There seems to have been a recent flurry of plug-in releases, with many being real time-savers, and adding great new functionality to Lightroom. Here’s a few of the latest additions for you to explore:

SLR’s with video have quickly become popular, but until now, Lightroom hasn’t had the facility to import or manage those video files along with your photos. Jeffrey Friedl has done a great job of incorporating that into Lightroom, with his Video-Asset Management plug-in.

You’ll also want to explore his many other plug-ins, including uploads to SmugMug, Flickr, ZenFolio, Picasa Web, and Facebook. He’s also the author of my favourite Metadata Wrangler tool, GPS tools, and a few others besides.

Tim Armes, author of the well-known LR2/Mogrify plug-in has also been busy writing, and has released LR2/Tree Exporter, which can replicate your folder structure when exporting. Very neat! LR/Transporter is another of my firm favourites, as well as LR/Enfuse and LR/Blog.

Sean McCormack of Lightroom Blog has been busy with Twitter plug-ins, with export plug-ins for both TweetPhoto and TwitPic.

Many people have asked recently about an FTP export plug-in – if you download the SDK and unzip it, in the Samples folder you’ll find a ready built FTP upload plug-in. Don’t worry, there’s no programming involved! Install just like any other plug-in, and it’ll appear in the dropdown list at the top of the Export dialog, where it currently says ‘Files on Disk’.

There are more plug-ins appearing every day, so keep an eye on Lightroom Exchange for the latest.

It’s true, the watermarking facilities currently in Lightroom 2 are a bit limited. Ok, very limited! But all is not lost… Lightroom plug-in programmer Timothy Armes came to the rescue with the well known LR2/Mogrify plug-in, and LR/Mogrify before that, adding fully configurable presentation options. LR2/Mogrify is donationware, and the trial allows you to process up to 10 images at a time, so you can see how well it works.

At first glance, the LR2/Mogrify interface can looking a little complicated, but that’s just because it’s so powerful. Let’s cover some of the basics that you’ll use when watermarking or signing your images.

The first thing you’ll need to do is install the LR2/Mogrify plug-in. Tim’s written full instructions on his website, so I won’t cover that here. In short, Windows users need to install both ImageMagick and the plug-in, whereas Mac users only need to install the plug-in.

Once LR2/Mogrify is installed correctly, you’ll see the Post-Process Actions section in the lower left corner of the Lightroom Export dialog. LR2/Mogrify can be used in conjunction with any of the other standard export options, such as resizing, sharpening, etc., and before any other export plug-ins.

First of all, let’s look at borders. Click on Borders in the Post-Process Actions and press Insert to add that panel to the Export Options. To add a border, select the width for each edge and the colour – and repeat for additional borders. You can alternative different widths and colours to create more interesting borders, or you can just keep it simple. The results of layering multiple borders can be seen below.

Now how about signing your image? Going back to the Post-Process Actions section and selecting Text Annotation is one option. You can choose the size, font, and positioning of the Text Annotation. You can even use that same Text Annotation section to add the EXIF data about your image using the ‘Add Token’ button to select the information to show.

One thing to be aware of – if nothing seems to be happening with the Text Annotation, try a different font. Mogrify can be a bit fussy about which fonts it will use! If your preferred font isn’t working, you can always use a graphical watermark instead – we’ll come back to those in a moment.

And here’s the result of those combined settings:

But what if you need to overlay a heavier watermark, or you want to add a graphical logo instead? Again, it’s simply a case of selecting the correct Post-Process Action – in this case the ‘Graphical Watermark’ option. You’ll need to have created your watermark image in a pixel editor such as Photoshop, and if you want to include transparency, you’re best off using PSD rather than PNG files, as there are some controls unavailable for PNG resizing.

These are just a few of the options available – have a play, and see what you can come up with. To get you started, I’ve uploaded the Export Templates and watermarks that I’ve used – you’re welcome to download them from here: http://www.lightroomqueen.com/downloads/mogrify-downloads.zip If you unzip the downloaded folder, you’ll find 2 folders inside – ‘Export Templates Mogrify’ and ‘Watermarks’. To install the Export Templates, put the ‘Export Templates Mogrify’ folder inside the Export Presets folder – you can check the location on your system by going to Lightroom’s Preferences dialog, choosing the Presets tab, and pressing the ‘Show Lightroom Presets Folder’ button. Obviously the presets are looking for watermarks and fonts on my system, so you’ll need to update the locations to point to the files on your own computer system.

If you have any problems, drop by www.lightroomforums.net and we’ll talk you through it!

Tim Armes has just released an update to his LR/Transporter Lightroom plug-in. This is hot off the press – it’s not even documented yet.

The new feature is for Lightroom 2 only. Many online ordering cart systems will provide a text file with a list of the files that the customer has chosen. Particularly for large orders like weddings, it can take a long time to manually select all of the images in Lightroom ready for ordering – but no more! LR/Transporter will now read that text file and mark the files for you.

To use:
Download LR/Transporter http://www.photographers-toolbox.com/products/lrtransporter.php A trial version is available to see how it works, and it’s well worth a donation to unlock it.

Installation instructions are here: http://www.timothyarmes.com/lrtransporter.php?sec=install

As with any plug-in that modifies the catalog, make sure your backups are current.

Open your catalog and select the files from the wedding in question.

Go to Library menu > Plug-in Extras > Mark Images using LR/Transporter

In the dialog, navigate to the text file containing the list. It just needs to be a basic text file, with 1 filename per line, and nothing else. (It’s also possible to use CSV files using the Import Metadata using LR/Transporter).

Choose the options you want – the examples below show which filenames will be matched as you change the dropdown lists.

Press OK, and the matching images will be marked.

To find and filter those images, select the Metadata filters from the Filter Bar and select Marked by LR/Transporter in one column. Your options will be Yes or No – yes being the ones that matched the text list.