P: Publish Service Unpublished Photos Indicator

Hello,

 

I don't know if this has been requested before (maybe I searched for the wrong terms) so apologies if this a duplicate.

 

I have many, many, (MANY) Publish Collections that post to PhotoShelter, Flickr, my WordPress blog, Hard Disk, etc. and as I work on my photos, developing them, adding keywords, captions, etc. etc. some of the published photos obviously need to be updated.

 

While it is great that Lightroom tracks all changes and readily shows me "Modified photos to re-publish" in those Publish Collections, it is an absolute CHORE to go through all of them, trying to find WHICH ONE actually contains photos that need to be re-published.

 

My Feature Request, thus: add an indicator next to the name of a Publish Service (and the Publish Collections therein) when there are photos in it that need updating. This could be something as simple as an asterisk, like "Flickr *" when there's something in the Flickr Publish Service that needs updating. And then "Landscapes *" for the Publish Collection (Flickr album) that contains modified photos.

 

Thanks for considering it.

Alexander.

Hello John. Good to know you're still in the Lightroom Plugin business. I'll check into your plugin. Retirement is the best gig I've ever had. I hope you feel the same way.

I use Any Source regularly to publish and update many dozens of collections with many thousands of photos on Flickr and Zenfolio.  I regularly publish 4 to 6 collections concurrently with those services, mainly because they are so slow and flaky, often terminating with a server-side error after ten or twenty photos.   But I've never experienced LR 7, 8, or 9 crashing.

Flickr used to be horrendous but now that they've been bought by Smugmug, it seems to be more reliable. Zenfolio has its ups and downs, and if I have a lot of photos to publish, I wait until the evening when it seems less loaded and more reliable.  Downloading comments from Flickr can take hours for a collection with a thousand photos.

(And though I'm retired from Silicon Valley, I still very much develop and maintain plugins -- not dead yet!)

 I agree that publishing many collections simultaneously can be very slow. In the past, it has crashed Lightroom for me. I haven't tried doing this in a long time, but I'll try it again and see what happens. {Not holding my breath}

Unfortunately, the Any Source plugin is no longer supported. There hasn't been an update since Lightroom 7.3 or so. From his bio, it appears that the author is now retired.

Hmm, when you select multiple collections and click Publish (without holding down Alt/Opt), LR publishes all the selected collections. 

It doesn't appear that holding down Alt/Opt does anything different (other than change the button's label to Publish Selected).  

I agree that visually marking which collections need publishing would be useful.

Clicking Publish with many collections selected can be very slow, especially with services like Flickr and Zenfolio that try to download comments even if no photos need to be published-- that can be excruciatingly slow on large collections.

As a workaround to having this built-in, you might consider the Published Collections command of the Any Source plugin, which shows you all collections and how many photos in each that need publishing; it also lets you select which collections should be published and how many to be published concurrently.

While there's some merit in the suggestion, did you know that you can select all those collections and publish them with one click? You select them, hold down Alt/Opt and notice how the Publish button changes to Publish Selected.