Inspiring

Question

Rob Cole has passed away

Forum|Forum|9 years ago
January 19, 2017
14 replies
11993 views

Fyi: As Jeffrey Friedl posted recently, Rob Cole has passed away in January 2015.
Rest in Peace, Rob!

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haraldl57387743

Participant

It's sad to read Rob passed away, may he rest in peace.

I have been searching the www the last couple of months to find a download source for his great ISO Detailer plugin.

I lost the source files after a new Windows and Lightroom and I really miss this plugin.

So I hope someone is able to point me to a new download source if it exits.

Any help is much appreciated.

Greetings,

Harald

D

DFBurns

Inspiring

For what it's worth, I wondered if the Internet Archive would have a copy of Rob's site which is now gone. It does and it last crawled his site around the last time he was heard from - Feb 2015. Unfortunately, although all the text/HTML is there, my understanding is that the Internet Archive doesn't archive .zip files which is how Rob packaged up all of his code. A few minutes of browsing his site there seems to back this up but maybe I'm missing something. In any case, here is a link if anyone would like to browse the site:

robcole.com

On his download page, he lists his terms for using his code and it seems very "MIT license" to me. Essentially, you can use and modify his source for free but give him credit. Other interpretations are welcome: http://web.archive.org/web/20150208092405/http://www.robcole.com/Rob/_common/DownloadEasy/Download.cfm?dir=ConfidentialI… (I think for #3, he is talking about distribution, i.e. not that you can't include it in your own code but that he wants his complete plugins to come from him.)

Unless that interpretation bothers someone, I'm happy to make a plugin of his from Jan 2015 available. It's his ExifMeta version 5.9. I think I'll wait to hear consensus though before I provide a link.

db

johnrellis

Legend

Unless that interpretation bothers someone, I'm happy to make a plugin of his from Jan 2015 available.

That seems fine with me. I had corresponded a fair bit with Rob and met him in person, and I think he would have liked to see his plugins continue to be distributed and used.

D

DFBurns

Inspiring

I have pushed version 5.9 of Rob's ExifMeta plugin to GitHub:

GitHub - DaveBurns/ExifMeta: Rob Cole's ExifMeta plugin for Adobe Lightroom

john beardsworth

Community Expert

I think this information is wrong, and I have just contacted Jeffrey to question his post.

L

LoweMo_photo

Participating Frequently

Would you be willing to share the "other information" you have? I had also heard (some time back) that he had died, but that post seemed to have been removed (I think it was here somewhere), so maybe it was removed as incorrect or unsubstantiated rumor.

In any case, if his work was, indeed, released with a permissive license and we could get his code into a Github repository, I would be happy to participate in moving it forward as a resource for other Lightroom developers. I have some "base code" I'd also like to share to help reduce the pain of everyone reinventing wheels to get things done with the Lightroom SDK. (Right now, I have other things I need to work on, but hope to get a solid version of that code available on Github in the coming month.)

johnrellis

Legend

I did read an obituary and news reports of a Robert Cole who died in a boating (Jetski?) accident while on holidays, but that one was a building contractor and I think quite a bit younger than the Rob Cole we are talking about (the photo also didn't appear to resemble "our" Rob Cole). So, I'd assumed that was a different Rob Cole. Assuming it *was* a different one, it's an odd coincidence that two Rob Coles died in aquatic accidents in the same time-frame. I'd be curious to see anything that verifies this one is truly dead, especially since my reading of his license does not really make me think he wanted to share his work quite as openly as an MIT license. Hopefully, if he's alive and just not able to work on his code, he won't mind. And if he really is dead, I do think it's an appropriate tribute to maintain his good work.

Anyway, @DFBurns, thank you for taking the time to get that repo set up. I've forked it so that, if I find anything I can improve or update, it'll be easy for me to contribute back with a pull request. (It might be a while, though, till I have time to "switch gears" and do much with Lua/Lr SDK. Other projects and personal matters are keeping me too occupied for now, and I'd rather not have Lua syntax accidentally polluting my JS/PHP, etc—or vice-versa.) ;-)

Unfortunately, Rob really did die January 2015. Here's the relevant newspaper item from the Daily Post (of Palo Alto, CA):

The Daily Post: Search the Archive

"DEATHS. Publish Date: February 7, 2015. ... From the San Mateo County coroner: FEB. 2. ROBERT DAVID COLE, 55, of Los Altos"

The name, age, city, and date of the report all match what we knew previously. Rob lived a few miles from me. I met him for beer once, though I didn't know him very well except for LR correspondence.

It's an odd coincidence that two Rob Coles died in aquatic accidents

I don't think there's any evidence LR's Rob David Cole of California died in an aquatic accident. There are just multiple posts here and on Friedl's blog referring to Robert Daniel Cole, 31, of Virginia killed in a jet-ski accident: Crash of jet skis left Robert Cole of Virginia dead; two injured at Cayman day trip from cruise ships | THE CHESAPEAKE T…

johnrellis

Legend

Very sad -- Rob was a great contributor to the Lightroom community. Thanks for posting.

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