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Using Publishing Services with Flickr

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HBarrison

New Member
Joined
Oct 12, 2021
Messages
9
Lightroom Experience
Beginner
Lightroom Version
Classic
Lightroom Version Number
LrC 11.4.1
Operating System
  1. Windows 11
Has anyone on the Forum uploaded large amounts of images from LrC to Flickr? Any reviews on how well it works? Previous to using LrC all of my uploads have been via Flickrs' Photoshop Elements Desktop App.
 
Slightly off topic:

I'm in the process of investigating photography websites and I plan to poke at Flickr. Jeffrey Friedl has a "Publish" plugin for Flickr that I plan to use:
http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/flickr I just now used his plugin for SmugMug and it seems fine. The pages about the plug in and how to use it reveal some short comings with LR.
 
I have about 12,000 photos published on Flickr in about 60 collections, published over the past 12 years. Most are scanned slides.

I long ago moved to using Zenfolio as my primary publishing service. In its later years of being owned by Yahoo, Flickr tried to become a sorta-kinda Instagram, and in the process they "simplified" their service and removed many useful features, some of which they gradually added back. During the Yahoo years, it's reliability was poor, but I have the impression that it's significantly improved since being bought by Smugmug in 2018. Flickr has gone back to its roots of being a place to share large, curated collections of photos, rather than as a social-media platform where users share pictures of the moment and then forget about them.

I still keep those photos on Flickr because there are many communities that still access the vintage slides (a thousand slides from the Vietnam war, Tokyo in the 1960s, extended family, etc.).

I prefer Zenfolio for a silly reason: I find it easier for my viewers to see the photos, with the keywords visible without scrolling.

For historical reasons, I use Adobe's plugin for Flickr and Friedl's plugin for Zenfolio (and appreciate the infinitely better support and features he provides).

Flickr has a longstanding performance bug with downloading comments back into LR that particularly affects collections with hundreds of photos or more. (Friedl's plugin has a hack that lets you avoid downloading comments.)

One thing to be aware of: LR has a longstanding bug where releases of new major versions can mark all of your photos as "changed", needing to be republished. This happens when Adobe adds new develop features (e.g. masking) or change the catalog internally. The visual appearance of your photos hasn't changed and their metadata hasn't changed, but LR insists on thinking they've changed and need to be republished. With the upgrade to version 11, the Mark As Up-To-Date command often/usually doesn't work, so you must republish all the photos to get rid of the "Modified" status.

Adobe has deliberately decided not to fix this bug.
 
Adobe has deliberately decided not to fix this bug.
Ah, what is the best, non-profane way to describe this decision? Is there any way that we as users,can put pressure on Adobe to address this sore spot?
 
Slightly off topic:

I'm in the process of investigating photography websites and I plan to poke at Flickr. Jeffrey Friedl has a "Publish" plugin for Flickr that I plan to use:
http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/flickr I just now used his plugin for SmugMug and it seems fine. The pages about the plug in and how to use it reveal some short comings with LR.

Slightly off topic:

I'm in the process of investigating photography websites and I plan to poke at Flickr. Jeffrey Friedl has a "Publish" plugin for Flickr that I plan to use:
http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/flickr I just now used his plugin for SmugMug and it seems fine. The pages about the plug in and how to use it reveal some short comings with LR.
 
pedz,
Great to hear - I look forward to your analysis. I have been a Flickr Pro member using PSE since 2007 and I find Flickr's Windows Uploadr accurate but a bit "cluncky" at times. I still use PSE for Organizing my images; its file based system is very easy to master and I use a single Folder for both PSE and LrC. I subscribed to Adobe LrC to get more advance editing tools.
 
