The Lightroom 3 beta is taking a step in the right direction with its new Publish Services.  The included Flickr plugin will synchronise ratings and comments back to your catalog but only time will tell if this capability will support retrieval of individual client selections from Publish Services.  In the meantime Lightroom 2 users can make use of web galleries to achieve a similar outcome.

Matt at The Turning Gate has developed a number of web galleries, including TTG Client Response Gallery, TTG Highslide Gallery and TTG Highslide Gallery Pro, that can help Lightroom publish self-contained web sites that automatically email a client’s selects.  Articles and tutorials regarding web gallery usage are available on Matt’s site so I won’t repeat that information here.  These galleries cover part of the workflow gap – allowing clients to inform you of selects – and my TTG Client script addresses the remainder by converting the response emails into Smart Collections ready for import into Lightroom.

New TTG Client Script features

I first published this script as part of my Working with a Wedding Client’s Photo Selects in Lightroom 2 post last year.  This revision provides the following functionality improvements over the original version.  Usage of the script remains unchanged and is described on the TTG Client script homepage.

Support for TTG Highslide Galleries

Over the past year Matt has released new Highslide galleries that can email client selects to the photographer.  The TTG Client script now supports client select emails from these galleries.

Workaround for Lightroom 2 (LR2) bug when hyphens (-) are used in filenames

LR2 has a minor bug that means it quietly renames files to replace hyphens (-) with underscores (_) when producing web galleries.  While the gallery itself will work fine it makes it difficult to match the client selects back to the original file names in your Lightroom catalog.  The Turning Gate recommends file naming conventions to avoid this issue but this could require renaming of files imported before you started using these galleries.  This new release of TTG Client script allows you to continue with your current file naming scheme and instead treats every underscore as a search wild card so the Smart Collections can locate the selects.

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

Capturing your Client’s Selections in Lightroom

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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: Latest version of Export Backup 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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Update: A newer version of this plugin is now available. 
Please visit the Export Backup plugin page to download the latest version, and find the latest documentation for the plugin.

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: Latest version of Export Backup 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

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I recently found out I was the official photographer for my brother’s wedding only two days before the actual event.  Aside from the stress of my first wedding shoot (for a family member no less – no pressure…) I also had to work through the logistics of processing and publishing the reams of photos captured.  Living over 1000 kilometers away from the client made this process a little more difficult than for your average wedding shoot.

The foundation of my digital photography workflow is Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom 2 (LR2). I was confident my core workflow was up to the task but what I was missing was a way to publish the proofs, record the client selects, and bring that information back into LR2 so I could complete my editing tasks.

The Turning Gate’s Client Response Gallery provided a simple solution to the problem.  The web engine plugin generated my proof gallery for me, and when family members selected photos I would receive an email with the details:

Selections: EX_20080914_153823, EX_20080914_154715
GalleryTitle: Test Gallery
Name: Sample
Email: <<email address>>


The standard process for loading the selections into LR2 involves copying part of the selection line, pasting it into an LR2 find or filter field, then working with the displayed photos.  I found this a little cumbersome given the volume of selection emails (> 40) I ended up receiving, so I wrote a perl script to turn the gallery email body into smart albums that could be imported directly into LR2.

The script to convert TTG Client Response gallery selection emails into smart collections can be downloaded here: ttgclient.pl.  If you are a Windows user and don’t have perl installed already you can download it here. 

Using the script is as simple as:

1. Copy the body of a TTG Client Response gallery selection email into a text file. (Example: input)
2. Run the ttgclient.pl script, passing one or more filenames as parameters.
   e.g. on Windows c:\> ttgclient.pl ttgclient-sample.txt
Smart Collection TTGClient-Sample-Selections.lrsmcol ready for import to LR2.
e.g. on Mac (assumes perl is in you path)perl ./ttgclient.pl ttgclient-sample.txt
Smart Collection TTGClient-Sample-Selections.lrsmcol ready for import to LR2.

3. Open LR2’s library module.
4. In the Collections panel, right click on a Collection. Select Import Smart Collection Settings from the context menu, then select the file generated by ttgclient.pl (e.g. TTGClient-Sample-Selections.lrsmcol).
5. If the client specified ratings for any of the photos you will also have a separate import files generated for each rating level awarded.  Repeat the previous step until all of the collections are imported.

You should now have a new Smart Collection (e.g. TTGClient-Sample-Selections) containing all of the selections and rated images included in the email from the gallery. 

I hope this helps your workflow as much as it did mine.  And thanks to Matt for making such a useful LR2 gallery available for free!

Updated Feb 2009: Added Mac details based upon user feedback

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

Working with a Wedding Client’s Photo Selects in Lightroom 2

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