LR plugin opinions wanted

allanrubé

I am starting to use SmugMug and have used LR. I plan to upload about 6000 images to 75 galleries. I have not used the plugin before. Is is worth using? All I know is that if I drag images to the galleries showing in LR - thngs are uploaded.
What are the improvements over just exporting to my hardrive and then uploading besides not having to make extra copies (on the disk)? That in itself makes me want to use it but I wonder if the program is buggy or whether there are other negatives I don't see?

leftquark

We have a large majority of SmugMug customers who use the Lightroom Publish Plugin to upload their photos and love it. As a photographer myself I almost exclusively use the Lightroom plugin to upload my photos to SmugMug and it's what I would recommend. Here's why:

• Can do everything from within SmugMug, which saves me a little bit of time/effort in not having to switch back and forth.
• Don't have to export the photos to JPG, which saves valuable HD space on my external drives
• The publish plugin knows when a photo has changed or been re-edited and lets me republish. I don't have to remember "is the version on SmugMug the latest version?" -- the Lightroom plugin does that for me, notifies me which ones need to be re-published and uploads with the click of a button
• Easier to edit metadata (titles, captions, keywords) from within the Publish Plugin

allanrubé

Thanks. This makes me say use it. I do have 1 concern. Say I have a folder in LR for HDR beach shots. In it are 25 raw files and 5 tiffs made from them. Can I just upload the folder and have the tiffs go to the Smug and the raw images stay on my hard drive? I need for this to happen. Can this be done and if so how do I set it up?

leftquark

I'm a little confused on how you're doing things. I always start with a RAW file and then edit it in Photoshop and save it as a TIF. In my lightroom catalog, I now have 2 versions of the same photo: 1) the original raw and 2) the edited tiff. I then do 1 of 2 things ...

1) I'll "group" them together with the TIF file being stacked on top. The RAW file is still in my catalog but the TIF is on top, so if I add it to SmugMug for publishing, only the TIF file gets uploaded.
2) Since the edited TIF is really the only copy I care about, I remove the RAW file from my lightroom catalog (it remains on my HD but no longer in LR. I can always re-import it if I need it). That way I don't have to worry about clogging up Lightroom with additional files that it doesn't need. Lightroom can get very slow as the # of files in the catalog grow.

allanrubé

If you need to reimport a raw you have to start all over with adjustments.That is a lot of extra work if you have to do it often.But that probably doesn't happen a lot.
What I thought of doing was select just the tiffs in a folder and drag those to the correct SmugMug gallery. But what you do or what I will do is extra work I hoped could be avoided. But I guess not.

leftquark

You have to options to avoid that:
1) Convert all your native RAW's to Adobe DNG RAW format. Any adjustments you make are embedded in the photo.
2) Set Lightroom to automatically save all your changes into sidecar XMP files. Any time you make an adjustment the XML file will be generated/saved.

No extra work.

You can select the tif's and drag them to the correct SM gallery, that's fine. My suggestions are just meant to make your workflow/lightroom performance better.