Publish Multiple Smart Collections - Hard Drive

[dw24154351]

Publishing multuple collections that are contained within a Publish Service is clumsy and inefficient.

The fundamental issue appears to be that there is no support for iterating through multiple selections. I reported this a while ago when I discovered it was not possible to highlight mulitple collections and export the smart settings for each. The process only exported one, despite multiple selection.

In the current scenario I have 100+ smart collections in a hard disk publish service. The goal here is to create a master folder with individual folders matching each smart collection. I don't want all images to be contained in a single folder.

At the top level there is no control to say publish everything in this current publish service.

So what would seem to be the correct procedure is to highlight the smart folders (within the Publish Service), reveal the context menu and then select publish now. Whilst this is possible, it only exports one, not all the folders highlighted. Multiple selection is not supported.

You have to select publish for each folder. That's tedious and unncessary. It should be a one step operation.

Multiple selection needs to be properly supported.

Another thing that is inefficient is that there is no keyboard support to move through the collection list items. Down arrow is used when the main screen is showing the grid view. Option-arrows could be a substitute, especially if there is no such thing as view focus in the UI.

It occurs with all Published Services. 

Steps

1. Create multiple smart collections within a Hard Disk publish Service
2. Select all the smart collections
3. Context menu 
4. Publish Now

Result

Only one of the collections is published.

Workaround

Select one collection at a time and then select Publish

LrC 11.5, Mac Monterey, M1

[George_F]

I understand you're hoping to have this built into Lightroom, but I wonder if any of Jeffrey Friedl's plugins would work to at least find a viable work around?  Definitely worth a look.

http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies

[George_F]

If I'm not mistaken, I believe the "Publish All in Selected Service" in the Bag-O-Goodies Plugin is what you are looking for?

http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/bag-o-goodies

[dw24154351]

Thanks for the link.

Seems to be buggy. Only some of the folders are published with contents. The remaining don't appear immediately for some reason, but when the folders appear they have Zero K size, despite there being photos defined in LrC.

I'm half way to writing my own plugin....

[George_F]

I'll be interested to hear how it works out!

[dw24154351]

First export went well. 130 folders probably 2-8 images per folder.

Second real export is a little more interesting 130 folders, 4-30 images per folder. You could possibly say a bit more disappointing.

Performance seems to be an issue it came close to an hour to process (on an M1).

But looking through the folders not all images were exported. Some of the collections have say 22 images but there are not 22 images in the folder, only 17. The on screen published state is also wrong - for the same folder, the Publish button is not showing. There are no pending images to publish. The interface would make you believe all the images are published, but looking in Finder tells a different story. There are folders are reporting fully published but only a subset of images are in the Hard Disk Publish Service.

A couple of folders are empty and they should not be.

Iterating through every collection and asking it to publish all isn't guaranteed to push out everything to disk. That's not good. That sounds buggy.

I'm wondering if internal testing has stressed the system to this extent.

Have to delve deeper to understand how asynchronous tasks are queued and managed. The naive loop would schedules the tasks sequentially, ideally you could parallelise and also manage how many you fire off at once.

I think I maxed at around 28 simultaneous processes. Checking activity monitor, not all cores were being leveraged. So there's definitely some room for improvement on multi core processors.

[dw24154351]

Tried again, deleting the Published Service and essentially starting again. Restarted LrC.  Much better performance - seems to have completed in about 7 minutes. Hit over 100 processes this time. This is more like it.

[George_F]

That's awesome news!  I'm glad you are getting close to a solution.