Export Post-Processing not working as expected

[atj777]

I have a post-processing action that I use to create some data using Exiftool which I then use as input for another application.

This used to work fine with Lightroom 5.7 on Mac OS 10.10 but stopped working after I upgraded to Mac OS 10.12.

I have recently upgraded to Lightroom 6.10 to try and get it working but it still doesn't work correctly.

In my Export preset I have Post-Processing set as:

After Export: Open in Other Application

Application: /Users/andrewtj/Desktop/diveexiftool.sh

/Users/andrewtj/Desktop/diveexiftool.sh is as follows:

for i in "$@"

do

/Users/andrewtj/atj.com/atj.net.au/diveexiftool.sh "$i"

done

/Users/andrewtj/atj.com/atj.net.au/diveexiftool.sh is as follows:

F=$1

G=${F##*/}

rm ${F%/*}/DiveEXIF/${G%.*}.exif

exiftool -d "%d/%m/%Y %H:%M:%S" -@ "/Users/andrewtj/atj.com/atj.net.au/exiftool.arg" -w %d/DiveEXIF/%f.exif "$1"

open -a Preview $1

If I run /Users/andrewtj/Desktop/diveexiftool.sh from Terminal with the appropriate parameters it works perfectly:

* the old .exif files are deleted

* new .exif files are created

the .jpg files created in the export are displayed in Preview

However, when I do the export and the Post-Processing runs /Users/andrewtj/Desktop/diveexiftool.sh I only get

* the old .exif files are deleted

the .jpg files created in the export are displayed in Preview

exiftool does not appear to run and no .exif files are created.

I can't work out why it is behaving differently.

Note that the way I have it set up has some history and it was the only way I could get it working with earlier versions of Lightroom.

[johnrellis]

On Mac, a post-processing action has to be a proper OS X application, not an executable or shell script. You can make such an application from your shell script using Applescript -- make a droplet that responds to files being dropped on it via the "on open" handler.  See here for a few more details: Re: Help!! Export Post process action does not fire!

Alternatively, you can buy the Run Any Command plugin, which lets you run a shell command line as an export post-processing action.

On Windows, it's a lot simpler -- the post-processing action just runs an executable with a command line.

[atj777]

When did Adobe remove support for shell scripts in export post-processing and why did they remove it?

[johnrellis · Accepted solution]

I gave you absolutely the wrong answer. I repeated a misremembered factoid without checking, which I discovered when I went to investigate the behavior of previous versions.  Very sorry for that -- I hate it when others do this, and I hate it more when I do.

I just tried this sample script action.sh as an export action, and it worked just fine after marking it executable with "chmod":

#!/bin/sh
(date; echo $1 $2; echo $PATH) >> /users/john/desktop/action.txt

It produced this output:

Wed Jul  5 13:28:22 PDT 2017
/Users/john/Desktop/06-09-2012_SFA_SC_TWT_I00010001.tif
/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin

The last line points to the likely cause of the problem.  On my system, the default location that ExifTool installs itself is /usr/local/bin, which isn't on the value of PATH used by LR:

Johns-MacBook-Pro-3:Desktop john$ which exiftool
/usr/local/bin/exiftool

So your scripts could either add the location of "exiftool" to PATH or they could just use a fully qualified pathname, e.g.

#!/bin/sh
(date; echo $1 $2; echo $PATH; /usr/local/bin/exiftool -ver) \
    >> /users/john/desktop/action.txt

which works correctly.

[atj777]

That was the problem.  Thank you very much.

I thought it might be PATH related but a) I couldn't think why Lightroom would be using a different PATH from what I got by default in Terminal and b) couldn't think of a way of checking the PATH that Lightroom used in the Export action.