Upgrading to LR4 and SmugMug Publish Service

waduckfan

I currently use LR3 to publish photos to SmugMug through the plug-in publishing service. When I get an order, I then edit, republish, then send the order to printing. I am looking at upgrading to LR4, but I haven't been able to find any information as how an upgrade effects the publishing service area. That is, will I have to start all over creating a new SmugMug publishing service, and lose all the galleries as shown in Lightroom or will those carry over in an upgrade?

Any one have info on this?

BradfordBenn

Hello-

I have done this already. If you are migrating the catalog it will come over without an issue. You will just need to enable the plugin in Lightroom again. You may have to sync the photos again, but that is not difficult at all. This means that you just have to set the image ID's that may have changed to be linked correctly. I migrated about 10K images and had only about 7 if I remember correctly. The FAQ is fairly good about explaining it. You can find it at http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/352421.

EntropicTendencies

The SmugMug plugin isn't bundled with LR4 (this allows us to update it independently of the Adobe release cycle) - you can download it from http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/121321-lightroom-plugin-update (it works with both LR3 and LR4).

I'd recommend updating the plugin in LR3 - if that's done correctly you're all set when you update to LR4.

The most common source of problems with the LR4 upgrade is if the upgrade is performed using export/import - this strips the publish service information (this isn't a LR4 issue, export/import just does this even if you import to another LR3 catalog).

I'd recommend the following steps:

1. Update the plugin in LR3.
2. Check it works.
3. Install LR4.
4. Start LR4 and open your existing catalog. LR4 will upgrade the catalog, creating a new .lrcat file (your LR3 .lrcat is left unmodified).
5. Check the publish service is ok in LR4.

If you install the plugin update in the recommended place it should just work in LR4 after the update.

If you have problems, stop - contact us at help.smugmug.com - your LR3 catalog is still untouched, so you can work as before until we figure out what went wrong.

Barrie
Smugmug Support Hero

waduckfan

Thanks!