Is there any way that we as users,can put pressure on Adobe to address this sore spot?
Here is the community thread on the latest incarnation of the problem:
https://community.adobe.com/t5/ligh...otos-to-re-publish-for-no-reason/m-p/12690169

And a thread from the old feedback forum starting in 2017:
https://community.adobe.com/t5/ligh...blishing-and-smart-collections/idi-p/12250355

In that incarnation, Adobe employee Rick Spaulding said, "Due to it’s obscure nature and that a solid workaround has been discovered we will not be expending any time or resources to fix it. It will only affect those users who are planning to migrate from a version <6.6 to a version >= 6.6 so that number is extremely small. "

I disagreed with his assessment that the number affected was "extremely small", since it affected anyone using a publishing service migrating to a newer version of LR. But at that point, there wasn't any point in arguing with a decision from the engineering manager.

In the latest incarnation, employee Rikk Flohr asked for a simple recipe to reproduce the problem. Not an unreasonable request in general, since without being able to reproduce a problem, the engineering team would have a hard time fixing it. I commented that such a recipe might not be practical, since you had to create a large catalog with an older version of LR, make edits probably involving older process versions, publish, then migrate to a newer version. I suggested that if the engineering team wanted to solve the problem, it would be much more practical to get copies of some of our catalogs, which would allow them to reproduce the problem easily. No action was taken, suggesting that it wasn't of sufficient priority to Adobe to put in that effort.
 
Here is the community thread on the latest incarnation of the problem:
https://community.adobe.com/t5/ligh...otos-to-re-publish-for-no-reason/m-p/12690169

And a thread from the old feedback forum starting in 2017:
https://community.adobe.com/t5/ligh...blishing-and-smart-collections/idi-p/12250355

In that incarnation, Adobe employee Rick Spaulding said, "Due to it’s obscure nature and that a solid workaround has been discovered we will not be expending any time or resources to fix it. It will only affect those users who are planning to migrate from a version <6.6 to a version >= 6.6 so that number is extremely small. "

I disagreed with his assessment that the number affected was "extremely small", since it affected anyone using a publishing service migrating to a newer version of LR. But at that point, there wasn't any point in arguing with a decision from the engineering manager.

In the latest incarnation, employee Rikk Flohr asked for a simple recipe to reproduce the problem. Not an unreasonable request in general, since without being able to reproduce a problem, the engineering team would have a hard time fixing it. I commented that such a recipe might not be practical, since you had to create a large catalog with an older version of LR, make edits probably involving older process versions, publish, then migrate to a newer version. I suggested that if the engineering team wanted to solve the problem, it would be much more practical to get copies of some of our catalogs, which would allow them to reproduce the problem easily. No action was taken, suggesting that it wasn't of sufficient priority to Adobe to put in that effort.
John,

After reading the threads on the Adobe forum, I got annoyed enough :mad:to post a reply to one of your posts.

I may be a bit picky here, but the decision-maker here should not be the engineering manager. It should be the product manager. Not to be "divisive," but I have often obsered that an engineering manager will make a decision based on how much effort is required to resolve an issue, not on the customer impact or benefit. If I am being too picky here, then "mea culpa."
 
I have used Flickr weekly if not daily for well over a decade and love it. I have 25,000 full-size jpegs posted there and have had over 11 million views on my albums.

I do it just for fun and give my work away. I like Flickr because it is a photographer's website and the best place to post your work in bulk and beyond just a small jpeg. You can post huge jpegs at high quality, which is what I do. Then the users/viewers can download any size they want from that jpeg you post.
I purposefully do not have an Instagram or Facebook Account because I don't like social media, but if I depended on photography to make money, I of course would have both of those accounts because that is where photographers market their work. Flickr is OK for that too and most pros I know have Flickr accounts, but Flickr is more for sharing and viewing great jpegs than it is for marketing your work.

Flickr is a great place to post your work while avoiding the nonsense of social media postings and the tons of other stuff that populates Facebook and Instagram.

