Driving Lightroom Remotely.

So, a good while ago I started messing around trying to figure out how to remotely control lightroom. I was doing a lot of tagging and organising of photos and it seemed to me that I could find a better way of doiong it. What eventually came out of this was an app and a plugin, collectively known as 'Earwig' - because it has to be called something and it was the first thing that came into my head. In itself it's quite simple; a (Mac) menubar server applet that listens for POST and Websocket messages which it passes on to a Lightroom plugin. The plugin expects Lua code which it executes and passes back to the server app which in turn relays it to whoever sent the POST or Websocket message. That's all it does but its simplicity gives it power in that anything that can send POST or Websocket can potentially control Lightroom. I've done this using HTML/Javascript in browsers - the server app also includes a web server that can serve up HTML pages - Alfred, the MacOS spotlight replacement and BetterTouchTool, which can act on a variety of device triggers. The video linked to demonstrates how I'm using Earwig with BetterTouchTool.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this; the tool is robust but tailoring it for individual use requires a knowledge of the LR SDK and it's not for the faint hearted. It needs some UI love to make it functional for more general use and if it's released generally it'll need support and it almost certainly need Beta testing, all things I'm not sure I want to get into. On the other hand it would be nice to see even a small part of the community benefit from it. So, I don't know.

Anyway, this video is a demonstration of BetterTouchTool being used to adjust Dev parameters and add or remove keywords. Let me know what you think:

https://buggeringabout.com/downloads/Earwig%20btt.mp4