Errors posting to Facebook in Lightroom 4

[ckapusta]

Hello,

I recently setup a Facebook connection in Lightroom 4, and everything Authorized properly, however, when I go to publish a photo, any photo, I get an error back stating "Photo Upload Failed" and when I click OK, a second box pops up saying "Cannot Update this Collection".  The strange part is 50% of the time the photos actually do upload to Facebook, but they are never marked as such in Lightroom, so every time I publish it tried to reupload the photos.  What am I doing wrong here?  Elements seems to work fine, and Lightroom 3.6 worked fine from this same PC.  I did a fresh install of Lightroom 4, built a new Catalog, still the same problem.

[Gravediggingaditch]

"Photo upload failed, but no error string was returned from Facebook."

I'm not sure what is causing it. Sometimes I can upload a few photos at a time. Sometimes I can only upload one.

As long as I only upload one at a time and stay out of the facebook album while its loading, I seem to fare better.

Either way - not as I envisioned. Also, somehow photos are now showing up at the top of my Timeline. They are going down at the bottom with other photos. I have to manually adjust the date on FB to bring them back up.

[AndrewKArch]

I have had the same problem and what I did that seemed to solve it (at least for this one last upload) was to log out of Facebook completely on all browsers on my computer and then upload. It seemed to work fine then.

[MassNerd]

Even after logging out of my facebook account I still get a one-time error uploading to facebook with Lightroom 4.2.  This is an improvement over when LR 4.0 came out though. I used to get repeated errors. Now it seems to be one time. I think click OK on the error message, wait a few seconds and then click the Publish button again and no problems. While not ideal, I can live with it.

[BN-Sally]

I just tried loggin out completely, and LR managed to upload 2 photos and move them over to the "published photos" sub heading, but then, still gave me the following error. "Photo upload failed, but no error string was returned from Facebook." Do you think this is a Facebook error?

The strange thing is that some of the photos are visable on my facebook page.  When I hit publish again, it duplicates as if they haven't already been sent.  So frustrating!  I suppose I'll have to manually export, upload via mac and then delete the jpgs. 

PLEASE fix this Adobe!

[Sebasvideo]

That always happens to me every time I use the Facebook uploader. Either Facebook doesn't have that connection setup correctly, or Lightroom has a bug in that module, but it never works if you want to upload a lot of photos. I always export to high quality JPEGs and then upload manually from the browser, which almost never fails.

[Guest]

The Lightroom Facebook plugin is one of the worst pieces of software ever written. It's right up there with Facebook's Android app. Totally unusable. A joke. I mean, why even bother releasing broken software? Just let people upload their FB pics manually and don't deceive them by giving them a broken piece of software.

And the required browser reauthorization upon each single use? I should just stop right here.

[Senhor_Ron]

Actually, I haven´t experienced a problem with the plug-in in months...

[Guest]

@Ron - what OS are you on? I'm on OS X Lion. Latest Lightroom.

[Senhor_Ron]

@georgeypcx:

Running Mountain Lion, latest Lightroom.

For me solution appears to be that I removed the authorization from within LR, then deleted LR as an app in facebook and then reconfigured the plugin.

[Guest]

tried that, still not working.

if I just had to reauthorize every time I'm exporting photos, that would be possible to get used to.

but the thing flat out doesn't work - I need to close and reopen Lightroom for a few times for it to just export one picture.

how sad.

[outside4343]

Adobe, please fix this.

I get between 1%-3% on most publish attempts and am lucky if 1 photo will publish.

I usually have to try about 50-75 times to get all of the photos in a 100 album set to publish which takes hours on end.

I'm running Lightroom 4.3 and will get the same double error everyone else does:

1. Error -> Photo upload failed, but no error string was returned from Facebook.

2. Warning: Can't update this collection.  Photo upload failed, but no error string was retured from Facebook.

Dear adobe developer: You will contend that this is a facebook issue and not a lightroom issue. You are better than that and can code in a timeout retry or at least restart the upload when you error out from facebook.  Please do this and there will be thousands trying to upload happy.

[MassNerd]

Ok, I've been really struggling with uploads to Facebook on my Lightroom processed JPEGs. Jeffrey Friedl's plugin has the most success but I wasn't impressed feature wise. The built in Lightroom plugin never uploads on the first attempt.

So what about exporting to JPEG and then uploading using the web browser? Surely this should work smoothly right? Not really. I  would still have 10% of more of photos time out when trying to upload in Firefox to Facebook. Same thing with Internet explorer. Then I gave Chrome a shot. At first this was working very smoothly. I thought I had it solved, then recently same problem. Timeouts!

So I tried an expiriment with my JPEG export settings in LR. For all my previous attempts I had been using the full resolution (18MP Canon APS-C sensor) and 85% JPEG quality.   For this attempt I changed those settings to resize to 2500x2000 and JPEG quality to 75%.   Now the problem album I was uploading went very smoothly. All photos went on the first attempt.  So I wonder if Facebook just has a problem accepting large files?

