P: Ability to set up a queue up and schedule several tasks at a time when not by your computer

Report · Jun 13, 2011

OK, I'm not sure I can describe this good. But sometimes LR is slow when you start a few tasks, like exporting images to jpgs, web galleries, etc, that you wish that those could be done at a time when you're not by your computer (say at a coffee break, lunch or even leaving the office for the day).

It would be cool with a feature where you could queue several tasks, that can be done when the computer is having "down time" or when you tell it to "start processing task queue" or similar.

Or a possibility for third party vendors to script something like this (or even yourself if you're fairly good as scripting).

Report · Jun 13, 2011

Why not just let it do those tasks in the background while you work?

Report · Jun 13, 2011

Lee, that's the thing, it does slow down stuff like the adjustment brush more than normal (it's enough sluggish as it is).

Report · Jun 13, 2011

I think this is great but what would also be great is to be able to pause single tasks and lets say give the different priority as well as tell them only to use the cpu not used by the user lightroom or any other program.

Report · Jun 13, 2011

Petra, you got my '+1'. Also, you might like a related idea:

Auto-publishing

In spirit, I see these ideas as being part of the same thing:

- exporting and publishing and whatever else may need to be done in the background.

Maybe create previews / cached copies (if cache enhanced to be more beneficial) too, if nothing else to do...

Maybe be able to configure background processing to kick in if keyboard idle for a minute or two...

Summary:
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Good idea - to be able to do all the things that need to be done (or may come in handy in the future), without interfering with what's going on at the keyboard...

PS - Feel free to PM me if you have specific ideas for scripting to support this cause.

Petra - In the mean time, you may also be interested in ExportManager, which supports export queuing.

Report · Jun 13, 2011

Theoretically, background processing could be done in tandem with foreground processing, if background processing is lower priority and interruptable, but my experience is that Lightroom crashes more often when I continue working with exports in progress. So, I tend to initiate exports after a round of edits, and take a break until exports are finished...

Report · Jun 14, 2011

I like this idea allot!

Report · Jun 14, 2011

Exactly, and that's the reason I suggested this. Let the computer work when I'm not working on it. 🙂

Report · Jun 14, 2011

That's a bad idea.

If the application is crashing, fix the crasher bug. Adding a new feature to put a human in the loop for scheduling tasks is not the solution.

Report · Jun 14, 2011

The purpose of this request is *not* just to work around crashing - responsiveness is also a factor (see original post).

In an ideal world, Lightroom (and other apps) would be responsive and reliable despite a multitude of background parallel processing tasks, but that doesn't mean the ability to hold-off the background processing sometimes is a bad idea.

For years, I was unable to play high def video while Lightroom was exporting.

And Adobe often recommends turning off auto-write xmp if your brush is hesitating or you're having other problems for which it might be a factor.

And I've re-written more than one plugin (written by different authors) to offload FTP to an external app to work around ongoing FTP stability issues.

We do not live in an ideal world...

Report · Jun 15, 2011

Again, well said Rob.

Report · Feb 23, 2012

I like this idea and it would allow me to queue up several items at the end of my evening to pick up in the morning.

A simple example might be the following that might otherwise take hours.
Which if tried to be done at the same time and while you are trying to use Lightroom during your day would completely take over your computer doing nothing else. Them doing all simultanously would also slow them all down to a crawl.

So being able to assign a series of process and then labeling them as concurrent or independent processes would be helpful.

That said, a better queue manager in itself would be useful today in Lightroom beyond the micro-status bars that are currently available.

For example.. a simply application.
1) Export Shoot 1 using profile X
2) Export Shoot 2 using profile X
3) Export Shoot 3 using profile Y
4) Render 1:1 Previews for Shoot 4
5) Render Standard Previews for Shoot 5
6) Render 1:1 Previews for Shoot 5
7) Apply Preset X to Shoot 6
8) Export Shoot 7 as Catalog to location W
9) Import Shoot 8 from Catalog from location S
10) Render 1:1 & Standard previews for Shoot 8
11) Publish to my smugmug shoot 2
12) Publish to my Flickr shoot 2
13) Optimize Catalog
14) Display batch job status

Christopher

Report · Nov 15, 2012

Lightroom: Queue! Wouldn't it be great, if you could set up your JPEG Export, your Web Gallery Export and Web Gallery upload into a queue, then run them (or other processes, too) consecutively and automatically while you went for lunch? I know I would!

