How to change Export location of Publish Service or migrate Published Folder?

[xax]

HI all,

I've moved my Lightroom catalogue from PC to Mac recently. Everything works great but the Publish Services.
My configuration of Hard Drive publish services is ok. I see all photos inside every Published folder.

The problem is that all my Published Services were set to publish to G:\Lightroom_Export and this folder is not available any more of course.

Already Published Service is protected against change of Export Location but without this change I'm not able to use my already defined Published Folders.
I have tens of Published Folders defined there (with hierarchy using Publish Folder sets) and I'm not able to find the way how to move them to new Publish Service with new Export Location defined.

Is there anybody with idea how to solve it?
Either how to change Export Location of existing Publish Service or how to migrate Publish Folder setting from one Publish Service to another.

thank you in advance
Michal

 

[clee01l]

Michal, Welcome to the forum. I assume you also moved the HP Publish Service folder named "Lightroom_Export" along with everything else. Unfortunately the Publish Service Folder is set and AFAIK, there is no way without manually manipulating the Database outside to change this.

It is simple enough to create a new HD Publish Service that will point to this folder location on the Mac. Once you have this working you can Drag images from the old static Publish Service Collection to the new static Publish Service Collection and then delete the old HD Publish Service. Your images may go into a "To Be Published" state but no harm in publishing these again to the HD. Publish Service Folder.

 

[xax]

Thank you for such a quick response Lee but this is something I know about. I tried it. I did this with my first 20 folders but then I've recognized another 60-80 folders and it is really annoying to do this one by one. It will take me hours and finally it can happen again it he future
So I'd like to find some mechanism that will be reusable in the future eventually because I'd like to do this also with rest of my photos and then there can be hundreds of Published Folders. So it scares me that these settings are not "repairable".

 

[clee01l]

Michal, Publish Services are new in v3 of LR and I guess it should be expected that there are going to be a few rough edges. You've found one of them. There is a lot of overlap between HD Publish Services and Regular File Exports. Hopefully in the next release there will be some resolution here and in other areas that are not yet fully thought out. There is a link at the top of this page that you can use to submit the 'bug' report. Yours is a very important shortcoming to be pointed out to Adobe.

I am seriously considering getting a MBP to supplement my Win7-64 Desktop. I will be following you down this same road if and when I get a MBP. I have completely replaced the Export Presets that I used in LR2 with Publish Services to the HD. So my task is going to be like yours when that happens.

I think I can solve your problem by editing the LR catalog database outside of LR. If you want to be a guinea pig, I'll give it a try. As long as I work with a copy of your catalog and as long as you have a current catalog back up you won't lose any thing except a little time.

 

[xax]

oki, let's give it a try.
I don't think there is a real chance to get it work but amount of work waiting for me (to make it standard way) push me to try it at least
So what's the idea?

 

[clee01l]

What I'm going to propose is that you post a copy of your catalog file to a location on the web where I can D/L. I will use a SQLite database manager to edit the HD publish Service target entry path from the Windows location ("C:\Parentfolder\childfolder\etc") to the equivalent path on the Mac ("/{mountpoint}/Parentfolder/childfolder/etc") From what I can tell,the same update that is missing from LR. I'll return the edited catalog to you via the same web location. If you want, you can post your *.lrcat file here (http://www.filedropper.com/) and share the generated link with me. If you have another web link, I'm happy to use that instead.

In addition to the *.lrcat file, I'll need from you an example of the old paths ("C:\Parentfolder\childfolder\etc") and the equivalent path on the Mac ("/{mountpoint}/Parentfolder/childfolder/etc") Note these are the folders that you copied from the old PC to the Mac, not any of the ones you have manually reworked in LR on the Mac.

If you want to continue this conversation with PMs so that you do not broadcast access to your posted copy of your *.lrcat file that's fine.

BTW, If this works It will help both of us and you can buy me a Pivo, My preference is a Radegast Premium.

 

[clee01l]

Follow-up: (for reference when this issue comes up again)

We can now close this thread. There is no update mechanism for Export Folder Location in a Hard Drive Publish Service. Once coded and added to the catalog LR has no mechanism to change the location if the catalog is moved from one computer to another or from one HD to another. The only option inside of LR is to delete the old HD Publish Service and and recreate it with a new Export Folder Location AND republish. This can get tedious if (now that we have used Publish Services for a while) there may be many Published Folders and Published Smart Folders. At the moment, I have 8 Hard Drive Publish Services created and each contains no fewer that 5 Publish Smart Folders. One has 14 Publish Folders, Publish Smart Folders and Publish Folder Sets. This same problem will exist if the Drive Letters from one windows configuration do not match the other or is a user wants to move existing Export Folder Location on a local drive to a remote drive (for space considerations)

As long as the user mimics the Hard Drive Publish Service folder paths on both machines, you can simply update the path in the catalog table to the new path (i.e. ("C:\Parentfolder\childfolder\etc") to the equivalent path on the Mac ("/{mountpoint}/Parentfolder/childfolder/etc").

The particular issue reported in this thread was complicated because the OP attempted to manually recreate one or two of the broken Export Folder Location by replacing the old Hard Drive Publish Service with a new one. This caused new record keys and new parents to be created the needed to be incorporated into the old scheme. While this was not an unresolvable issue, it did require several false starts trying to devolve the proper parent child relationships with folders and folder sets and maintain referential integrity. If this issue is to be resolved It should be resolved at migration time and before any structural changes are made to the Hard Drive Publish Services.

I have submitted the following Problem/Issue at Photoshop.com

Hard Drive Publish Services do not transfer from Windows to OSX or from Windows to Windows if Different Drive letters are in use on Different windows installs.

Transfering a catalog from Windows to OSX fails to convert HD Publish services to a proper target destination and provides no mechanism to correct the Export folder location. Moving a catalog from windows to OSX will permit the user to Find Missing folders for master images listed in the Folder panel. No similar mechanism exists for HD publish Services. A simple fix would be to permit the user to correct the column remoteCollectionId FROM "AgLibraryPublishedCollection" from a Drive letter designated folder path to an equivalent OSX folder path. This is not possible inside Lightroom.