What LR export settings do others use for Facebook?

I'd also be curious to hear how many of those NOT experiencing problems with the LR plugin are using lower resolution cameras (12MP or less)? Are the people with Facebook problems working with larger files from a 18MP+ camera? Maybe lightroom is sending the full resolution files are well and running into the timeout issue with facebook?

[Senhor_Ron]

From the facebook cheatsheet:

Max width / Max height: 2048px, so yes you went above 🙂

My export settings for facebook are: resize to 960px over the long edge at 72ppi, jpeg 100%

Upload working perfectly through all browsers (except IE).

Your camera resolution is irrelevant in this issue. That is, I see no reason why it should.

Try adjusting your settings accordingly and then see what happens.

To verify the facebook connection, remove the authentication with the facebook app, delete the app from facebook and then re-authenticate from within Lightroom.

If your different browsers still give errors, I´d verify by uploading to different sites to see if that works without error.

Also see if your network is ok.

Hope this helps, cheers.

[kwschnautz]

For me, all hell broke loose when I got to an image that was roughly 20000 pixels wide and 3000 tall. (60MP) It was a panorama.

I know I've seen the 2048 pixel number floating around, but I was able to reduce mine to 10,000 pixels on the longest edge (1500 tall) and it uploaded fine.

From that, I gather that the limitation is not really on file dimensions, but instead total file size (MB). Perhaps limiting your uploads to 20 megapixels will suffice?

[areohbee]

Disclaimer: I have not read all posts, but:

* does this problem occur using all facebook plugins, or just one?

If you've only tried one, then consider trying the other(s).

PS - if problem occurs using Jeffrey Friedl's facebook plugin - tell Jeffrey. He may or may not be able to fix it promptly, but at least he'll probably give you the real skinny...

Rob

[Stan Burman]

I have just given up. I can't get Lightroom 4 to publish to Facebook. I have frankly gotten a bit sick-and-tired of trying different things.

As much as I like Lightroom, this feature is so lame that Adobe should just delete it. I really don't care whether it's an Adobe thing or a Facebook thing. It's lame.

Stan

[Guest]

@stan +9000

I upload 2000px max at long edge, 100% JPEG.

Lightroom FB plugin: extremely annoying experience, I wish I never found this piece of time-waste in a software package I like and I paid for.

Jeffrey's plugin: uploads on the first attempt and without any problems.

[Julie Kmoch]

We have made a change in our upcoming 4.4 release that we think should improve the success rate in uploads. You can kick the tires on the 4.4 RC build on our labs site, http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom4-4/

[Stan Burman]

Hi Julie, Thank you so much for your info. It's good to know that the Lightroom team is trying to fix this. I haven't used the LR 4.4 RC yet but will give it a try.

[ReidSimpson]

Thanks, Julie. I downloaded and installed 4.4RC1 to replace 4.3. I edited and uploaded 148 photos to Facebook tonight without any errors. However, after the upload completed, the Facebook collection has 65 of the 148 photos listed in the "Modified Photos to Re-Publish" and the rest (83) in the "Published Photos" list. I didn't do any edits to the "Re-Publish" images, so I don't understand why there ended up there.

Reid.

[Julie Kmoch]

I'm not sure what caused that in your case, Reid, but our method for detecting 'modifications' is pretty broad, and can include things like changes to ratings or keywords in addition to more obvious ones like develop settings. To work around this, select the images in the "Modified Photos to Re-Publish" bin, right-click to bring up the context menu, and choose "Mark as Up-to-Date" from near the bottom.

[ReidSimpson]

Thanks, Julie... I just wanted to make sure that I reported the behavior in case you had some S/W test folks that want to look into it. I'll let you know (on this thread, I guess) what happens next time I upload another album to FB. (Might not be for a couple of days, though.)

[nuwonda]

same error persists in 4.4 RC1. Nothing changed. I wish this would not take over 1 year to fix... Aperture does not have any issues uploading to FB...

edit: it may have to do with "portrait" orientation? I think it always fails on "portrait" orientation pics, landscape work fine? Anyone?

Edit2: scratch that, now failed on a landscape one... sigh.

[Julie Kmoch]

Rats. Nuwonda, can you please describe the error you see? Is it intermittent? And do you get any kind of error message or does it just quietly fail?

[ReidSimpson]

For what it's worth, I have seen a few upload failures with 4.4RC1 as well. If I recall correctly, all of them, except one, provided non-descriptive messages (like "upload failed, with no error code" or something like that) but one of them gave me a big popup filled with HTML (I think) which I failed to capture for you. (Sorry!) My upload batches are usually in the 50-200 picture range and many of them have completed without any errors. (On the other hand, it's usually 2AM EST when I finish editing, so FB load is probably low. )