drive.

Once you have configured your automatic backups press OK to save the settings, and it is best to restart Lightroom as soon as possible to test that everything works as expected. If this is the first time you have enabled automatic backups they will also run at next startup (regardless of the selected backup timing) to confirm you have configured your backups correctly.

Plugin Operation

If you are a Lightroom 3 user and have just setup catalog backups then you should see the following dialog when you exit Lightroom.  Make sure the backup folder matches the folder configured for your automatic backups then select the Backup button.  Lightroom will then take a few moments to copy your catalog and add it to the selected folder.

If you’ve used the settings suggested in the previous section then next time Lightroom starts you should see the following appear at the top of your Lightroom workspace. You may need to open the top panel of the Library module to see it.  This progress bar lets you know that TPG LR Backup plugin is executing your backups in the background while you continue working on your images.  Once this step has completed you will have a new zip file in your backup folder for each type of backup that was scheduled to run.

If you ever want to know when your last backup occurred just open up either of the plugin’s menu items and you will be able to see the most recent backup events at the bottom of the dialog.

Feedback

I hope this post has given you some ideas on how to setup your own Lightroom backups. Please let me know via the comments if there is anything other part of my backup regime you would like me to expand upon.

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

Quick and easy way to back up Lightroom

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• Easily backup your Lightroom 4 catalog on demand (2)
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Refresher: Importing photos and video into Lightroom 3

We’ve previously discussed Lightroom 3’s revamped Import feature so we’ll be jumping straight to the facets most relevant for Android users.  If you are using Lightroom 2 the first part of the series describes how to import photos from your phone but you will need to upgrade to Lightroom 3 if you want to manage video in Lightroom as well.

A reminder before we begin.  If your Import dialog doesn’t look like the one shown below you will be using the compact version of the dialog, so please click the arrow button (depicted) in its bottom left hand corner to reveal the full dialog.

The first part of this series described three main approaches for importing content from your phone:

1. Synchronisation software (e.g. HTC Sync)
2. Mass Storage Device, accessed directly from Lightroom
3. Mass Storage Device, accessed via third party import application

When importing content directly into Lightroom (option 2) you need to select either the Copy or Move import type at the top of the dialog depending upon whether you wish to leave a copy of the files on your phone or not. Add is not advisable as Lightroom’s Develop module could only work with these files when the phone was physically attached to your computer.

Synchronisation (option 1) and third party import application (option 3) allow a little more flexibility because the content is already on the computer before Lightroom is asked to import it.  An Add import type is acceptable in this case if you would prefer the images to remain in their current location.

If you use a third party import application (option 3) to load the images and videos then chances are you have already setup the file naming and folder structure you prefer.  If not you may wish to use the File Renaming and Destination sections of the right hand Import dialog panel to adjust these details on the way into Lightroom.

Why some video won’t import into Lightroom

Lightroom’s Import dialog doesn’t always detect videos in the source.  In this example another video (MSD_20110106_0050.3gp) exists in the same directory but the dialog gives no indication any files are missing. An Adobe knowledge base article explains that only a few formats are supported:

• AVI
• MOV
• MP4

In practice this means that files using other file extensions will be ignored even if their content should technically be supported by Lightroom.  Videos with other types or file extensions will simply not appear in the grid for selection during import.

Shooting Lightroom compatible video

Knowing this limitation we can take steps to ensure our videos will be compatible with Lightroom 3.  On the HTC Desire this means opening the included Camcorder application,  using the menu to access the Settings tab (the gears icon in the bottom left corner of the screen) and verifying the Encoding Type is compatible with the MP4 file type.  While MPEG4 is the most capable of the encoding types shown here technically they all are suitable, and your choice can be guided by the encoding quality you require.  e.g. use MPEG4 if you wish to capture 720P video.  Unfortunately there is no matching option to change the video’s file extension so all videos are created as 3GP files not visible to Lightroom.

Preparing your video for Lightroom 3

Now that we know the video content is compatible with a Lightroom supported file format (MP4) we only need to perform one more step before Lightroom will let us import the files. 

In the first part of the series we mentioned that Samsung Galaxy S video is supported “out of the box” by Lightroom.  Using Phil Harvey’s versatile exiftool application we can get a better understanding of how these Lightroom acceptable videos are structured.  Executing the following command (split over two lines due to space restrictions) indicates a supported file is structured like this:

exiftool -ext 3GP -ext 3GPP -ext MP4 -s -FileType -MIMEType –MajorBrand
-MinorVersion -CompatibleBrands -CompressorID -AudioFormat .