Most pros don't post full-size jpegs to Flickr like I do because they don't want their work downloaded full-size for free. I post full-size jpegs and don't care if people take them for their use. I want them to. I have had hundreds, maybe thousands, of images published this way in websites, magazines, pamphlets, brochures and even published books. I shoot churches and then they often contact me and ask for the images. Even the Vatican did a couple of times. I have had stock services try to buy my entire Flickr catalog for good money but I have refused those offers.

So, Flickr is fantastic for that and a lot of fun. I have no affiliation with them. I pay them the hundred bucks a year or so to publish my images there and get their "pro" version.

Here is how you do it from LR, or at least how I do. After a trip or a shoot, I flag the images I want to export in the LR Library module. I hit export and size them at full size and 90 percent quality. I export them to a named temporary folder on my desktop. That folder is on my internal boot M.2 PCIe 4 SSD. I watch LR do that export (time varies depending on the jpeg size, number and the speed of your system) and then the jpegs are all in that folder on my desktop. I then go into Flickr and click the upload button. I point it at the folder on my desktop (or wherever you export from LR to). I then highlight all the jpegs. It asks if you want to create an album and I say yes and name the album. Then I click on upload and the files all fly up to the Flickr cloud and are in my account in the album I made.

The great thing is that when you add a Title or Caption on the image in the LR Library Module (which I always do for every image in post-processing in LR) that Title carries over to the Flickr upload and when people view your image in Flickr, that title shows up. If you want, go into my Flickr page and look at the albums and see how the viewing and downloading work. Check out the Albums vs the Photostream. The photostream is a running total by day of all your uploads. The album is a group that you select for presentation. In my case there is an album for every trip I have taken in the last ten years.

A few notes: The average jpeg size of my Fuji GFX exported full-size 90 percent quality jpegs is about 45-50 MB. Sometimes 60 or 70 MB. The Leica Q2 50 MP exports are about 25 to 35 MB. They all upload flawlessly to Flickr every time from anywhere in the world. I have never had the slightest problem with an upload and I have uploaded 25,000 files. One just requires a somewhat decent internet connection. I have uploaded these jpegs to Flickr from all over the world using some pretty slow internet. Sometimes I have to wait to get to better connectivity to upload a large batch of big jpegs.

I then delete the jpeg folder from my laptop or PC desktop after the upload to Flickr. With LR, in my opinion there is never a need to keep a jpeg so I always delete them. Then if you ever need a jpeg for whatever purpose, just export it from LR when you need it at the size and quality you require for whatever purpose you need a jpeg for. Why keep a jpeg if you have the raw? No need.
 
I may be a bit picky here, but the decision-maker here should not be the engineering manager.
I may have jumped to a conclusion here whether it was the engineering manager or the product manager on this particular decision. Often you can reasonably infer the decision maker based on comments in the threads, but re-reading the the threads here the evidence is pretty thin either way.
 
I'm having a reading comprehension problem on this thread.
Is someone wanting to export jpegs from LR straight to Flickr in some manner? What? Can you even do that? No way. Why in the World would anyone want to do that even if you could. You simply export jpegs from LR to a folder like you would for using jpegs for any purpose then upload the images you select from the folder to Flickr like anyone normally would.
I don't get it. You Gurus are amazing. First you gotta know all this LR stuff in infinite detail. Then you gotta figure out what the question is. LOL....
 
I don't get it.
Have a read of the Publish Services section of your Missing FAQ book (page 417?) to get an understanding of the benefits of using any Publish Service versus a "standard" export.
 
Jim - OK will do. I bought Victoria's book and promised to read it all, but I haven't yet. Maybe I can learn a new trick, but I doubt if I would ever export directly to Flickr. I like to skim through my exported jpegs on a viewer before uploading them to Flickr. Sometimes I see something and go back and re-edit the raw in LR and re-export that shot. We all have our crazy workflow habits. But I'm willing to learn new tricks.
 
Sometimes I see something and go back and re-edit the raw in LR and re-export that shot.
Which is the main benefit of a Publish Service. Read the book!
 
