Lightroom publish to Smugmug not working?

derekgio

Hello, I noticed that I'm getting an error when publishing from Lightroom to Smugmug this morning. It was working fine earlier and no settings changed on my end so I'm wondering if there is an issue at the moment?

leftquark

There indeed is an issue with uploading from Lightroom at the moment. Our Engineering team is working as fast as possible to fix it!

leftquark

Uploading through Lightroom has been restored

tomrees

Uploading to Lightroom has most certainly not been restored. I have spent the last two weeks pulling my hair out with this plugin. I have had no help what so ever from smugmug support. I have a number of bugs plaguing my workflow.

1. When I make edits to images, they are not always being automatically marked for re-publish. If I manually mark them for republish they simply don't update on my site when they are re-published and never do again until I delete the image form smugmug and completely re-upload it.

2. Images will completely disappear from galleries and the same fix as above is the only way to get that file back on my site.

3. When images are downloaded it simply downloads a spacer, no image is being downloaded. Clients are complaining of this and now I am finding it an issue even when downloading from within a user login.

Ferguson

@tomrees, those problems just do not follow my experience. I take it you have written to support, if not please do (i.e. do not depend on postings here).

As to (1), there are bugs in Lightroom (not the plugin) that do what you describe, though they are niche cases. Two I know of are (1) editing in photoshop (not lightroom) does not flag Lightroom to re-upload, and (2) metadata changes by changing keyword synonyms does not flag for an upload. A more pervasive issue is that sometimes Smugmug will cache your photo, so it will have uploaded and replaced, but you may not see it for a while. Checking the upload log under account settings is a good way to double check (I do not know of a way to force the cache to clear -- it's the cache at their CDN, not the browser).

I upload and replace photos all the time, including about 5 minutes ago. There are some issues with it (like not replacing some metadata), but by and large it all just works, and has for tens of thousands of images. What you are describing is definitely not normal, and I hope that the Smugmug help folks will solve it for you.

leftquark

@tomrees said:
Uploading to Lightroom has most certainly not been restored. I have spent the last two weeks pulling my hair out with this plugin. I have had no help what so ever from smugmug support. I have a number of bugs plaguing my workflow.

1. When I make edits to images, they are not always being automatically marked for re-publish. If I manually mark them for republish they simply don't update on my site when they are re-published and never do again until I delete the image form smugmug and completely re-upload it.

When you make edits to images and they're not marked for re-publish, are these photos you've edited inside Lightroom, or outside of Lightroom. As @Ferguson mentioned, Lightroom has a bug that is preventing photos edited in Photoshop from being marked for republish. I've reached out to Adobe several times but haven't had much traction getting them to fix it. Additionally, we try to be smart and optimize bandwidth and minimize re-uploading the entire file if it's not needed. Often the first "Mark to republish" will just update the metadata (if we detected captions, keywords, or titles have changed). If you've changed both a (caption, title, or keyword) AND the pixels of the photo, you'll want to do a second "Mark to Republish" and it will send the full file up.

@tomrees said:
2. Images will completely disappear from galleries and the same fix as above is the only way to get that file back on my site.

When you say "images completely disappear from galleries", do you mean within Lightroom, or they completely vanish on SmugMug? Do you have any examples? If you could write in as soon as that happens, we can look at what's going on.

@tomrees said:
3. When images are downloaded it simply downloads a spacer, no image is being downloaded. Clients are complaining of this and now I am finding it an issue even when downloading from within a user login.

Can you explain the steps you're taking that returns a spacer.gif? Are they trying to right-click on the photo and save it to their computer? Or are they clicking the "Download" button below the photo? If they are right-clicking, SmugMug attempts to protect your photos and that's why they're seeing the spacer.gif. If they're getting that when clicking the download button, then something is going wrong and I'd love a few examples so I can dive deeper.

tomrees

@leftquark I'm using Lightroom only, no photoshop involved. I have never previously had to double re-publish to get the image itself to update. Is this bandwidth restriction behaviour a recent addition?

Images were simply displaying a blank spacer on my site but this behaviour seems to have stopped in the last few days. I contacted support many times with examples. They stated that they kept simply 'refreshing' (not sure whether they meant refreshing the browser or something else), and informed me that they were able to get all images to display eventually, however I was never seeing the images despite waiting, refreshing, clearing caches etc. The workflow for getting the images back on the site was: I them from the site (via the organiser), then synced the gallery in LR and add the images back into the gallery and published. Essentially, no amount of re-publishing was working.

With regards to spager.gif being downloaded, it was when I was downloading from my site when logged in, as well as when clients click download from a client gallery. Nothing to do with right-clicking, the spacers were being downloaded by clicking the download button.

Ferguson

@tomrees said:
I have never previously had to double re-publish to get the image itself to update. Is this bandwidth restriction behaviour a recent addition?

I think this has always been there, but the logic for when/how it occurs is sufficiently convoluted (with good intentions) it is hard to see. If you update the image itself in (almost) any fashion, it updates the image on SM on publish. If you update the metadata but not the image, it updates just the metadata on SM. Marking to republish will update the image itself, UNLESS it is already thinking it needs to update the metadata only, in which case it sends only the metadata. The double publish (specifically publish, mark-to-republish, publish) is necessary if you want to ensure the actual image is transmitted in cases where it thinks to send only metadata. Normally the only reason you need to do this is if you want the Original Image (i.e. if someone downloads it) to contain the metadata; this is because when SM updates metadata only without sending the image, it does not change your original image to embed it (it never changes your original image -- which is a good thing).

The rest of your experiences are bizarre. I use this all the time (including two days ago for a new gallery), and with extremely rare exceptions it just works. My suggestion is create a new gallery, put one or two photos in it, turn on debug logging, and publish. If it fails to work, stop and send the logs to SM. Maybe you've already done that, in which case sorry for the redundancy, but usually if there are anomalies they show up in the extensive debug logs.

One other suggestion if it is still really misbehaving - shift to a disk publishing plugin, and publish to a disk folder. See if that works properly. This eliminates all SM code and relies purely on lightroom, see if there is something wacky in your LR setup.

Please don't mistake me - it could be a bug in SM's plugin. But just from the number of people who use it all the time (including me) it's not one easily repeatable, and it's going to take some digging I suspect.

PS. Not affiliated with SM other than as a customer.