======== ./SamsungGalaxySVideo.mp4
FileType                        : 3GP
MIMEType                        : video/3gpp
MajorBrand                      : 3GPP Media (.3GP) Release 4
MinorVersion                    : 0.3.0
CompatibleBrands                : 3gp4, 3gp6
CompressorID                    : avc1
AudioFormat                     : mp4a

Executing the same command on a HTC Desire video returns a rather similar looking result:

======== ./HTCDesireVideo.3gp
FileType                        : 3GP
MIMEType                        : video/3gpp
MajorBrand                      : 3GPP Media (.3GP) Release 4
MinorVersion                    : 0.3.0
CompatibleBrands                : 3gp4, mp41, 3gp6
CompressorID                    : mp4v
AudioFormat                     : samr

The video compressor and audio format are different across the two videos but fundamentally they both use the same 3GP format and brand (release).  The only significant difference is the filename extension.  To confirm this I manually renamed the 3GP video file from my earlier test to use the MP4 file extension and re-ran the import on the directory.  This time the video was detected, and upon importing all of the usual Lightroom 3 video features were available.

The reason this works is the 3GPP and MP4 file formats are related, as described on the MP4 Registration and Wikipedia sites. 3GPP is a part of the “MP4 family” and is structurally based upon MPEG4 so it is valid to rename a 3GP or 3GPP file to use the MP4 extension.  Some phones already take the step to store 3GP files as MP4 without user intervention. 

In the interests of simplifying my digital workflow I created a one line command script called Rename3GP.cmd to automate renaming my Android videos for me.  It uses exiftool to check all 3GP and 3GPP files in this or child directories, and rename the file extension if we are sure this is a suitable 3GP file.  The command (split over two lines due to space restrictions):

exiftool -P -r -m -overwrite_original_in_place -ext 3GP -ext 3GPP
"-FileName=%%d/%%f.mp4" -if "$MIMEType eq 'video/3gpp'" .

If you want to run this at the Windows command line or on a Mac instead you would modify this slightly by removing the extra percent (%) signs. 

exiftool -P -r -m -overwrite_original_in_place -ext 3GP -ext 3GPP
"-FileName=%d/%f.mp4" -if "$MIMEType eq 'video/3gpp'" .

Running this script or command prepares your Android’s video files for Lightroom and from here on in the import process is the same as for any other Lightroom supported file.

I hope you have found this series useful and please feel free to share your experiences with us 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

Finding the best approach for importing photos and video from your Android phone into Lightroom (Part 2)

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• Finding the best approach for importing photos and video from your Android phone into Lightroom (Part 1) (7)
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My HTC Desire can capture photos, video and voice notes using the software that came pre-installed.  While Lightroom does have some limited ability to support audio files (as sidecars to photos) it is unable to manage standalone .amr voice note files, so for the remainder of this discussion we will be focussing only on photo and video media. 

Your options when importing from an Android phone

Your main options for making an Android phone’s content available to a computer are Sharing, your handset’s included synchronisation software, or accessing the content as an external Mass Storage Device either directly from Lightroom or via a third party import application.  

The synchronisation software provided varies from company to company and on my HTC phone the software is known as HTC Sync.  Samsung and other vendors provide their own equivalent but the rationale used in evaluating the options should still be relevant.  Most synchronisation software has similar capabilities so the discussion here should help you to make your own informed choice. 

The Android Market contains a number of applications providing ways to export images from your phone to third party services.  Adobe Photoshop Express is one example and can export images to Photoshop.com, Facebook, and TwitPic.  These applications can be useful in their own right but they do not assist the Lightroom import workflow so have not been considered here.

Video can be the Achilles heel of many of the import mechanisms mentioned below.  If you are considering recording video on your phone then choose your import mechanism wisely, and part two will discuss the preparation of video for import into Lightroom.

Sharing

Many Android applications (e.g. HTC Desire’s Gallery application) provide a sharing option when viewing a photo or video.  Selecting this option lets you chose from a number of mechanisms for sharing items with other people or services.

This is great for quickly sharing individual items but not terribly useful as the basis of a reliable import workflow for Lightroom.  Selection of content to share is manual increasing the chances you will miss files unintentionally.  It also requires a secondary service such as Dropbox or Bluetooth to transport the files to an location accessible by Lightroom’s Import dialog. Other options such as email can be used but require more manual processing to detach the files and store them somewhere Lightroom can access.  Sharing is best used for quickly getting individual photos or videos off your phone and somewhere others can see it.

