Two-way syncing of Lightroom with Flickr?

[maholyoak]

I've been using Lightroom with Flickr for a long time. Some degree of two-way synchronization between the Flickr plugin (the Adobe one that comes with Lightroom) and Lightroom is possible. For instance coomments are downloaded to Flickr. However there are some strong limitations on this plugin:

(1) Problems arise if you have a lot of Flickr photo sets then you may not want to keep all of them listed in Lightroom but you may want to update them after you post them to Flickr. For instance if you discover an error in a name or want to retouch a photo. This is especially the case if you move to a new computer or do a major upgrade and lose the photo sets listed in the plug in.

(2) If you import photos from another library where you have set up a Flickr album then that album does not get imported to Lightroom in the Flickr publish module. The connection to Flckr is lost!

I'm in no way suggesting using Flickr as a backup but it would be useful to be able to link to existing albums in Lightroom and to locate existing files in the current library or list them as missing so that republishing is then possible. If anybody knows a way of doing this then please reply.

Currently I'm using Lightroom 4.3 on a Windows 7 PC.

Thanks
Marcel

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

Have a look at Jeffrey's more extensive plug-in and see if it'll meet your needs - it does try to link up with existing files.  http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/flickr

[dj_paige]

While Jeffrey's Lightroom Exporter plug-in is a very powerful piece of software, it was not designed to be (and falls far short of ) "two-way syncing" between Lightroom and Flickr.

[maholyoak]

Thanks Victoria. Yes, I've used Jeffrey's software and have the current version. It doesn't do two-way syncing. It was mainly developed as a geotagging tool before this functionality was added to Lightroom.

[dj_paige]

It was mainly developed as a geotagging tool

You must be thinking of a different plug-in from Jeffrey Friedl.

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen · Accepted solution]

maholyoak wrote:

it would be useful to be able to link to existing albums in Lightroom and to locate existing files in the current library

It was this bit of your original post that caught my eye.

According to http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/flickr/publish#populate it should try to link previous Flickr uploads with photos in your catalog.  I haven't used Flickr for a long time though, so I'm not up to date with the current functionality.

[dj_paige]

Two-way syncing would let "sets" on Flickr become "collections" in Lightroom, and vice versa. As far as I can tell (and I use this plug-in regularly), "sets" in Flickr cannot be synchronized with Lightroom constructs. Going the other way, a grouping of Lightroom photos (whether they are in a collection, publish collection or neither) can be turned into Flickr "sets". If there is a Flickr "set" and a Lightroom "collection" that are supposed to be the same, but the number of photos contained in each is different, there is no automated way of determining where the mismatch exists.

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

Very helpful info, thanks Paige.

[maholyoak]

Success! I think I have gotten to the bottom of this now. With the latest version of Jeffrey Friedl's Flickr plugin you can indeed populate both the sets and groups.

The link provided by Victoria to Jeffrey's blog allows you only to populate the "photostream" collection in the publish services of Lightroom.

However further down in the settings of the jf Flickr plugin there is a part entitled:

"Sync set/group membership for photos already part of this publish service".

It gives a warning about this being beta and undocumented, so to backup catalog before trying.

I did this and synced nearly 7000 photos in Flickr in a lot of sets that it automatically added and located the vast majority of them in my Lightroom library, which contains about 45,000 images. It all took maybe half an hour to run, so it was slow (even with a fast internet connection) but worked! I am a happy camper!

A bonus that I was not looking for but discovered is that this plugin will also sync with Flickr groups.

The version I used is http://regex.info/LightroomPlugins2/releases/flickr-20130324.298.zip

Thanks Victoria and Paige for all of your help

Marcel.

[bearnyc]

I just downloaded and attempted to run this plug-in.  Am I correct in understanding that is plug-in was designed not only to public from LR to Flickr... but can also take existing photos from Flickr and add them to LR?

If the latter is true then I must be stupid because I cannot figure out how to make it work.

I have LR CC and the plug-in mentioned above.  I did notice that since it's been quite some time since his original manual was written, there are some instructions such as "see the blue box" that are non-existent, and he makes reference to checking something about Metadata without explicitly telling us non-tech people where to look for it (or maybe the location changed?).

I've spent five hours in trying to make this plug-in work.  In short: is this meant to take an existing Flickr photo stream and download it into LR for synching?

[dj_paige]

... but can also take existing photos from Flickr and add them to LR?

I use this plug-in regularly and I have not ever seen such a feature, nor have I seen such a feature described on the plug-in's website. So I conclude it doesn't exist.

The only publishing it does is from Lightroom to Flickr, not the other way.

[bearnyc]

Oh wow... thank you.  I have completely mis-read and misunderstood what was on his page and what I saw during the online searches for two-way syncing.

Thank you!