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Very sad -- Rob was a great contributor to the Lightroom community. Thanks for posting.
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I think this information is wrong, and I have just contacted Jeffrey to question his post.
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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.)
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There was another post which referred to a boating accident, and I was the one who got it taken down. I have asked for this thread to be removed too.
Update: I have received further information that appears to confirm the earlier report. Sorry if I caused any confusion.
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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.) 😉
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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 ship...
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@johnrells Right. I thought that there was some confusion about the manner of his death since I was pretty sure that the younger Robert D Cole (who died in the jet-ski accident) was not the same as LR's Rob Cole. it would, indeed, be a strange coincidence if they'd both died in aquatic accidents, a short time apart, but I had heard rumor LR's Rob Cole's manner of passing was more depressing (probably the reason no obituary or other info is easy to find besides that death notice, which I hadn't actually seen till now).
Anyway, thank you for the confirmation. I can't really say it's good to hear verification that he really is dead, but that allays any concerns I might have had about his (actually somewhat restrictive) license/terms being converted to a fully open source release.
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Very sad that Rob passed away in 2015; I wondered why he had been so quiet. However, some of his work lives on, and I have just used his SQLiteroom plugin to identify all the files that I have printed. I tried to do this myself but failed, so thank you Rob for your plugin; it still works in LR6 despite your reminder that it might not.
So if you are up there looking down at us still struggling to do things that Adobe could do but won't, thank you for all your efforts.
Bob frost
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Before GitHub became the popular place to do it, I traded many emails with Rob about creating a public space for trading LR SDK code and he put it all into Assembla along with a brain dump of thoughts into their wiki feature. The project languished, I think for two reasons. The LR dev community was/is small and Rob just couldn't get people excited about sharing commonly needed code (note all the plugins that compile their Lua). The other reason was that Rob had very strongly held views about his technical approach and not everyone agreed with it.
Anyway, the project is still located here and I'm sure there are some gems buried in there.
Framework | Lightroom Plugin Development Project | Assembla
It might be interesting to set up something similar on GitHub which people appear to be more comfortable with.
db
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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:
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.c... (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
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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.
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I have pushed version 5.9 of Rob's ExifMeta plugin to GitHub:
GitHub - DaveBurns/ExifMeta: Rob Cole's ExifMeta plugin for Adobe Lightroom
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Has anybody the DevMeta plugin? I googled for it but can't find any valid download.
Thanks in advance!
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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
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I am using Rob Cole's CollectionManager plugin quite a bit, so now I have created a GitHub repository in case someone else wants to use it and/or extend it.
This is the first time I use GitHub (and I'm not experienced with Git at all), so I may have done something wrong. But give it a try
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Hi,
Are there any fellow Rob Cole Plugin enthusiasts who could share the Gazoo plugin with me by email or dropbox? Would really appreciate it!
Priam
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Just bookmarking this. I was after one of his plugins so I could extract the proprietary exif in my Fuji images, but when I couldn't find any trace of it I decided to write my own. I might be able to contribute to replicating his plugins in the future if I have the time.
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bernie west wrote
Just bookmarking this. I was after one of his plugins so I could extract the proprietary exif in my Fuji images,
Have you not seen my X-LR ?
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Hi John, I have. But I want a few extra things in there related to the Dynamic Range settings. I also don't want to pay for something I can code myself..
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Fair enough. Its Expert Mode does allow DR values to set any number of sliders and presets.
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Bernie - Are you looking to apply Fuji's film simulations and a few other things with Fuji-specific metadata? If so, John's plugin is the way to go. If you want a general purpose plugin that lets you look at any Fuji metadata and filter/search with that, you want Rob's ExifMeta plugin. You are welcome to get it from the GitHub repo I set up for it: GitHub - DaveBurns/ExifMeta: Rob Cole's ExifMeta plugin for Adobe Lightroom . I believe that's version 5.9. Someone else has supplied me with 5.11 and a few other of his plugins and I'm slow getting them up to GitHub. If you want a packaged zip of it all, I don't have that on GitHub but you can PM me for a DropBox link.
BTW, I will point out that John's plugin is custom to Fuji and streamlined. Rob's is so general purpose for any metadata a camera could ever generate that both the UI and code are very heavyweight. I had ideas once about making a Fuji specific version of it once but I have no time for it.
db
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I created a simple EXIF Plugin for Lumix cameras. You can use as a starting point to adopt it for Fuji. The code is straightforward. In case you habe any questions just contact me
Lumix_Metadata/lr_metadata at master · Lufthummel/Lumix_Metadata · GitHub
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Someone (need to check my notes to remember who) gave me several zip files and I have just pushed several of Rob's plugins to GitHub:
ChangeManager
CustomMetadata
DevMeta
Exportant
ExportMaster
OttomanicImporter
ExifMeta -> this was at 5.9 but is updated to 5.11, the last version.
You can find the repo's here: DaveBurns (Dave Burns) / Repositories · GitHub
Note that I pushed these "as-is." I have not used the plugins except for ExifMeta.
Cheers,
db
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Are there instructions of how I can download the Mac binaries for ExifTool, and where to install/place it to use with the ExifMeta plugin?
Thank you in advance.