Synchronisation Software (e.g. HTC Sync)

The manufacturer’s preferred synchronisation software is included with most Android phones.  It is typically used for synchronising Calendars and Contacts between a computer and phone.  For HTC devices this is the Windows only HTC Sync application, and the last major release (version 3) introduced the ability to synchronise photos and videos back to your computer.

To take advantage of this feature enable the “Copy device Camera Shots to PC” option in the Gallery synchronisation options.  From then on HTC Sync will copy all photos and videos taken by the device into a pre-defined sub-directory in Documents or My Documents.  This is convenient because it prepares your images for import into Lightroom automatically every time you synchronise the phone.  Other brands offer their own syncing software so users of handsets should have an equivalent option available to them.

This was originally my preferred import option but HTC’s synchronisation software has one issue that makes it unworkable for my video workflow.  During the file copy process it resets all of the date/time stamps for the files and replaces them with the time they were synchronised to the computer.  For images this is a minor nuisance because the EXIF metadata is unaltered and contains the relevant dates.  Unfortunately video files do not have an equivalent of EXIF metadata so once those date/time stamps are lost it becomes difficult to impossible to determine when those videos were taken.  This interferes with my preferred file naming scheme and is a “show stopper” issue for me.   Synchronisation software from other manufacturers might not have this flaw but please verify this yourself before entrusting you video import workflow to this option.

Mass Storage Device, accessed directly from Lightroom

One of the simplest options for importing your files into Lightroom is to connect your phone and computer via the supplied USB cable, switch the connection to the “Disk Drive” type, then start Lightroom’s Import dialog and wait for it to detect the phone.  The Micro SD card should soon appear in the dialog just like any other external USB device and the photos and videos will be found in its DCIM folder.

As you are accessing the content directly from the memory card the dates and times recorded for the content will remain intact, so the video file renaming workflow should now operate correctly.  Unfortunately a new problem quickly becomes evident. Lightroom doesn’t recognise the HTC Desire’s video files so refuses to import them.

The HTC Desire includes a number of different modes for recording videos but all store the files with a .3GP file extension.  Lightroom does not currently recognise this as video and will not offer to import the file.  This impacts not only HTC phones but also those by other manufacturers (e.g. Motorola), and even other phone operating systems (e.g. the PalmOS use by my old PalmOne Treo 680), that choose to save their videos with this file extension.  If your phone uses .3GP or .3GPP as the extension for its video then Lightroom will ignore the files so cannot be used as the import mechanism.

Mass Storage Device, accessed via third party import application

The easiest way to work around the Lightroom Import dialog limitation is to use a third party application to copy the files to disk first.  I currently use this approach and the Image Ingester 3 product to import my files.

While this adds another step to the importing process it also grants some flexibility (e.g. more extensive file and folder renaming options) and ensures all of your images and video are imported onto your computer regardless of their filename extension.  Once on your system you have options to prepare your videos for import into Lightroom via its Import dialog.  More information will be provided about the preparation process in part two of this post.

Choosing the most appropriate import approach

After reviewing all the options presented the decision making process becomes fairly straightforward.  It all depends upon your interest in video and the capabilities of your phone.

If you don’t currently, and never will, capture videos on your device then using your phone’s native synchronisation software (e.g. HTC Sync) or Mass Storage Device mode (via Lightroom’s Import dialog) to import is the simplest approach.  The limitations mentioned above don’t impact an image only capture workflow, but if your workflow ever does expand to include video you will need to quickly change your import approach or risk losing valuable video metadata.

If you do capture video, take a quick sample with your phone and verify what file extension it produces.  If your phone is a Samsung Galaxy S or any other phone that shoots AVI, MP4 or MOV videos (yes, even an iPhone) then use the Mass Storage Device mode (via Lightroom’s Import dialog) to import.  It is the next simplest way to retrieve the media from your phone, retains your video date/time metadata, and Lightroom will recognise your video files so this option should support your video workflow.

If your phone produces .3GP or .3GPP video files you will need to use the Mass Storage Device mode (via third party import) option to maintain your video date/time metadata and ensure these video files ignored by Lightroom aren’t lost. My tests with colleagues’ Android phones indicate at least some HTC and Motorola users will need to take this approach.  Once the video files are safely store on your computer you can then prepare your video for import into Lightroom.

If you fall in the last category then please stay tuned for part two of this post, where I will describe the process of getting your .3GP video ready for processing by Lightroom. 

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

Finding the best approach for importing photos and video from your Android phone into Lightroom (Part 1)

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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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