P:Facebook publish plugin no longer authorises or retrieves albums or update published collections

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

LR 4.4, OS X 10.8.4
After the infamous facebook Tuesday night update the Facebook publish plugin no longer works.

LR will not display a fb album list, cannot create albums or publish new photos to existing albums. Editing Collection settings will no longer authorise and returns error "Can't save changes: Authorizing"

Sometimes states error "Cannot retrieve facebook album list", plugin also fails and needs reloading, diagnostics file contains :

Plug-in error log for plug-in at: /Other App Links/Imaging/Adobe Apps/Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4.app/Contents/PlugIns/Facebook.lrplugin

**** Error 1

An error occurred while attempting to load this plug-in’s portion of the Export dialog.
?:0: attempt to index upvalue '?' (a nil value)

I have reloaded an earlier backup of the plugin to make sure it was not corrupted.

Several users have posted about this error on the Adobe community forum http://forums.adobe.com/community/lig...

Removing authorisation and plugin from fb does and reauthorising does not resolve this problem!

Tested also in LR Beta 5, same problem!!!

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I can also confirm that it is working again with no changes. Also I did not need to go to facebook and remove the lightroom app. It Authorized and allowed me to select a album which in turned allowed me to save the settings and start publishing.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Well the plugin is working again, but not 100%!

Sometimes it works, sometimes I get Authorisation failed, cannot retrieve fb albums or the plugin itself fails and needs reloading. trying to re-authorise still waits with waiting for authorisation.

I believe FB have made changes but Adobe still needs to look at the plugin and the FB changes to make it more stable.

[Swin70]

Yeah, still experience this glitch although the main functionality does appear to be back. I added a couple of publish service for Facebook for different folders, but each time I open LR, I need to re-authorise. This does compete OK, although of course LR want me to re-publish.

In addition, I did get one error where the plug in failed to load, meaning that I had to go into the plugin management and re-load.

[Brett N]

It looks like Facebook is well on it's way to fixing whatever it was they changed that broke this connection. What I'm seeing on my side is that it is working stably. My guess is that they were probably still working on it yesterday, so that is why everyone was seeing such a mix of issues. Let us know if you are still encountering issues and we can continue testing.

[jayloden]

I upgraded to Lightroom 5 over the weekend, and I just tested it again about 60 seconds ago. Still no dice on my original Facebook publishing service, it always returns "unable to retrieve album information".

However, I discovered that as of this morning, I *can* create a NEW Facebook publishing service successfully. The problem is, that means I lose all my albums and collections managed by Lightroom under the current Facebook publishing service if I switch over. Is there some way to export or sync that information? It would be a major loss to have to dump all my managed collections in order to use the plugin again.

[Brett N]

I just tested this again. It was working perfectly this morning, but now it's a mess again. Facebook must still be in the middle of making changes. Looks like we still need to wait.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

As I said early, sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't!

I have to go through these steps to update an already published collection.

Plugin Manager - reload plugin.
Edit collection settings - Authorise plugin - Done - Cancel ( It hangs on can't save authorising!)
Then back to collection and publish. Which sometimes works, sometimes does not.

JF's FB plugin works however and has all the while. I do believe Brett N that plugin really does need to be looked at, even though FB are playing around a third party plugin has not suffered at all during this!

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I'm still not able to use the Facebook plugin. I get the authorization failure message. When are the fine folks at Adobe going to address this ?

[coffeefrog]

Any progress on this? It seems to have been broken since at least the middle of last month.

There are some diagnostic issues with Lightroom as well as the functional defect. There is a surprisingly large range of error behaviours displayed. For example internal errors identified by the plugin are not consistently reported to the user (sometimes the plugin indicates an internal error in the plugin manager but not otherwise, even when the user interacts with the plugin from the left-hand pane in the main window), there are seeming array indexing errors that do not indicate what their consequence or cause is, messages that are inconsistent with the user session - a message about no album associated with collection for example immediately after creating one though a Lightroom dialog.

Facebook is also inconsistent, different sequences of pages are sometimes displayed during authorisation attempts.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

So it is down yet again today... LR5, MBPr running OS X 10.8 ... i tried deauthorizing from the facebook window as per the instructions I've found on other blogs. Today I tried yet again to create a collection/album. The album was created but it wasn't mapped to the collection. Now my plugin will not allow me to reauthenticate and the facebook page just hangs. Shenanigans! You wouldn't know that people's livelihoods depend on social media (especially in the photography world)

[coffeefrog]

The defect is still there. Any progress in analysis or ETA on a fix? Whether the underlying issue is Facebook's or Adobe's is not very interesting, the Adobe software is the thing that is not delivering its advertised function, but this is now a quite old issue.

Is the plan to remove the Facebook upload function from the product or to fix it? If the plan is to fix it, when will the fix be available?

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Hello! Will this be fixed anytime soon?

[coffeefrog]

Amy,
If you read the Adobe employee comments, it does sound like they are waiting for Facebook to fix their problem without having Facebook's formal engagement with their issue (this is suggested by their speculation about what Facebook is doing in this area rather than a more clearly engaged response). Jeffrey Friedl's Facebook plugin works at the moment. Its a pity that I now have two types of Facebook album collections, which is not an ideal situation, but without any feedback from Adobe I can only assume that this function has been in effect orphaned by the company. I doubt that the Lightroom team would think that, but the quality of Facebook's engineering practices may well be incompatible with retail software like Lightroom, rendering the Lighroom export function in practice something that cannot be guaranteed to work.

I'd like to be wrong, but how long has it been and how much progress information has been provided?

Greg

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

If Jeffrey Friedl's Facebook plugin works, then it seems to be a problem with Adobe's plugin. Adobe shouldn't distribute Lightroom with plugins that they can't maintain.

After removing the old app from Facebook, I could re-authorise the new one.

[coffeefrog]

Removing and reauthorising seems to work for some people some of the time; not everyone, and not all of the time. Whether this function is supportable in retail software that has Adobe's release cycle time is an interesting question.

[Pete.Green]

Hey all,

Try out these suggestions from the Lightroom side while we wait for a fix on the FB side.

http://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/e...

We will also have some updates coming in LR5.2 update that will help as well.

Regards

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Any word on the progress related to this issue?

[jeffr46255812]

I published about 10 albums to FB today and then all of a sudden, I got the "No Facebook album assigned to collection" error everyone is mentioning! Weird.

However, I found that if I simply created the album in FB first, I could choose this when publishing and select "Add to existing album". This seemed to resolve the issue for me.

Bit of a pain but not too bad.

[coffeefrog]

OK, broken again in the latest LR release. Seriously guys, you have to admit that this is simply not supportable behaviour for a commercial product. If I have to approach the software wondering what workaround I'll have to use today, then you have failed.

The handling of internal errors in Lightroom is still not fixed, after the publish fails (and LR tells me that it has failed), it thinks that the collection is published (either it failed or didn't and the software should have one view of the status, but you know that already). You guys know that is broken behaviour. I then get a LUA error about indexing, just to reinforce the point that the internal error handling is broken.

The repeated references on the part of Adobe staff to waiting for Lightroom to fix things indicate how much effort is going into making this work. Jeffrey Fried manages to make this work. Why can't you?

[coffeefrog]

Just bought and installed LR6 stand alone version (very difficult to find it on the Adobe site). Upload is still broken (a message about no album associated, followed by an indexing error from LUA). There must be something broken in my config causing this that the LR software does not detect, so I sent some more money to Jeffrey Friedl for his plugin.