Does the Lightroom Classic SDK support custom UI panels?

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
July 31, 2022
2 replies
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Is there any way to create a custom UI panel that is visible in the library view? (Example of panel location in the attached screenshot) As far as I can tell the SDK only supports adding UI elements in the export/publish dialogs and from pop-up UI elements that are selected from the menubar.

I'm trying to add an always-visible UI element that will contain client details while still having the library view as the active window. If anybody has any suggestions for workarounds or knows if this is possible please let me know!

SDK

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Correct answer johnrellis

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If you want to display per-photo metadata, you can create a custom Metadata panel tagset, which can display standard LR metadata fields or custom metadata fields added to photos by a plugin. As an example, here's the custom tagset defined by my Any Vision plugin:

See Adding Custom Metadata Tagsets in Chapter 4 of the SDK Programmer's Guide.

If you want to display other sorts of information that's not stored in standard of custom per-photo metadata fields, your options are limited. You can create "floating dialogs" via LrDialogs.presentFloatingDialog (), which are not modal and remain displayed while you use the rest of LR. Unfortunately, Adobe botched the implementation, and there is no way to keep them permanently on top of the LR main window. So as soon as the user clicks anywhere in the LR interface, the floating panel gets buried underneath the LR window. You'll have to tell your users to make the LR window at least a little bit smaller than the screen so there's room to see the panel peaking through from behind. See my Any Crop plugin for an example.

johnrellisCorrect answer

Legend

[This post contains formatting and embedded images that don't appear in email. View the post in your Web browser.]

If you want to display per-photo metadata, you can create a custom Metadata panel tagset, which can display standard LR metadata fields or custom metadata fields added to photos by a plugin. As an example, here's the custom tagset defined by my Any Vision plugin:

See Adding Custom Metadata Tagsets in Chapter 4 of the SDK Programmer's Guide.

If you want to display other sorts of information that's not stored in standard of custom per-photo metadata fields, your options are limited. You can create "floating dialogs" via LrDialogs.presentFloatingDialog (), which are not modal and remain displayed while you use the rest of LR. Unfortunately, Adobe botched the implementation, and there is no way to keep them permanently on top of the LR main window. So as soon as the user clicks anywhere in the LR interface, the floating panel gets buried underneath the LR window. You'll have to tell your users to make the LR window at least a little bit smaller than the screen so there's room to see the panel peaking through from behind. See my Any Crop plugin for an example.

K

kimaldis

Inspiring

I have an app that I've e written for, amongst other things, running Lightroom connected UIs in a browser view. Currently I'm using it to edit dev parameters from an iPad and to show information about selected photos, again on an iPad browser. I'm also in the process of building a full screen tone curve editor. you'll need Lua and HTML/JavaScript language knowledge but if you feel like getting your hands dirty and if you're on a Mac and you fancy checking it out I can let you have a copy, see how you get on. I've been toying with the idea of making it public for a while, it would be useful to have someone else testing it.

you can see brief description of it here . Check out the first video, around 3.00 for a floating window demo.

C

Cooper246850918yttAuthor

Participating Frequently

This sounds like an interesting solution and probably the best one for what I'm trying to achieve. The production implementation will be Windows based but the concept of your plugin is very interesting. I would love to have a look at and expirement with it on my Mac if you happy to share a copy?

Thanks for this info and the link to your blog it is very helpful!

Rob_Cullen

Community Expert

I do not know SDK, but, you can set the 'flourish' that appears under the panels with an image of your choosing, and that can be a graphic, or a graphic of text.

Panel End Marks are saved in Windows folder-

C:\Users\{Your Name}\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Panel End Marks

eg.