Bug with hard disk publishing service?

[MarathonMax]

I recently posted a thread about HD pub services. Got the answer. Tks. I posted the solution on my blog here.

I also viewed this video on Adobe TV that mentions a few "gotchas" to be aware of when exporting for iPad viewing.

Two things that need to be done:
1) Rename files (more on a possible bug here and some limitations below)
2) Minimize embedded metadata (this is the IMPORTANT part in order to have your pics appear in the order you want)

Now about renaming files.

First a limitation:

I have set up one and only one pub service for all my iPad albums. You can (and must) ask LR to rename files in sequence, however you can only select one custom name for all albums being published by this service. This forces me to select a generic file name (I have chosen "Photo").

I would like to be able to select a variable name and I would probably choose the Collection's name. Or am I getting this wrong???

Now a bug:

Having watched the video after I initially created my service and published some albums, I needed to republish my albums if I wanted to have the pictures appear in the order I wanted.

HOWEVER, marking a smart collection for republishing does NOT use the newly modified publishing parameters - it still uses the previous ones.

I had to delete and recreate the smart collection (actually, I export and re-import its settings). If this is not a bug, then it is inappropriate behavior!

Thoughts?

 

[clee01l]

A couple of things that I see are important to note here. Renaming and adding a sequence to the file name and removing the creation date via the "minimize embedded metadata" option is only necessary IF you desire a special sequence that differs from the limitations imposed by iTunes/iPad.
If you have published (exported) images to a folder with one naming scheme and then change the publishing service to another naming scheme, you (or LR) needs to remove the earlier published image file (with the old name) before replacing it with the new named file. When LR republishes to a folder, it first creates a temporary folder inside the folder to hold the new published image files. These new published image files have the correct name. It then replaces the contents of the publish folder with the contents of the temp folder. One would expect the publish folder image to get the characteristics of the image in the temp folder. It does get the data contents ( I tested this with a B&W conversion). It does not change the file name. So, yes, you have found a bug. Please report it.
Until it is fixed, you will need to use the work-around anytime you want to change your naming sequence AFTER you have created the Publish Service. The workaround that i used was to change one criteria in my smart collection so that ALL images are moved to the "Deleted Photos to Remove" queue, Publish and then once all images have been removed from the Publish folder, change my smart collection criteria back and Publish again.

A suggestion for File Naming: You can embed metadata in the file name so you might want to choose one of the fields like "Title" or "Instructions" and create a naming scheme like {Title}{Sequence # (001)} If you place the value that you assigned for collection name in one of the available metadata fields, you will get the unique name that you want instead of "Photo001.jpg"