Export Portfollios, collections to lightroom

[PhilBurton]

I belong to a local camera club consisting of mostly amateur enthusiasts, and most of them use only Lightroom and Photoshop and never comment about cataloging functionality. However, when I ask them about how they manage their metadata most of them don't. Beyond keywords, captions, and descriptions they seem not to be very concerned about it at all. I've come to the conclusion that I am very much in the minority when it comes to these things. I suppose that most users of PSU are like me in that respect. We are not like the average photo enthusiast. If everyone was like us, Hert would be able to afford to hire a huge team of developers and to add all sorts of cool features to PSU.

Tom,

This post made me laugh. I've mentioned in the past that many railroad enthusiasts have kludgy systems for "catalog management," based on elaborate filenames. But these systems are very particular to each individual, and don't allow any sort of searching or organization across different people's photo collections. In the past, I tried to explain proper metadata management to a few people, but I was completely unsuccessful.

Let me say this. If everyone was like us, Hert would be so widly profitable that his company might get acquired. Google, Facebook, maybe Adobe or one of the online photo sharing sites like Flickr. Not Apple, since they seem to have given up on serious photo amateurs and professionals. Hert, don't worry about what I just wrote. It's all in good fun.

Phil

[ssahm]

I do not have so much experience in writing PSU macros.

Would it be "easy" to write a macro, that synchronizes the "job id" with the portfolio name
(and best case: is triggered when a pictures is added/removed from a portfolio)?

I guess the "best case" would not be possible without Hert's assistence.

[Hert]

While that would be fairly simple, such a mapping should be backed by the IPTC specs. And afaik there's no mapping defined for that.

[sanphotgn]

ssahm,

To do it manually select photos already in a Portfolio Collection, go to the Details Panel, enter %CatalogPortfolioList in the Job Identifier field and click on OK.

Try it on one photo and then a few to see the results.

[Preston B]

To do it manually select photos already in a Portfolio Collection, go to the Details Panel, enter %CatalogPortfolioList in the Job Identifier field and click on OK.

That would work, but there is a possible downside that I can see. If he removes the image from the collection, the %CatalogPortfolioList in the Job Identifier field would remain attached to that image. Searches on the that identifier would include the removed image, so, the OP would have to clear that field at some point.

--P

[PhilBurton]

To do it manually select photos already in a Portfolio Collection, go to the Details Panel, enter %CatalogPortfolioList in the Job Identifier field and click on OK.

That would work, but there is a possible downside that I can see. If he removes the image from the collection, the %CatalogPortfolioList in the Job Identifier field would remain attached to that image. Searches on the that identifier would include the removed image, so, the OP would have to clear that field at some point.

--P

Which is why collections/portfolios need to be officially defined in IPTC or XMP (I don't know which). That way the regular metadata update mechanisms in both Photo Supreme and Lightroom would capture any changes in/out. But is this a fool's errand, trying to get changes in IPTC?

Phil

[tstoddard]

Which is why collections/portfolios need to be officially defined in IPTC or XMP (I don't know which).

Phil, as I alluded to in one of my earlier posts, this standard has already been written as a proposal made by the Metadata Working Group. The challenge is getting software vendors to support those proposed standards. I know that Hert and others are not eager to do so. Apparently some of the standards proposed by the MWG are not going to be easy to support. For example, they have proposed, what is in my opinion, a much better way of defining hierarchical keywords than what is currently implemented by most DAM software, which typically consists of using a combination of the dc:subject and the lr:hierarchicalsubject fields in conjunction with application specific categories or labels or some other keyword management tools. This could lead to an interesting conversation but would be off-topic so I won't go any further.

The point is that getting standard's organizations to propose standards that we would like is not easy. The fact that the MWG has already recognized that it is common for people to want to form collections of images and that they've already proposed a solution to representing collections in metadata is encouraging. It's up to users now to convince software vendors that these standards are valuable enough to be implemented. Unfortunately, implementing standards isn't always in the best interest of software companies. As we've seen in may other areas of software development, building proprietary features into products while not supporting standard 100% can sometimes make it more difficult for users to change from one program to another.

By the way, I'm not accusing Hert of doing this. It is the large vendors like Adobe, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and others that have more to gain by doing this.

[PhilBurton]

Which is why collections/portfolios need to be officially defined in IPTC or XMP (I don't know which).

Phil, as I alluded to in one of my earlier posts, this standard has already been written as a proposal made by the Metadata Working Group. The challenge is getting software vendors to support those proposed standards. I know that Hert and others are not eager to do so. Apparently some of the standards proposed by the MWG are not going to be easy to support. For example, they have proposed, what is in my opinion, a much better way of defining hierarchical keywords than what is currently implemented by most DAM software, which typically consists of using a combination of the dc:subject and the lr:hierarchicalsubject fields in conjunction with application specific categories or labels or some other keyword management tools. This could lead to an interesting conversation but would be off-topic so I won't go any further.

The point is that getting standard's organizations to propose standards that we would like is not easy. The fact that the MWG has already recognized that it is common for people to want to form collections of images and that they've already proposed a solution to representing collections in metadata is encouraging. It's up to users now to convince software vendors that these standards are valuable enough to be implemented. Unfortunately, implementing standards isn't always in the best interest of software companies. As we've seen in may other areas of software development, building proprietary features into products while not supporting standard 100% can sometimes make it more difficult for users to change from one program to another.

By the way, I'm not accusing Hert of doing this. It is the large vendors like Adobe, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and others that have more to gain by doing this.

Tom,

In my "day job" software standards is a key issue. As an oversimplification, in any marketplace, the strong companies do not favor standards, and the weaker companies do favor standards, which they then use to attack the market position of the leaders. As you note, the stronger companies use proprietary features to create vendor lock-in. Creating standards, and then gaining adoption, can be an ugly process, sometimes political.

I'm going to guess that the big issue here for the MWG to get adoption is end-user demand on the vendors. In one thread, someone notes that photographers who actually care about metadata are in a real minority. Without such pressure, "which vendor goes first?" is the question. Let's say that Hert "goes first" because that fits in to his overall message that there is no user data lock-in with Photo Supreme. (That's called "industry leadership.") Some other, probably small, companies, might follow. At that point, someone like John Beardsworth or Jeffrey Friedl might write a Lightroom plug-in to support this new metadata. Heck, I might even try to do that myself, if I had enough information about Lightroom's internal data structures and how to address them. Or I might take the "easy way out" and post a comment on Victoria Bampton's Lightroom forums.

Phil