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Plugin, Republish, Need to do nothing while doing something

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Linwood Ferguson

Linwood Ferguson
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Ok, this is a bit convoluted, but here goes...

I use the Smugmug Lightroom plugin and generally love it. There is one aspect however which is driving me crazy.

The combination of Lightroom and the plugin together work hard to only send the image if the image has changed. In fact, if you change only metadata, the plugin just sends the metadata and updates Smugmug's cache of metadata, the image itself is not exported.

This sounds good, and for people who do not otherwise care, it saves a lot of transmission time. I however care, as people download the images from my site and use them as images.

Simple scenario: I send up the photo, and then see I had the wrong caption. I change the caption and it sends JUST the caption. If you view it on Smugmug the caption is correct, as Smugmug uses its own cache. If however you download the image itself, the caption is incorrect, as it did not update the image data, just the text in its cache.

So here's my issue: I need a way to tell Lightroom/SM-Plugin to republish the image.

Sounds simple: CLick the "Mark for republish". The problem is something (whether LR or SM-Plugin) is noticing that the develop settings did not change, and so it does NOT send the image. I am not sure if this is new behavior or not (specifically the "Mark for republish" -- I really think that used to be an absolute "send again", but I just tested it thoroughly).

The only way I have found to make this work is make some develop change. Except I do not actually want a change.

So you might, clever that you are, think that you can just do something like "Exposure up 1 stop" then "Exposure down 1 stop". Lightroom (not smugmug) notices you were clever, and on the first step moves it to "to publish" and on the second back to "Published". It's too darn helpful.

I tried something else, changing the balance slider in split toning, without any change in the default saturation of zero -- but LR is smart and realizes this has no effect with the saturation zero.

Anything else I do en mass has real impact -- all the quick develop changes are in fairly large increments. Anything I change on Develop and sync is absolute, not relative, and so has a potential to screw things up. I just did one gallery where I knew clarity was the same in all, and changed it from 15 to 14 which is innocuous, but if I did not know and copied at 14 over a 0, that's substantial. The same seems true of anything on the develop screen, since nothing there is relative.

So... anyone have any ideas? How can you, en mass, change develop settings in a real way (that LR will know you changed), but that does not actually DO anything? (Or anything significant?).

The closest I can come is the Quick Develop clarity -- it's a real impact but not a large one to go up or down one click.

I'd also welcome a completely different workaround, some way to force a republish (of the image) not involving develop settings, but I have had no luck.

Oh... before you say it... Removing from the collection and re-adding is not an option, as that changes the URL at Smugmug -- it has to be "modified", not changed to "new".
 
I don't know if this would meet your needs, but Jeffrey Friedl has a Smugmug plugin. I use his Zenfolio plugin, which I suspect works similarly, and I find that if I mark an image to be republished, the plugin dutifully sends the image up to Zenfolio. Of course, if the issue is at SmugMug's end, then a different plugin may not help.
 
I should have updated this earlier. I THINK I have found the workaround inside of the SM Plugin, with SM's help.

It appears it causes some problems by being too smart -- if you do something like change metadata, mark up-to-date, then mark-to-republish, it realize it still only has metadata to send.

But if you do absolutely nothing else and then mark for republish, it decides you must have wanted the image itself sent.

Unfortunately if you have not kept close watch on what has been sent, it means you send everything at least twice -- you have to publish everything (which may be a republish), then without touching any metadata, mark everything to republish again and send again. VERY wasteful, but it appears to work.
 
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