P: Ability to set up a queue up and schedule several tasks at a time when not by your computer

I like this idea and it would allow me to queue up several items at the end of my evening to pick up in the morning.

A simple example might be the following that might otherwise take hours.
Which if tried to be done at the same time and while you are trying to use Lightroom during your day would completely take over your computer doing nothing else. Them doing all simultanously would also slow them all down to a crawl.

So being able to assign a series of process and then labeling them as concurrent or independent processes would be helpful.

That said, a better queue manager in itself would be useful today in Lightroom beyond the micro-status bars that are currently available.

For example.. a simply application.
1) Export Shoot 1 using profile X
2) Export Shoot 2 using profile X
3) Export Shoot 3 using profile Y
4) Render 1:1 Previews for Shoot 4
5) Render Standard Previews for Shoot 5
6) Render 1:1 Previews for Shoot 5
7) Apply Preset X to Shoot 6
8) Export Shoot 7 as Catalog to location W
9) Import Shoot 8 from Catalog from location S
10) Render 1:1 & Standard previews for Shoot 8
11) Publish to my smugmug shoot 2
12) Publish to my Flickr shoot 2
13) Optimize Catalog
14) Display batch job status

Christopher

Again, well said Rob.

The purpose of this request is *not* just to work around crashing - responsiveness is also a factor (see original post).

In an ideal world, Lightroom (and other apps) would be responsive and reliable despite a multitude of background parallel processing tasks, but that doesn't mean the ability to hold-off the background processing sometimes is a bad idea.

For years, I was unable to play high def video while Lightroom was exporting.

And Adobe often recommends turning off auto-write xmp if your brush is hesitating or you're having other problems for which it might be a factor.

And I've re-written more than one plugin (written by different authors) to offload FTP to an external app to work around ongoing FTP stability issues.

We do not live in an ideal world...

That's a bad idea.

If the application is crashing, fix the crasher bug. Adding a new feature to put a human in the loop for scheduling tasks is not the solution.

Exactly, and that's the reason I suggested this. Let the computer work when I'm not working on it. 🙂

I like this idea allot!

Theoretically, background processing could be done in tandem with foreground processing, if background processing is lower priority and interruptable, but my experience is that Lightroom crashes more often when I continue working with exports in progress. So, I tend to initiate exports after a round of edits, and take a break until exports are finished...

Petra, you got my '+1'. Also, you might like a related idea:

Auto-publishing

In spirit, I see these ideas as being part of the same thing:

- exporting and publishing and whatever else may need to be done in the background.

Maybe create previews / cached copies (if cache enhanced to be more beneficial) too, if nothing else to do...

Maybe be able to configure background processing to kick in if keyboard idle for a minute or two...

Summary:
========
Good idea - to be able to do all the things that need to be done (or may come in handy in the future), without interfering with what's going on at the keyboard...

PS - Feel free to PM me if you have specific ideas for scripting to support this cause.

Petra - In the mean time, you may also be interested in ExportManager, which supports export queuing.

I think this is great but what would also be great is to be able to pause single tasks and lets say give the different priority as well as tell them only to use the cpu not used by the user lightroom or any other program.

Lee, that's the thing, it does slow down stuff like the adjustment brush more than normal (it's enough sluggish as it is).