Sync SmugMug Gallery with Lightroom

thalaia

Dear DGrinners

I hope you have some advice for me.

I've created a SmugMug gallery and also set up a Guest-URL, so others can upload some pictures too.

Now I'd like to keep this gallery in sync with the local version I have in Lightroom. Syncing my own pictures does work, but the pictures others have uploaded, just won't download into my Lightroom gallery.

Is there a way to get this to work? OR is there a workaround?

I now started to download the whole gallery onto my computer, but this will last hours, as there are so many pictures (at the moment 3 zip files, of aproximately 1.5 GB each - and there will be more pictures I guess). And many of the pictures I already have, since they are the ones taken with my camera.

Of course: If I had known before, that the syncing wouldn't work, I would have set up a seperate gallery for the other to upload into. But now it's too late. The link has been distributed and the uploading is already in progress.

Hope you have some good ideas.

Thanks in advance!

Yours sincerely

Thala

jhofker

I don't think it's designed to download files into your Lightroom catalog.

You could move *your* photos to a separate gallery and continue to allow folks to upload to the current gallery. Might take care of your current issue.

thalaia

Hi jhofker

Thanks for your answer.

What I've tried in the meantime is to collect all the pictures uploaded by others and assign those virtual copies to another gallery. Then I downloaded just those pictures.

That worked fine and the pictures could even be matched to this 2nd gallery. BUT: they still wont be matched to the initial gallery - even though I have them on my computer now.
I checked the metadata and realized that the timestamp had been altered and that the filename now featured some extra figures and an '_O' at the end. So I changed all the alterations I found. But still it won't work.

I even contacted the SmugMug support about that, but they recomended to download all the pictures in queston individually. Not really an option when you have several hundered pictures, is it?

Hope someone has another idea (a tool I could use to solve the problem or the source to the lightroom plugin, so maybe I could find a way to add the option I'm looking for or something like that - I'm really open to any input ^^)

Thanks in advance!

Thala

jhofker

Can I ask what your end goal is in having all of them on your computer and synced to SM? Maybe we can help you skip this step altogether. :-)

thalaia

*g* of course...

I had a quick look through them and realized, that some (or better 'many') of them needed some retouche work done (especially back light and sharpness/off-focus problems). And I thought it's easier to keep track of what I'm doing, when I have the whole gallery synced to my computer.

Anyway... I think I've found the problem. The local gallery I was syncing was a smart-gallery and that didn't work out at all. So now I tried to delete it in LR and sync again with SM. And - voilà - now all pictures are matech correctly (though to a normal, non-smart gallery).

I would have been nice to have a smart gallery (especially when trying to keep track of all the correction work), but I'm still glad I've found a way to solve the problem.

Better ideas or input for a next time are still welcome though

Anyway, thanks a lot for your help!!!

jhofker

Glad you got it going!