Viewing local folders for Lightroom publish services?

[Dante_Stella]

😡

So per a popup message from Lightroom, and apparently without any prior end-user warning, effective today, Facebook dropped the Lightroom plug in, the plug-in shows as disabled, and the local folders (albums) under the service have vanished.

Is there any local Lightoom [meta]data from which to reconstruct the organization of those folders? I have the source files, but I really don't want to reconstruct the selections from two years of pictures of my kids (I can settle for four folders out of 94, if I can at least get back to that).

Thanks,
Dante

 

[Godfrey]

I doubt you'll find any LR metadata on your local storage that will allow you to reconstruct the organization if LR doesn't have anything to show you in the Library UI. That data would be the responsibility of the Flickr plug-in to provide, obtained dynamically from the online service.

I would imagine that if the Flickr folders in LR map to albums on Flickr, you should be able to reconstruct the organization by going to Flickr on-line and manually sorting your image files into Collections in LR, or into actual folders/directories on disk with LR, that match.

I may be completely wrong about this, of course. It's just a conjecture.

---
Got lucky, I guess: I've not used any of the publishing plug-ins with LR to prevent this sort of thing from happening ... I always export my image files for posting to Flickr into a local directory, then manually upload and create an album for them on Flickr.com that matches the local directory. So what's on my local disk in terms of completed work on Flickr matches exactly what is on Flickr. It's more work but I know I have everything archived properly, can't lose it.

G

 

[willie_901]

It is unfortunate FB's unannounced change caused this problem.

The way to avoid future disappointment is to always Publish from LR Collections. Then your image selection and sequencing efforts are part of the Catalog.

 

[Dante_Stella]

Godfrey - I think that's not actually correct about the collection info coming in from the plug-in, since Lightroom annoyingly tracks changes to metadata and re-sorts folders to identify updated items that it thinks need to be updated online. I don't think that is coming from online services' having access to metadata changes locally. I think that the information is there, but it may be inaccessible.

Willie - while it may be safer to duplicated one link collection with another, there is actually no point because at least for Facebook, what they eliminated was the publishing altogether. What really occasioned this is - for the first time - a major service pulling off Lightroom with zero warning. Had this been revealed a couple of weeks prior and not just sprung this morning, and had there been any documentation from Adobe that a publish service could just go up in smoke and take its subfolders (image lists) with it, this would be not be an problem.

The UI/UX on Lightroom is terrible; there should actually be no difference between a "collection" and a "publishing service," at least in terms of permanence, since they are only really links to files as you are seeing them.

 

[maigo]

Viewing local folders for Lightroom publish services?

The way to avoid future disappointment is to always Publish from LR Collections. Then your image selection and sequencing efforts are part of the Catalog.

This is what I do with the Flickr plugin on LR5.
I create a smart collection based on metadata, keywords and "pick flag". The photos meant for Flickr are marked with a 5 star rating. Then the plugin rules publish all the 5 star photos from a given collection.

Sorry, I don't post to FB so I'm not any help with your problem.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Dante_Stella]

Ok, I was totally right about this information being there.

Export the publish collection using Lightroom Voyager. That generates a text file with all of the collection information. Yes, Virginia, all of that stuff is still in your library. It's just hidden. Which makes the total disabling of the plugin even more infuriating.

Do a ton of text manipulation (all searches and replaces in Word and Excel) to parse out the paths into lists.

Use Photo List Importer to create standard Lightroom collections from the lists.

I got half of these reimported in an about an hour. I'm sure there was some simple flag in that publish dump that would have turned these into normal collections (since there is a "type" field), but that was a bridge too far to figure out tonight.

Dante

 

[Godfrey]

Ok, I was totally right about this information being there.
...

Great! As I said, my thoughts were purely conjecture since I have never used or relied upon any of the publish plugins at all. I'm glad that there are tools and such that allowed you to recover what you wanted! 😀

G

 

[Dante_Stella]

Great! As I said, my thoughts were purely conjecture since I have never used or relied upon any of the publish plugins at all. I'm glad that there are tools and such that allowed you to recover what you wanted! 😀

G

Well, the main tool was a logic class from 1994, coupled with a good working knowledge of wildcarding. 🙂

But seriously, my former incarnation as a child programmer was fascinated with how, as you parse through all this text, the protocols and tags for defining these sets must have changed with successive versions of LR and the Facebook plug-in. The worst part was how to choose the initial delimiter to break up a huge, continuous run of text (how Lightroom stores this material), and the best of a bunch of bad choices was to parse on the space character, replace the "[CR] with "XXXXX, then convert all remaining carriage returns to spaces, then all "XXXXXs to "[CR]. This is due to the fact that a lot of file paths for the image files had spaces in them. It took me an hour and a half to figure out the sequence that required the least amount of post-editing work. And believe you me, pattern searches and replaces on a 400-page TXT document are staggeringly slow, even on a quad i7 @4Ghz.

That said, I have just another 60 pages of lists to cut and paste in. It's going pretty quickly now. The list uploader was the best 5 euro I ever spent for a piece of software.

The irony, of course, is that the end result will be copying huge numbers of references back to a different publish service to crank out 600 4x6 prints of each of the kids. Two steps forward, one step back.

Dante