Can't Drag and Drop to Smugmug from Lightroom

sudermatt

We recently purchased Adobe Lightroom 1.0 for my wife and her fledgling photography biz.

Working on WinXP -1 gig ram - plenty fast processor...

She does her color edits and stuff...filters out the pix she doesn't want...until she gets the set of pictures she wants to present to her customer.

We select all, and try to drag to smugmug gallery.

Smuggy won't work
IE specific tool won't work

we can't even drag one image from the library to smugmug. The only way we can do it is to Export the select images to a seperate folder then drag the folder contents (file explorer) to smugmug.

Anybody else having these problems?


Other apps seem to work. Why doesn't Lightroom?

Thanks,
Matt

Andy

So, a couple things:

1) the files must be .jpg extension

2) the files must be < 8mb (std and power accounts) and <16mb (pro accounts)

3) the files must be < 48megapixels

Are all these conditions met?

sudermatt

Yes
first of all...WOW...and thanks for the quick reply...you'll make my life much happier at home ;-)

to your questions....yes.

well....now that I think about it.

she's working in the library...making edits (color adjustment, red eye, etc.), then she's trying to drag from the library.

could it be that the library is the png file? that's why smuggy doesn't like it?

jfriend

sudermatt wrote:

We recently purchased Adobe Lightroom 1.0 for my wife and her fledgling photography biz.

Working on WinXP -1 gig ram - plenty fast processor...

She does her color edits and stuff...filters out the pix she doesn't want...until she gets the set of pictures she wants to present to her customer.

We select all, and try to drag to smugmug gallery.

Smuggy won't work
IE specific tool won't work

we can't even drag one image from the library to smugmug. The only way we can do it is to Export the select images to a seperate folder then drag the folder contents (file explorer) to smugmug.

Anybody else having these problems?


Other apps seem to work. Why doesn't Lightroom?

Thanks,
Matt

I think the issue is that the Smugmug uploader is expecting a drag/drop "type" as a filename that ends in JPG or JPEG. That's what you usually drop onto it and what it understands. That's what Windows Explorer does when you drop a file onto it after exporting from Lightroom.

But, before you export, Lightroom does not contain an actual file that looks like the image you adjusted in Lightroom. There is no such file until you export. Instead, Lightroom has the original file on disk to which it dynamically applies a bunch of settings from it's database in order to display it to you. This is all the long way of saying that Lightroom doesn't support drag/drop of filenames and that's what the Smugmug uploader wants.

It might be possible for Lightroom to be coded to do some sort of auto-export to a temporary folder and then pass those filenames to the Smugmug uploader and then somehow know when it was OK to clean up those temporary files, but it doesn't know how to do that today so drag/drop isn't supported.

It might also be that Lightroom supports some other drag/drop object type (besides just a filename) and the Smugmug uploader could eventually learn how to understand that other object type, but that would take some documentation from Adobe before that could be done).

A better solution (which will hopefully come about sometime in the next year) would be direct upload support to Smugmug from within Lightroom where a Lightroom plug-in could be written that would convert the Lightroom settings to an actual image and then upload that to the gallery of your choice in your Smugmug gallery. I'm not sure that any Lightroom APIs have been released yet to enable this type of plug-in development.

sudermatt

the other way around this....

is for smugmug to give us ftp access to our libraries (somehow). at least for professional accounts... lightroom has an ftp upload ... maybe that would work.

We're now off topic. But, why can't we ftp our files?

renstar

sudermatt wrote:

We're now off topic. But, why can't we ftp our files?

If i had to guess its because (iirc) FTP is totally insecure because usernames and passwords must be transmitted in plaintext. Thats why such things as sftp (and webdav) exist. I do believe that smugmug will let you use webdav to get to your account, or at least you used to be able to.

-r

jogle

Lightroom has an exported actions folder. so you can export the photos you want and it will automatically run them through that app. I tried putting a link to the standalone OSX uploader in there but it doesn't work, it only accepts
drag+drop (more about that here: http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=530171&postcount=44)

So I've started writing an automator action that will upload to smugmug, eventually I plan to have a bunch of automator actions that will work with smugmug.

apiercy

I believe you can upload from lightroom using StarExplorer. Have you seen this thread?

Oakley

apiercy wrote:

I believe you can upload from lightroom using StarExplorer. Have you seen this thread?

The StarExplorer program looks great. But does it work with a Mac? I don't think it does.

What's the Mac equivelent???

Cheers,

apiercy

Yeah I don't think it works with a Mac either. I'm not sure if there is a Mac equivalent, perhaps someone else knows?

Nikolai

Oakley wrote:

The StarExplorer program looks great. But does it work with a Mac? I don't think it does.
Cheers,

Why, thank you:-)
S*E does run on Mac - just not natively. Since it's a solid Win32 application, it would run on any emulator, like Parallels. Luckily it's a pure API-based app, it does not require any .NET stuff. Just a couple of DLLs for SSL support, and I'm working on eliminating even that... (DLLs that is, not SSL support:-)

HTH