Capture One Plugin for Publishing Directly to SmugMug

jerrac

This has been asked about before, and I know both SmugMug and Capture One are aware of the request. Judging from the age of some of the posts, they have been aware of it for years. Which is fairly disappointing. :(

Topics in this forum:

* https://dgrin.com/discussion/266035/capture-one-to-smugmug-plugin
* https://dgrin.com/discussion/comment/2089126
* https://dgrin.com/discussion/262908/question-regarding-upload-tools

One comment in the above topics mentioned that CO did not have a way for plugins to publish photos. If I'm reading the docs correctly, that is no longer true. (https://support.captureone.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002659738-Plugins-for-publishing-images)

Could a SmugMug employee let us know if there are still issues with how CO's plugin system works that prevent creating a SmugMug plugin?

In the meantime, maybe us users could tweet @captureonepro and @SmugMug about it? Maybe that would be a more visible way to show how many users actually need it. (I tweeted them a couple days ago, and received a nice polite response from both.)

leftquark

Since I’m no longer at SmugMug I haven’t followed up if this is still true but here’s some details from several months ago:

Typically a plug-in architecture using a standard development language and standard API’s so that you can code your plugin once and it works on all versions of the software. You’d need one developer and they’d need to only know how to write it using one programming language. Essentially: write it once and it works for Mac and windows version of CO.

However CO built their plugin to require separate versions for Mac and windows. You need a Mac developer for the Mac version and a windows developer for windows and they are totally separate. Twice the work. Twice the number of engineers. And twice the QA. CO Isn’t a big enough app to justify 2 full time engineers so what most likely would happen is you’d sneak in some time when an engineer can work on it — which means the Mac and windows versions of a CO plugin would have different features. That’s not a great user experience for your customers.

If CO would build the plugin architecture differently, such that one developer could write it for both Mac and windows, that would be easier for a small company like SmugMug to justify building a plugin.

Lastly, the sad truth is that CO isn’t very popular. It’s loved by those that use it (I’m one of them!) but it’s an extremely extremely small population of photo editors, making it even harder to justify writing and maintaining 2 versions of a plugin

jerrac

Thanks for the info. Would the plugin really require that much work, though? It looked to me like they haven't changed the sdk since C1 v12. So I'd think as long as SmugMug's api's stayed stable, it'd largely be a build once, and occasionally update thing...

I actually downloaded the plugin sdk for windows to see what it was like. Look like all .Net and C# code. Sadly I've not picked up those tools. Otherwise I'd give it a go myself. At least for Windows. I'm not very fond of Macs are....

Any .Net devs out there interested in taking this on? Make it open source (assuming C1's license lets you) and I bet we could get several people on it. I know enough about developing in general I could help test, and might even pick up enough C# to help develop along the way. (I'm a Linux SysAdmin, so scripting is more my level, but I've tinkered with compiled stuff a bit.)

havanese

Capture One is eager to bring plugin to C1 and I think Smugmug would get good support from the (as On1 software did) to get this done. This was brought up in a recent Smugmug YouTube Tips and Trick episode and Alastair Jolly mentioned he would love to see this as well...so they are aware of it.