Hey Jim.... Come on Man.... I'm working on it. It's like a bazillion pages. It's like reading the Old Testament (which by the way is not a bad idea at our age)....
I've been using LR for many years almost every day, so at least I know what I'm reading in that LR Bible. But I have to skim.... I know a lot of it....

Anyway, 98% of the posters on here (I've been paying attention for a month now) have not read any of The Queen's LR Bible. If they all had it and read it and knew where to look, we wouldn't need Gurus. But we do need Gurus....
But listen Jim ... don't quit on me.
I'm going to need you in October (maybe November) when I build again. Because I am going to screw up that catalog link to my new data disk.
For sure. 100% guaranteed. It is the most difficult and thing about LR. But unavoidable. The relational database has to link to the new disk and it has to hit on every folder - every image. And I have a huge cat with more images than most of you guys.
So I worry....
What happens if I lose 15 more percent of my brain capacity by then?
I'm 65, and 75% of Americans have cognitive loss by 70.
It's the bad food maybe.
It's why I go to Italy so much (which by the way, is not a bad goal for you Brits to live by). Although I must admit ... the food is damn good in London now because of all the Italian chefs.... And it was terrible when I went there once a month for 5 years in the 90s! LOL.
I love the UK. Gotta go back.... Lots of friends there I haven't seen in ages.
 
No Greg, I wasn't suggesting reading the book from cover to cover, but simply to use it as a reference point before you start commenting on the usefullness or otherwise of a particular LrC function, the benefits of which you appeared not to fully understand. Speaking personally, it's my go-to resource when answering a question that I may be less than 100% certain about the answer (even if I'm "only" 95% sure, I will still usually check the book first), it's an invaluable asset for all those "how do I....." questions.

You will find the book and Victoria's Blog equally invaluable when you build your new system.....there's nothing that any of the Gurus could usefully add to the words that Victoria has already penned. So if you ask me in November, I'll reply with the link to the Blog.

BTW, as I'm now well past 70 I hope your cognitive loss statistic really does apply only to Americans....otherwise I'm in deep trouble.
 
I will probably ask someone depending on the exact nature of the problem as it occurs, but I will follow your advice and try my best to prepare for the task by studying and thinking about the exact steps. I seem to remember clicking on a wrong folder level can make a mess. I had a big problem last time, and I solved it in 15 seconds by doing something Clete and Victoria told me to do. But I can't remember it.
Anyway, if everyone had the book and used it correctly, this forum would be less popular than it is. But many of the questions are related not just to LR but to photography itself and the equipment we use in our workflow. I can sometimes help there.
As far as your mental sharpness in your 70s, it seems spot-on! That's a very good thing.
Thanks....
 
Benefits of using a Publish Service to manage images on a website such as Flickr, Smugmug, Zenfolio.

  1. Can see in LrC Publish Service Collections extactly which images have and have not been uploaded to the website
  2. Can use smart collections to identify candidate images to post on the web site (eg, not already on website and rating >= 4)
  3. Can use smart collection to identify images that should be removed from the website (e.g. already one website and taken over 5 years ago and has rating < 4)
  4. Automatically marking images that have been changed in LrC since it was last updated on the website
  5. Easy drag and drop (plus push of "publish" button) to add new images to folders on website
  6. Easy to remove images from website though use of "delete button" (plust push of "publish button)
  7. Fewer steps to get images uploaded to website and skips cluttering disk drive with interim JPG's in temp folders
  8. In some cases can transfer user comments from the web site back into LrC
That's just off the top of my head. I'm sure I'll think of others right after I post this.

Of course, like any tech, one should to understand what it is for, what it is doing, more or less how it works and how to utilize it to serve your putpose..

At this point, I refuse to post images on any website that does not support LrC Publish Services. Some, like Facebook, 500PX, and Google Photos, to name just a few, which had Lr Publish Services in the past but for some reason choose to deprecate them. For each it was at that point that I ceased posting images to those sites, cancelled my paid membership, and removed them from my reccomendations list for clients looking to share images over the internet.


