Publishing a Collection, then what?

[SuzImages]

I have made virtual copies of my recent upload and put them in a collection I called "Flickr" to publish to Flickr. Now I have 20 photos (thumbnails) instead of 10. I've published the virtual copies to Flickr. Can I now get rid of the virtual copies, and will they disappear from the Collection. Will the collection name still be there for future publishing to Flickr? And, did I really need to make virtual copies to publish them?

 

[clee01l]

I would like to direct your attention to the Publish Services panel. LR ships with a Flickr Publish Services. These publish collections link directly to Flickr sets and your Flickr photostream. Publish Services will manage your image on the social web site and automatically tell you that you need to republish or remove images that have been changed or deleted in LR. Jeffrey Freidl offers a Flick Publish Service plugin that is more robust and generally work better with Flickr's API. I recommend this one over the one that ships with LR.

Now, what to do about virtual copies. The master copy represents one develop path and a virtual copy usually represents another (different crop, B&W vs. Color, etc.) There is no good reason to make a Virtual copy that duplicates the master and does nothing else. If there is no difference between your virtual copy and your master copy, there is no reason for both. If your Virtual copy was assigned to a Publish Service collection and will continue to be managed by that Publish Service Collection and the master copy was not, then you probably want to keep the virtual copy, set it as master and then remove the old master which now shows in LR as a virtual copy.

 

[SuzImages]

The virtual copies were sent to the Publish area for Flickr. They are exact duplicates of the developed original. My question was, if I delete the virtual copies from the Flickr publish area to make way for new photos to be published to Flickr, could I then delete the virtual copies in the library? I'm assuming once I delete the copies from the Flickr publish service, they will still reside on Flickr, correct?

 

[clee01l]

What I think you want to do with the Flickr Publish Service is let it manage all of the photos on Flickr. If you remove photos from the Publish Service and leave them on Flickr, then LR has no way of knowing that images in your catalog are associated with images on Flickr. A Collection, Publish or other, is just a catalog entry that says an image is assigned to a "bucket".
The home where you live is your address. The address of an image file is it path and folder. You might belong to a camera club, a church, and a cycling club. Yet you still live at home at your home address. An image might belong to a Flickr Collection, a Facebook Collection and a Google Picasa collection. It still lives in the folder where you imported it. Image collections are like the clubs that you might be a member of. If you want Lightroom to track your images at places like Flickr, you want to use the Publish Service. There is no reason to break that connection. If you are not using your master copy and are using your virtual copy, you don't need to keep both. You can promote your virtual copy to master by selecting the VC image and on the menu {Photo}{Set Copy as Master}

You might be called Susan at home but the people at church call you Suzi. You still live at the same home address no matter what you are called. Susan and Suzi are like virtual copies. The only time it is important to distinguish Susan from Suzi is when Susan is a brunette and Suzi is a blond (i.e. Virtual Copies having different develop parameters).

 

[kolesoff]

Missing the "like" button… well explained, clee!

 

[SuzImages]

What I think you want to do with the Flickr Publish Service is let it manage all of the photos on Flickr. If you remove photos from the Publish Service and leave them on Flickr, then LR has no way of knowing that images in your catalog are associated with images on Flickr. A Collection, Publish or other, is just a catalog entry that says an image is assigned to a "bucket".
The home where you live is your address. The address of an image file is it path and folder. You might belong to a camera club, a church, and a cycling club. Yet you still live at home at your home address. An image might belong to a Flickr Collection, a Facebook Collection and a Google Picasa collection. It still lives in the folder where you imported it. Image collections are like the clubs that you might be a member of. If you want Lightroom to track your images at places like Flickr, you want to use the Publish Service. There is no reason to break that connection. If you are not using your master copy and are using your virtual copy, you don't need to keep both. You can promote your virtual copy to master by selecting the VC image and on the menu {Photo}{Set Copy as Master}

You might be called Susan at home but the people at church call you Suzi. You still live at the same home address no matter what you are called. Susan and Suzi are like virtual copies. The only time it is important to distinguish Susan from Suzi is when Susan is a brunette and Suzi is a blond (i.e. Virtual Copies having different develop parameters).

I'm really not wanting Lightroom to manage my photos in Flickr. I just want to use the "publish" tool in Lightroom to get them "into" Flickr without having to export them to my hard drive as jpgs first. My original questions was, can I now delete the photos in the Flickr publish area to make way for new ones I want to send to Flickr in the future. By doing it this way, it seems like it saves me a step by not having to export them to my hard drive also.

 

[MarkNicholas]

I'm really not wanting Lightroom to manage my photos in Flickr. I just want to use the "publish" tool in Lightroom to get them "into" Flickr without having to export them to my hard drive as jpgs first. My original questions was, can I now delete the photos in the Flickr publish area to make way for new ones I want to send to Flickr in the future. By doing it this way, it seems like it saves me a step by not having to export them to my hard drive also.

As someone who has recently gone through the process of getting Lightroom to manage my photos on to One Drive, I suggest you to reconsider. Once set-up it is perfect for adding, removing updating photos. If you do it the manual way you will quickly lose track of what you have done making it so much more complicated to manage.

 

[kolesoff]

I'm really not wanting Lightroom to manage my photos in Flickr. I just want to use the "publish" tool in Lightroom to get them "into" Flickr without having to export them to my hard drive as jpgs first. My original questions was, can I now delete the photos in the Flickr publish area to make way for new ones I want to send to Flickr in the future. By doing it this way, it seems like it saves me a step by not having to export them to my hard drive also.

If you insist... Then don't use the built-in plug-in for Flickr publishing, it probably will delete your photos once they are deleted from the collection. Try the more sophisticated plug-in by Jeffrey Friedl. He has an option to leave files on the server when you delete them from collection, for sure.

http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/flickr

 

[clee01l]

I'm really not wanting Lightroom to manage my photos in Flickr. I just want to use the "publish" tool in Lightroom to get them "into" Flickr without having to export them to my hard drive as jpgs first. My original questions was, can I now delete the photos in the Flickr publish area to make way for new ones I want to send to Flickr in the future. By doing it this way, it seems like it saves me a step by not having to export them to my hard drive also.

It is not managing the photos at Flickr It is keeping track of the photos in LR that are at Flickr. If you remove the image from the publish service, LR no longer can tell you if the photo was sent to Flickr. So, you then have to remember which photos are at Flickr and which are not. Remembering which photos you sent to Flickr is part of Data Asset Management(DAM). LR is a DAM tool. There are other DAM software tools and then there is pencil and paper. The least reliable is keeping track in your head.
The part of the publish service that you see in the Publish Panel is a report of a single entry in the LR database. It takes up no appreciable space in your catalog file and none on your HDD. You can remove the entry in your catalog without removing the derivative file at Flickr, but this is really unnecessary if you want to know what files in LR have been sent to Flickr.

The Flickr Publish Service is an export function. It creates a temporary file on your local HDD and then sends that file to Flickr. Once the file is at Flickr, the Publish Service deletes the temporary JPEG. The only thing that gets retained in LR is the Flickr flag for that image gets changed from "No" to "Yes" and a date gets added in the Flickr upload date field. When you remove an image from the Publish Service, you tell the LR catalog to change the Flickr Flag from "Yes" back to "No" and replace the Flickr Upload date with a NULL value.