Publish smart with sub folders to smugmug

[Holger5FB5]

Hello there. 

I am using lightroom classic for many years now to organize my photos and tag them. 

Now I want to publish them to smugmug and thats where I need advice. 

I have some Root folders with each having some sub folders. My wish is to publish each root folder (not the overall root folder, cause I have some folders in there which I dont want to publish) with their sub folders to smugmug with a smart detection of changes like new keywords or edited photos. 

I already looked at plugins by New p and jeffrey, but they seem not to fit my preferences, or do they and I didn't understand them correctly? I think they only Export once and dont have the intelligence to recognize changes or do they? Or is the only way to create manually my root folders on smugmug and then create for every sub folder a smart collection with the content of the respective sub folder?

Thanks in advance 

{Moved from Lightroom Cloud to Lightroom Classic Forum by Moderator} 

[dj_paige]

I already looked at plugins by New p and jeffrey, but they seem not to fit my preferences, or do they and I didn't understand them correctly? I think they only Export once and dont have the intelligence to recognize changes or do they?

The whole point of a publish service is to recognize when something has changed since the previous Publish, and then export the changed photos. So why do you think these publish services DON'T do this?

[Holger5FB5]

Hi dj_paige

As I already mentioned, maybe I simply dont understand how this works. I have tried the official smugmug plugin, the one of New P Photo Upload and of Jeffreys Blog. The last 30 minutes I've tried to create manual a root folder and then into this some smart collections (or smart folders) with the rules that only one subfolder is recognized. But they were not put "into" the manual created folder and after test publishing, they are simply put into the root folder and there were no created subfolders. 

For me, this is completly new. As mentioned, I used lightroom so far only to tag my photos, nothing more. So I have now many things to learn. For editing, I already watched many videos of Pavel Kaplun, so there is enough information on video. For my personal "publish problem", there are many text to read, but I think I dont understand the "how to". If you unerstand my "wish" and can help me step for step (you can decide which plugin), then I am more than happy 😉

[dj_paige]

I'm afraid I'm not following you. Folders and collections are not related. You cannot create a folder and then move a collection into it. Also, are you talking about folders on your comptuer or folders on SmugMug or both or neither?

[Holger5FB5]

Hi again. Thanks for your interest in helping me. I will offer more informations with exact folder names, so you can maybe see better what I mean. Dont wonder about the folder names, I am from germany 😉

So, my all over root folder is named "Photos". In there, I have some root folders which represents cities, the names of my children, vacation and so on. There are also some root folders, for example of my work, which I dont want to publish. So first problem, I dont want to publish the whole all over root folder "photos".

One root folder is called "Elena" (my daughter). In there, there are sub folders like "2012-Elena-Birthday", "2013-Elena-Birthday", "2014-Elena-School" and so on (not in english 😉

An other root folder is called "Vacation". In there are sub folders like "2017-Vacation-Poland", "2018-Vacation-Paris", "2019-Vacation-Egypt" and so on.

Now my whish is, that this folder structure, root folders with sub folders is automatically published to smugmug, with the "smart" publish features lightroom or the plugin detects changes in tags, filesize or whatever to update or upload or delete the file on smugmug. 

Which is the best way to do this? 

[dj_paige]

So you were talking about Collections, now you are not talking about Collections but only Folders. Am I understanding the problem correctly?

I don't use SmugMug, but I do use the Jeffrey Friedl Flickr Publish Service, I assume it works the same (but maybe that assumption is wrong). You have to create Publish Collections or Smart Publish Collections. A simple way to do this is to assing the keyword Elena to all photos of this person, and then create a Smart Publish Collection that contains all photos with the keyword Elena. Then publish. When changes are made to any photo with keyword Elena (or new photos get keyword Elena) you publish again, only those photos with changes or new photos with keyword Elena get published.

[Holger5FB5]

Yeah, you are right, I mean folders. I basically want the same folders and sub folders on smugmug like on my PC. I thought this is only possible through collections in which I set the rules that they only refer to a specific sub folder. But thats excactly what fails. Does flickr have the ability to use folder structures? Smugmug does as far as I know, thats why I choosed smugmug. 

Your idea with keywords isnt excactly what I want. The keyboard elena for example is on many other pictures in other folders (like vacation and so on). 

[dj_paige]

There are no folders on Flickr.

Your idea with keywords isnt excactly what I want. The keyboard elena for example is on many other pictures in other folders (like vacation and so on).

You have complete control over which photos are used in the Publish Collection or Smart Publish Collection, my example was the simplest case. You can certainly create Publish Collections or Smart Publish Collections that fit your needs with more complex rules, and you can even pick specific folders to include in the Smart Publish Collection.

At this point, I think the whole idea of folders is doomed to fail (this has nothing to do with SmugMug and has nothing to do with Publish Collections). This is an issue about what is the best way to organize complex and multi-faceted photo collections, where Elena can be in folders named Elena as well as in other folders that don't have the name Elena in the folder name. In any event, that is beyond the scope of what you are asking, but I do think it is a cause of your problems.

[Holger5FB5]

Some years ago I also used flickr (the time it was free or 1tb for free). In this time, I used the method I mentioned above. I created smart collections which refer to a specific sub folder and this worked perfectly. Flickr showed every sub folder for which I did this, so I had many many "folders" (I know, albums) on flickr. Keyword search and all this things worked. But, yeah, flickr doesnt allow folder structure in form of root and sub folders. So basically this is my problem. Smugmug allows sub folders. So I need to find a way to to the same like on flickr years ago, but with root folders .

[Holger5FB5]

One of my ideas was to manually create the root folders and then create smart collections refering to a sub folder and putting them into the root folder I want. But this is the point where I stuck, it just wont work. But I have the faith^^ that New P or Jeffreys plugins are able to, but I overlooked it.

[Holger5FB5]

Ok, I finally made it, as I wished. And at the end it was really easy. I use the official smugmug plugin. Under this publisher I create manually the root folders. Then I create manually smart collections which refers to the seperate sub folders. This smart collections with the same name as the subfolder can be assigned to the root folders and voila, everything works as intended. I already tested new keywords, deleted photos and new photos. It will take some time to set this up for every folder but I only have to do this once. Anyway, thanks for your help and time.