Lightroom-News.com

Keeping his promise of taking on board user requests, Timothy Armes has had a busy week coding LR2/Blog. Going from version 1.0 only a week ago to 1.3 now, there is a wealth of new features in this handy plugin. Originally this just uploaded an image to Wordpress blogs, but with these new features it now has

The plugin has automatic updating built in, so you can easily keep up to date with current features each time you want to use it. I’ve used it myself on some of my recent blogs posts.

LR2/Blog web page

While there is a Shortcuts section to Adobe Community Help for Lightroom, it’s part of the full Help document and takes a little effort to print separately. In response to user requests on this, Senior Solutions Engineer for Education Rick Miller has produced the Lightroom 2 Shortcuts PDF Reference Guide.

With quite a few plugins under his belt, Timothy Armes is no stranger to the pages and posts of Lightroom News. With LR2/Mogrify and it’s predecessor, LR/Mogrify, high in the ranks as best post process plugin, it’s good to see Tim working on a new Export Plugin. That plugin is LR2/Blog. Designed to post images to Blogs that use the MetaWebLogs standard for upload, this plugin is perfect for those with a Photoblog. The prime example of a blog using MetaWebLog is Word Press.

Tim is taking a Lightroom approach to this plugin, and has released a barebones version, to garner feedback from users about how to further refine the plugin. He’s also got a free copy to whoever designs a banner for the plugin. As with Tim’s other plugins, this is donationware and more information can be had from Tim’s Blog.

One of the hot topics in Digital Photography in recent months has been Geotagging. The confluence of Digital Images, Online Mapping and GPS devices and services such as Flickr have lead to an upsurge of interest, use and software to support this need.

Here we look at using the iPhone as a GPS device and how we then insert that information into Lightroom.

Here are some interesting things that are happening in the Lightroom world at the moment.

There’s a lot of interest in being able to export with a directory structure intact. Over at Lightroom forums, there’s a post on just such an export plugin. It does work, although it seems to add an extra folder called ers on Mac. Check it out!

Matt Kloskowski has posted new free presets over at Lightroom Killer Tips. These High Key presets come in 3 flavours and are worth checking out.

Speaking of free presets, my own batch of grunge presets LRB Dragan are now up on Adobe Exchange for Lightroom.

Rich Cooper aka mountainstorm has updated his Tether programs and is looking for feedback on them. While these work with most Nikons, Canon compatibility on newer cameras is not there due to Canon changing communication protocol recently. Any camera that has a PTP mode should work with it.

Timothy Armes is now distributing via The Photographers Toolbox. We interviewed Tim recently and wish him well as he takes his great products further. The distribution brings with it a serial number mechanism, to prevent confusion between trial and full versions.

As part of Photoshop World, Martin Evening and Jeff Schewe will be giving seminars. Both Martin and Jeff are members of the NAPP Photoshop Hall of Fame, as well as being editors in chief here at Lightroom News. There’s a $100 discount offer running currently until the 20th Feb, so time is running out.

With apologies for the extended delay in following on with the series, here is part 6 in our continuing series on writing your own web gallery. Please note that the code section doesn’t wrap, but still can be cut and pasted to a text or code editor. In this case I’ve sacrificed readability to usability.

In our last look at creating a HTML gallery, we showed the need for Live Update, and prior to that we introduced the method of adding CSS in Lightroom. One thing I should mention about CSS generated in Lightroom, is that it doesn’t generate in the order you put in the model section of the galleryInfo.lrweb file. In fact I have no idea what sets the order. It seems quite random to me!

Anyhow, one of the easiest additions to the page that looks nice is the ability to have the images scroll along the page. Normally this would be simply put into a CSS file that Lightroom can reference. Let’s look at this initially and then add it to the main galleryInfo.lrweb code, where it can then be manipulated in a panel.