LRPlugin to mark or filter photos by an external filelist

[apochroma]

Hi all

Since I'm on a very huge work I have following demands. I have taken more than 5000 pictures of oilpaintings and drawings of one artist. We work in a group of 5 coworkers. From time to time I have to sort the pictures with a filelist: e.g.: A coworker wants to see following pictures:

00001.dng

00420.dng

00288.dng

03365.dng

.

.

.

If the list contains more than 100 pictures, it takes me a long time to find these photos. So my suggestion is, it should be possible to write a plugin which read the filelist and for each filename it makes a mark (star, color or whatelse).

I' dont know how to write such a plugin. If someone is interested in developing such a plugin, please contact me.

Your help will be much appreciated.

Thanks

Claus

claus@apochroma.ch

[john beardsworth]

Your requirement is not at all unusual and I'm actually working on something along those lines. One of the problems is how the list is parsed, and the likelihood of false positives, but it is achievable.

As a temporary solution, you can remove the line breaks from your list, so it's "00001.dng 00420.dng 00288.dng 03365.dng" . You then paste this into a smart collection "filename contains ...."

John

[DawMatt]

Hi,

You can take John's suggestion one step further and automatically build a smart collection for import into Lightroom.  I wrote a post about this last year where I used a Perl script to take the selections emailed by a web gallery and turn them into a smart collection.  You can then right click on any collection in the Library module, select Import Smart Collection settings, and you will then be able to see all of the selected photos.

Exported smart collections have a name like "My photos.lrsmcol" and their contents look like:

s = {
    internalName = "$select_name-$select_types",
    title = "$select_name-$select_types",
    type = "LibrarySmartCollection",
    value = {
        {
            criteria = "filename",
            operation = "any",
            value = "$select_photos",
            value2 = "",
        },
        combine = "union",
    },
    version = 0,
}

Its a pretty basic format and easy to automate a script to generate.  If worst comes to worst you could probably just take the snippet above, use a text editor to cut and paste the file list where the "$select_photos" value is, save then import into LR.

Matt

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

Tim Armes has just updated his LR/Transporter plugin to offer this functionality with an easy UI.

Instructions on how to use it here: http://www.lightroomqueen.com/blog/2009/05/21/lrtransporter-marks-files-from-text-list/

and download from LR/Transporter here: http://www.timothyarmes.com/lrtransporter.php?sec=install