Plugin to create collection set structure from flat text file?

[Dan Robichaud]

Hello,

I was directed here by another developer who suggested someone in this forum may have knowledge of a plugin that might do what I am looking for.

Essentially I am a volunteer synchronized swimming photographer and every couple weeks I am faced with the same tedious task – creating a collection/collection set structure to organize the photos by age group, routine, swimmer/team.  If I had access to a plugin that would create these structures based on data from a flat text file, it would save me so much time and effort compared to all the copy and pasting I have to do today!  I envision the plugin working its way through the list similar to a Linux mkdir -p command, eg.

mkdir -p “/2018/2018-02-03 CUSSL Easter Divisionals/Advanced/Team/1 – Ottawa U”

mkdir -p “/2018/2018-02-03 CUSSL Easter Divisionals/Advanced/Team/2 – McGill U”

mkdir -p “/2018/2018-02-03 CUSSL Easter Divisionals/Advanced/Team/3 – Trent U”

mkdir -p “/2018/2018-02-03 CUSSL Easter Divisionals/Advanced/Solo/1 - CHOLETTE, Carlie (UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA)”

mkdir -p “/2018/2018-02-03 CUSSL Easter Divisionals/Advanced/Solo/2 - ZHOU, Angela (UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO)”

mkdir -p “/2018/2018-02-03 CUSSL Easter Divisionals/Advanced/Duet/1 - BORDELEAU, Ellie & CROSS, Elly (CARLETON UNIVERSITY)”

mkdir -p “/2018/2018-02-03 CUSSL Easter Divisionals/Advanced/Duet/2 - ARPINO, Adele & CAULFIELD, Meagan (UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH”

...

Any suggestions?

Dan

[johnrellis]

While the LR Software Developers Kit provides the mechanism to create collection hierarchies from text files, I don't know of any plugin that will do it.

But you can easily do this with keywords without a plugin. The LR command Metadata > Import Keywords imports new hierarchical keywords from a tab-delimited text file. You can see the structure of the file by exporting your current hierarchy -- Google should be able to give you more details as well.

While LR does let you have a hierarchy of collections, they really weren't designed for what you're trying to do. Using keywords rather than collections for describing multi-faceted attributes has a number of advantages, both in apply the keywords and in searching for photos,  e.g. find all photos with a particular swimmer or university, all swimmers in an age group at a university, all photos from a given university and routine in the last year, etc.  Keywords also get recorded into the photos' metadata, letting them be accessed by other apps or Web services.

Your keyword hierarchy would look something like:

University

     McGill

     Ottowa

     Trent

     ...

Event

     CUSSL Easter Divisionals

     ...

Routine

     Duet

     Solo

     ...

Swimmer

     Arpino, Adele

     Bordeleau, Ellie

     Cross, Elly

     ...

For dates, use LR's built-in tools for filtering by capture date (which is automatically recorded in every photo -- no need to recreate the date structure in collections or keywords).

[Dan Robichaud]

Thanks for your quick response, John.  Unfortunately its not searchability within lightroom that I am trying to achieve, but rather creating a structure that I can also use in my Zenfolio publish plugin so that things get published in a nicely structured hierarchy to my Zenfolio website after every competition.

[johnrellis]

Are you using Friedl's Zenfolio plugin? 

To test my understanding, you want to create hierarchical published collection sets and collections in the LR Zenfolio publish service, which then get published as Zenfolio groups and galleries?

In general, while any plugin can create collection sets and collections (which appear in the Collections panel),  only the publish-service plugin itself can create published collection sets and collections (which get published as Zenfolio groups and galleries).  So you'd have to contact the plugin author, Jeffrey Friedl, about adding a feature that let you create these from a text file.

[Dan Robichaud]

I used to use Jeffrey's plugin years ago, but I've since switched to Lightroom plug-ins – New P Products  photo upload plugin (he was the developer that sent me here )

No, I don't want the collections created directly in the publish service, I just want them created as normal collections & collection sets.  Once I've organized and rated all my photos within those collections, I add the subset of photos I want published to a mirrored structure in the publish service which I create using Rob Cole's Collection Agent plugin ("Set Copy Sources" to the top level collection set and then "Copy" to the destination in the Publish section. The photo upload plugin by New P Products creates the necessary folders and galleries upon publish.   I've been doing it this way for years, so apparently you don't really need to have the publish-service plugin create those collections in the publish section     If I remember correctly, I think this may have been the reason I made the switch from Jeffrey's plugin...

Dan

[johnrellis]

I've been doing it this way for years, so apparently you don't really need to have the publish-service plugin create those collections in the publish section   

Right, I got that completely wrong. I had to look at an old copy of Rob's plugin to see how he did.  Rob is sorely missed...

[johnrellis]

I understand you've got an established workflow and publishing approach based on collections, but you could check out Zenfolio's Event groups for another way of doing it with keywords: Support Center - Zenfolio . They have a simple demo here: White Gold .