Report · Nov 15, 2012

Publishing services helps with this. Start publishing when you feel like it, cancel publishing if you feel like it. Since publishing service remembers which photos are published and which aren't, canceling is equivalent to pausing.

I don't guess that helps with web galleries, but hey...

Report · Oct 22, 2013

It would be wonderful if you could Queue to export. Right now we process a lot of photos per day for seniors and exporting slows our workflow down significantly. If we had the ability to go through and make our corrections then click export, add to queue, and then when we go to lunch or go home at night to start the queue so all the sources are used when we don't need the computer that would be wonderful.

Report · Oct 22, 2013

First, let me say that Lightroom is becoming an incredible tool for creating time lapse videos. These videos often have long render times and Lightroom's ability to multitask is fantastic. I like to cue up a video to render while I prepare the next one. Eventually there are several tasks in progress and the total time it takes for them to complete grows.

I like the way we can cycle through the several tasks that are in progress and choose "X" or stop them if we like. My request would be add the option of pausing a process so that others can continue with greater speed. I could see video professionals queuing up dozens of videos to render and having a little more management of these processes would be nice.

Report · Oct 22, 2013

It would be absolutely fantastic if Lightroom could take on some sort of background rendering capabilities. Maybe it could take a note from it's motion picture cousin, After Effects, and have this ability come through Adobe's Media Encoder. (FWIW, AE already has at least one other, 3rd party, background rendering mechanism.)

I'm a *busy* editor for a destination wedding photographer. When I finish an edit and start exporting 1,200 jpegs, I would love to start editing in a new catalog immediately. I'm certain there are many others out there that could benefit from this flexibility.

Report · Oct 23, 2013

I started importing 3600 photos last night and am now discovering that the computer went to sleep around 1600. Can LR tell the computer not to go to sleep during this process?

I'm seeing lots of issues when dealing with large sessions like this. For example, when I develop and sync a large number of images, all the new previews aren't generated for the images. To elaborate, if you sync the development settings for 1000 images and then goto Grid mode you can watch it update the previews for the visible grid of images and then the CPU goes idle. But when you scroll down to the next grid section it will only then start to render those previews and then again go idle. Why won't the CPU stay busy and render all the previews? The "Update DNG previews and Metadata" feature takes far, far longer (unreasonably long for this process) than simply scrolling though the grid to get the previews to update. Without having these previews updated its difficult to use Loupe mode.

I could go on, but I feel like these are the details that really matter to those of us with demanding 1000+ image import sessions and 1000+ item develop sync sessions but are easy to get overlooked with the smaller import sessions that are so common with consumer workflows. I'd love to see Adobe focus on making LR more robust for demanding pro workflows.

Report · Oct 23, 2013

You can certainly do it from the System Preferences under the Energy Saver panel.

Report · Oct 23, 2013

Yes, of course but it's not only a hassle to change the System Preferences for every LR import session, leaving the preferences that way (which is inevitable) would defeat the whole purpose of saving energy. That's an unfair burden to put on laptop users. My point is that it would be far better is LR could prevent the MAC OS from sleeping during this process. Is that a possibility?

Report · Oct 23, 2013

Jeff let me elaborate a little further. Naturally I know that I can, and have to, disable sleeping before these long import sessions. My point is that pros can't keep going back and forth to do this all the time. Last night I forgot to when I started importing 3600 images - I was tired after a long shoot. But I need that card for todays shoot and now it's not available because the process stopped. We need smart solutions to those and other problems - not band-aides. My question is simple - "Can LR tell the OS not to sleep during this process?"

Report · Oct 23, 2013

I've asked someone on the LR team on what the behavior should be or if this is possible. I was just trying to provide a solution that you could use immediately.

Report · Oct 23, 2013

Thanks. All the bug reports and feature requests I put in just get deferred without dialog...

Report · Oct 23, 2013

Ben said it was a good feature request. Team added it to their backlog.

Report · Sep 04, 2014

Can we get an "in progress" tag on this post from the Adobe crew? This is such a useful idea to delay CPU-intensive stuff until I'm away.

1. Exports
2. 1:1 previews
3. Smart preview building
4. iPad App sync

The queue would monitor and report success/fail. +1 for LR realizing my mouse isn't moving and starts chewing on the queue.

Heaven.

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Report · Oct 19, 2015

Suggestions:

"Export to queue" - Users should be able work with photos in different folders, export photo to queue and when leave computer should start processing files in queue.

Option to import empty folder into catalog.

Thanks