Migrating Plugins

[beach9000]

I've installing lightroom 2.2 on an fresh windows xp system and have managed to migrate my preferences from a vista machine. But with those preferences is my collection of plugins and for some reason the new installation of lightroom is not recognizing them (i.e. the plugin manager is empty).

I've tried manually installing them but the 'Browse for Folder' dialog launched from Plug-in Manager's Add button doesn't reveal the 'C:\documents and settings\username\application data\' folder. It doesn't show me any hidden folders at all.

Could anybody help me?

Thanks!

 

[Brad Snyder]

beach, Welcome to the forums.

Forgive the obvious question, have you enabled showing 'hidden' files/folders in XP?

Control Panel > Folder Options > View tab, about 1' items down, enable the radio button on 'Show hidden files/folders' option.

If so, and they still don't show, I guess we'll need to know more about the setup.

This probably isn't the cause, but 2.2 is not known for rock-solid stability, you may want to consider LR2.3RC.

 

[beach9000]

Thanks for the reply Brad,

Yes I do have the hidden files visible in windows explorer; further more under lightroom's preferences, in the File Handling tab, I can launch a "browse for folder" dialog for the Camera Raw cache and it's comfortably pointed at another hidden folder, C:\Documents and Settings\my name\Local Settings\Application Data\Adobe\CameraRaw\Cache. Under that dialog I can see and navigate through the rest of my hidden folders. For some reason this seems to be only specific to the plug-in manager.

This worked on the vista machine; are there other users on xp experiencing this or am I the only one?

And could I edit this setting by hand?

Thanks for the help!

 

[Brad Snyder]

beach, no, I haven't seen this problem mentioned previously, on any OS.

Have you tried disabling the 'migrated' preferences file? I presume you know where to find it, since you speak knowledgably about all the other file locations. Simply hanging a temporary .bak suffix on it and restarting Lr, will do for a test. Goofiness in that file has been known to cause a lot of 'eccentric' behavior.

And again, 2.3 is seriously worth a trial, and the price is right.

 

[Brad Snyder]

beach, another thought occurs: those plugin folder/modules can live anywhere. Try putting them in My Documents, or some innocuous available navigable location. The ..../Modules folder was deprecated with the 2.' release and later.

 

[beach9000]

Have you tried disabling the 'migrated' preferences file? I presume you know where to find it, since you speak knowledgably about all the other file locations. Simply hanging a temporary .bak suffix on it and restarting Lr, will do for a test. Goofiness in that file has been known to cause a lot of 'eccentric' behavior.

I guess by asking if I could edit the file by hand I was also asking where this file (or registry setting) was that contained the plug-ing locations. When I first migrated all I did was copy the application data folder from one machine to another.

beach, another thought occurs: those plugin folder/modules can live anywhere. Try putting them in My Documents, or some innocuous available navigable location. The ..../Modules folder was deprecated with the 2.' release and later.

I had it all set-up properly for 2.' on the other computer so I don't think that is the problem and I'd rather keep everything in one location since I'll be migrating again to a new computer and really like the concept of worrying about just one folder of preferences.

But after all this I managed to solve my problem by simply making the folder un-hidden (via the right-click properties), doing my business, and then switching it back to hidden afterwards. Funny enough though, after I re-hid the folder it now magically works and appears back in the browse to folder dialog.

So problem solve...for now.
Thanks!