Cheers - Dan
 
Benefits of using a Publish Service to manage images on a website such as Flickr, Smugmug, Zenfolio.

  1. Can see in LrC Publish Service Collections extactly which images have and have not been uploaded to the website
  2. Can use smart collections to identify candidate images to post on the web site (eg, not already on website and rating >= 4)
  3. Can use smart collection to identify images that should be removed from the website (e.g. already one website and taken over 5 years ago and has rating < 4)
  4. Automatically marking images that have been changed in LrC since it was last updated on the website
  5. Easy drag and drop (plus push of "publish" button) to add new images to folders on website
  6. Easy to remove images from website though use of "delete button" (plust push of "publish button)
  7. Fewer steps to get images uploaded to website and skips cluttering disk drive with interim JPG's in temp folders
  8. In some cases can transfer user comments from the web site back into LrC
That's just off the top of my head. I'm sure I'll think of others right after I post this.

Of course, like any tech, one should to understand what it is for, what it is doing, more or less how it works and how to utilize it to serve your putpose..

At this point, I refuse to post images on any website that does not support LrC Publish Services. Some, like Facebook, 500PX, and Google Photos, to name just a few, which had Lr Publish Services in the past but for some reason choose to deprecate them. For each it was at that point that I ceased posting images to those sites, cancelled my paid membership, and removed them from my reccomendations list for clients looking to share images over the internet.


Cheers - Dan
Dan,
That is food for thought for sure. I'm always willing to learn from someone else's tips, tricks and workflow.

Nice list and well done. I will try it. It is easy for me to just export jpegs from LR to a folder and then upload the images to Flickr and any album I create or old album already there, which I have done a bazillion times, but I can see where maintaining the link could be useful. Sometimes I post to Flickr from the road and get home and do some fine-tuning edits on the raw files that never see their way to Flickr.
Linking it this way could have some benefit for me but might add some complexity and uncertainty on the Flickr end. I will play with it and see. Upload some images and see...
 
Greg, interesting stuff. I really must give Publish Services a go. One question, what happens re images already uploaded to, say, Flickr? Do they sync back to Lr or are they ignored? I imagine they are ignored as they could have been uploaded from anywhere.
 
Greg, interesting stuff. I really must give Publish Services a go. One question, what happens re images already uploaded to, say, Flickr? Do they sync back to Lr or are they ignored? I imagine they are ignored as they could have been uploaded from anywhere.
The built in plug-in just deals with uploading new stuff.

Jeffrey's one is more advanced and still being updated regularly, so is generally a better choice. It does have some extra options for existing photos, like matching up with photos already in the catalog. There's some pretty complex options documented here: http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/flickr/publish
 
The built in plug-in just deals with uploading new stuff.

Jeffrey's one is more advanced and still being updated regularly, so is generally a better choice. It does have some extra options for existing photos, like matching up with photos already in the catalog. There's some pretty complex options documented here: http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/flickr/publish
Is there an easy way to export LR photos from the library to Google Photos? I tried uploading to Google Drive but although the photo was uploaded, I can't find it now in Google Photo to add to an album.
 
John,

After reading the threads on the Adobe forum, I got annoyed enough :mad:to post a reply to one of your posts.

I may be a bit picky here, but the decision-maker here should not be the engineering manager. It should be the product manager. Not to be "divisive," but I have often obsered that an engineering manager will make a decision based on how much effort is required to resolve an issue, not on the customer impact or benefit. If I am being too picky here, then "mea culpa."
You are right. The engineering manager listens to the voice of the engineering manager's customer. The engineering manager's customer is perhaps the product manager or some marketing team, but it's not us. We, the end user, are the customer of only those responcible for selling us the product. It's only they that listen to our voice. Sorry for the six sigma speak but that's the clearest way of putting it.
 
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