• Welcome to the Lightroom Queen Forums! We're a friendly bunch, so please feel free to register and join in the conversation. If you're not familiar with forums, you'll find step by step instructions on how to post your first thread under Help at the bottom of the page. You're also welcome to download our free Lightroom Quick Start eBooks and explore our other FAQ resources.
  • Stop struggling with Lightroom! There's no need to spend hours hunting for the answers to your Lightroom Classic questions. All the information you need is in Adobe Lightroom Classic - The Missing FAQ!

    To help you get started, there's a series of easy tutorials to guide you through a simple workflow. As you grow in confidence, the book switches to a conversational FAQ format, so you can quickly find answers to advanced questions. And better still, the eBooks are updated for every release, so it's always up to date.

Plugin development

Status
Not open for further replies.
Jan Roelof

Jan Roelof

Dog lover
Premium Classic Member
Premium Cloud Member
Joined
Oct 7, 2019
Messages
78
Location
The Netherlands
Lightroom Experience
Advanced
Lightroom Version
Classic
Lightroom Version Number
Lightroom Classic: Version 10.4
Operating System
  1. Windows 10
I'm trying to get into Lightroom plugin development. I've downloaded the SDK, found the programmer's manual and API reference, looked at the sample plugins and succeeded in writing a working plugin that loops over selected photos and reads and writes things like keywords. However, as soon as I want to do more, like displaying a progress bar for a lengthy operation, the manual and sample plugins prove insufficient and I'm down to frustrating trial-and-error gambling coding. I have found a few tutorials, but they cover only getting-started stuff.

Is there a go-to place for Lightroom plugin development? A forum somewhere that I can't find? Any books or tutorials that go past the basics? I have looked and not found.

I'm hoping that you gurus have some suggestions that you can are willing to share with me.
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
Unfortunately, Adobe merged their SDK forum with their main LR Classic forum, making it harder for the very few of us remaining LR developers to help each other. It seems I'm pretty much the only one in the last couple of years who responds to SDK forum posts. If you post on their main LR Classic forum, be sure to apply the canned tag "SDK" so I'll be sure to see the post immediately.

One immediate tip: Be sure to use a debugger rather than print statements. LR silently hides many Lua execution errors, so using print statements can be an extreme exercise in frustration. Check out the Zerobrane IDE or my Debugging Toolkit. Zerobrane is a full-fledged IDE, but its debugger doesn't know about LR's specialized task architecture, which can confuse you if you're not careful. My Toolkit is lighter-weight and not integrated with an IDE, but it understands LR's task architecture and it provides a more useful pretty printer that can print nested and circular data structures.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Thanks for your response!

I'll have a look at that forum and post plugin-development-related questions there.
Also I'm going to try out your debugging toolkit and will let you know how I fare ;)
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top