LR Plugin, Publish, Sync, SM Smart Galleries

Ferguson

I've made a mess, I know how I did it, but not how to undo it. I also think that the SM Lightroom plugin could use some work to prevent this.

I use SM Smart Galleries to group photos together, e.g. all of one player, by using keywords. The (real) gallery is for an event, the smart gallery goes through all events and pulls together those with a player's name (keyword) into a (smart) player gallery. Sort of a horizontal vs vertical slice through all the events for that team.

Works very nice.

Well, by mistake I sync'd photos and hierarchy in a folder that contained a bunch of these galleries. I think the photo sync is the real issue.

Apparently it pulls back the virtual copy that is in these galleries, matches it with a real photo in my LR Directory, and places it in the published collection.

Then... if something changes, it tries to publish that photo. But... that seems OK. Maybe.

But if you try to remove a photo from this collection in lightroom, it goes in a "Deleted Photos to Remove" state, and when you publish again it says "Can't update this collection - the request is a valid request, but the server is refusing to respond to it".

Here's one issue with all this -- I had some photos that were actually "in" these collections in Lightroom, that were not published otherwise on Smugmug. Both sides seemed happy with this, the smart rules would select their virtual copies, the publish from lightroom would push the actual photo not (necessarily) selected by the smart roles.

Now I have a mess. What I've tried to do is pull those that were only published in this way to an non-published gallery, so they get selected by smart rules, and what I'd like to do is just clear out all the photos from Lightroom's copy of these galleries, so that only the smart rules are picking up photos, and I'll try to be careful about syncing.

What I think SHOULD happen is that Lightroom, in syncing, should never pull back virtual (selected by smart rules) copies, only photos actually pushed separately to those smart galleries.

Or, at the very least, not throw errors when it encounters one during a publish.

Or... maybe I'm just doing this wrongly.

Is there some more appropriate way to handle this, and to clean up now?

PLEASE don't say delete them all and recreate, as I spent ages typing in the smart rules.

Ferguson

By the way... I've considered using Lightroom smart galleries for this, but it means uploading every photo twice. I've got lots of bandwidth and can do that, but I hate to put that extra burden on Smugmug storage. Plus it does take longer.

Ferguson

Also... I MAY have found a way to at least straighten out the current mess. If I delete these from Lightroom (but leave on Smugmug), then re-sync hierarchy only, I THINK it puts things back to what they should be, EXCEPT of course any photos I explicitly had placed in these galleries. Which I've pretty much written off as a bad idea and am trying to clean up (hard to figure out which they were, though).

Is that the best way to approach this for now?

Or is there a "right" way to do this?

Oja

This has been a major issue ever since the beginning. The plugin does not know how to deal with smart galleries or collected images and when you sync on a gallery that contains collected/smart images, the plugin will think they belong there and offer you to connect to an image. The problem arises that you can actually connect two different images in Lightroom to the same image on smugmug if the image shows up in two galleries! Obviously very bad. I've noted this as a bug before but it has never gotten addressed. Perhaps time to revisit this.

devbobo

Oja wrote: »

This has been a major issue ever since the beginning. The plugin does not know how to deal with smart galleries or collected images and when you sync on a gallery that contains collected/smart images, the plugin will think they belong there and offer you to connect to an image. The problem arises that you can actually connect two different images in Lightroom to the same image on smugmug if the image shows up in two galleries! Obviously very bad. I've noted this as a bug before but it has never gotten addressed. Perhaps time to revisit this.

G'day Oja,

I do acknowledge that this is an ongoing issue, but unfortunately, the LR SDK isn't very friendly and they don't allow you to programatically switch an image with a different one or even remove a photo from a gallery without actually doing a Publish action.

I recently came up with a creative solution to this limitation as part of some future development, and I'm hoping that it will lead me to being able to resolve this outstanding issue. The only other downside is that the LR SDK doesn't allow you to search image using the remoteId, so there is no easy way to find images that are linked to the same remoteId.

Cheers,

David