Syncing Comments from SmugMug to Lightroom Classic?

[Nona Janssen Walls]

Hello community!  I am using Lightroom Classic (latest version 9.1) with the SmugMug Publisher Plugin from Adobe.  I am sharing photos via SmugMug and asking for "Comments" within SmugMug.  When I sync the relevant Gallery and review in Grid view, I cannot find a way to search/filter or highlight those photos which have comments from SmugMug.  I also don't see an option to sort by Comment Date as was recommended in Adobe support.  Finally, the only way I can see a SmugMug comment is to open the individual picture in Loupe view, and then REFRESH the comment pane on the individual photos - it then miraculously appears.  This isn't feasible for over 20,000 photos!

I have "Sync Comments" enabled on the  SmugMug Publish Service within Publishing Manager under the Publishing and Syncing section.

What am I missing?  Please help!  Thanks in advance and Happy New Year!

[Jao vdL]

Yes this does not work very well. There are a bunch of other issues with the smugmug plugin (it still does not understand collected images in your galleries or images put there by the smart gallery feature in smugmug when syncing!!!) and this is definitely one. Indeed you cannot search for images with comments. My guess is that the AnyFilter plugin written by a regular on this forum can actually do this: http://www.johnrellis.com/lightroom/anyfilter.htm

[GoldingD]

For sorting. Perhaps a plug-in like:

http://www.johnrellis.com/lightroom/anycomment.htm

[johnrellis · Accepted solution]

"the only way I can see a SmugMug comment is to open the individual picture in Loupe view, and then REFRESH the comment pane on the individual photos"

In the Publish Services panel, right-click the published collection and do Publish Now. Even if there aren't any new photos to publish, it should refresh (sync) the comments for all the photos in the collection.  I haven't tested this specifically with the SmugMug plugin, but other publish services work that way (e.g. Flickr and Zenfolio).

"I cannot find a way to search/filter or highlight those photos which have comments from SmugMug."

There isn't any way that's built-in. With comments coming from collections shared with the LR cloud, you can sort the collections by last comment time (one collection at a time). But with collections published to SmugMug or other publish services, that feature is disabled. (It would have been trivial for Adobe to implement it -- they just don't care about this.)

See the Any Comment plugin for searching and sorting publish-service comments. It's a little inconvenient to use, since LR doesn't make the data easily available to plugins.

[Nona Janssen Walls]

Thank you!  The "Publish Now" works as you describe, much better than the Edit Gallery > Sync Photos + Sync Metadata option for pulling over comments.  I DID notice that this doesn't remove the comment if it is deleted on SmugMug, so I may end up with some cleanup to do at some point.  Will try the plugin for search and filter as well.