There are alternate means of accessing the Raw file, but this usually means finding the original file in Finder/Explorer, or Exporting as ‘Original’. The latter makes a copy of the file though. This plugin is free to try until July 7th.

The control you have is basic. The video must already be imported onto the hard drive (No importing from Cards). If you move the placeholder file, the video remains where it is. The video will still play from this location, but it’s not a good way to manage the files. If you move the video on disk, you must delete the placeholder image and re-import the video.

For further information and better detail on the plugin, go to Jeffrey’s ‘Video Asset Management‘ Page.

LR2/TreeExporter from Timothy Armes, is Lightroom 2 export plug-in that allows you to export your images while preserving your folder tree (also known as the folder hierarchy). While there are other plugins with this theme, this one automatically finds the common root folder for you, instead of requiring manual entry.

Matt Dawson at The Photo Geek has released the Config-Backup plugin. This Plugin Extras tool allows you to back up your preferences and catalog, along with compressing them to save space. Update: It now saves presets, plugins, and other Lightroom bits (I’ve tested with the 78Mb of web galleries I have, so I can confirm it works with even extreme amounts of information)

While I hate hate pushing my own work on Lightroom News, I have 2 plugins just out: Lr2Twitpic and Lr2TweetPhoto. Both provide access to a photo hosting service that allows you to post photos to your twitter.com account. TweetPhoto has additional tagging and geoencoding built in.

For Developers, Jeffrey Friedl has provided SHA1 and Twitter OAuth routines in Lua.

Finally Don McKee has announced his Shutterfly Upload plugin, allowing Lightroom users to upload to their Shutterfly accounts.

Matthew has been helpful and supportive of my work, so I was glad to be able to return the favour with help that led to the ‘Set Path to Shared Resources’ being implemented.

• Highslide JS driven viewing of large images.
• New, super-flexible page header with an all new look!
• Unlimited menu items.
• By popular demand, menus can be set to left, right or center alignment.
• Search Engine Optimization features.
• Fully customizable colors and appearance.
• Three gallery modes — Proofing, Slideshow and Inline Slideshow — making TTG Highslide Gallery three galleries in one!
• Enlarge multiple images in Proofing mode for side-by-side comparison.
• In all modes, image scaling to ensure that over-large images fit to the visitor’s browser window.
• Full styling options for the gallery description.
• Automatic color labeling from your Library (optional).
• BoxOver tool tips on thumbnails and other gallery components (optional).
• Selection gallery features for client proofing.
• Form-to-Email powered delivery for proofing feedback.
• A set of “Developer Options” making it easier than ever to integrate TTG Highslide Gallery into existing site designs

Highslide JS is a commercial product, but is free to use in non commercial ventures. Commercial users can purchase single site or all use licenses. This is in addition to cost of the gallery which is a version reasonable $10.

Read More…

Anita Dennis has announced some of the changes in Lightroom Help.

Speaking of Lightroom Help, they have a good list of tutorial videos related to Lightroom.

Lightroom Blog has a video on using the DNG Profile editor to create an IR profile to use in Lightroom.

Matt Kloskowski has a nice tip on Grid Thumbnail Sizes, along with a Q&A Post, and more free presets.

Adobe Community Expert Gene McCullough has a post on Single or Mulitple Catalogs over at Lightroom Secrets.

You can also catch up with the current Lightroom headlines using Alltop.

It would also be remiss to mention that Camera Raw 5.4 is out on Adobe Labs. While Lightroom versions tend to coincide with Camera Raw versions, no mention has been made of such an update yet.

Continuing in the series on the Toolstrip, here’s a short movie on the Graduated Filter. This video is in Quicktime format. A player can be downloaded from apple.com.

“Last year I wrote a blog post detailing my photography workflow. Since last year though my workflow has changed a bit as I’ve migrated from Adobe’s Bridge software to Adobe’s Lightroom software and thought that I’d post an updated article detailing how I process my images from start to finish. Questions about my workflow are some of the most common questions I’m regularly asked.” Read More

You might find that it is simpler to create or edit your Keyword list outside of Lightroom to speed up the process, especially if you need to create a complex list.If you are creating a new Catalog or brand new Lightroom system, you may have a set of Keywords that you have used in other applications or even a set you had left over from your archive of negatives or transparencies.

The Keyword list is simple to create at a basic level; it is a plain text file, returns separating individual Keywords and tabs allowing you to create a hierarchy.

But with the extended featureset that Lightroom offers with regards to Keywords there are a few other symbols you can use.

Let’s take a quick look at a few Keyword lists.

Here is a basic list of Keywords:

Cape Cornwall
Cheesewring
Cotehele
Eden Project
Gweek
Kynance Cove
Lanhydrock
Lion Rock
Lizard Penninsula
Minions
Morwellham
Mousehole
Newquay
Poldhu Cove
Pollurian
Pollurian Beach
Porthleven
Sennen Cove
St Ives
Trebah Gardens

and how this looks in Lightroom.

These are all places in Cornwall, so we can group them to create a hierarchy

Here is an indented list of Keywords.

Cornwall
	Cape Cornwall
	Cheesewring
	Cotehele
	Eden Project
	Gweek
	Kynance Cove
	Lanhydrock
	Lion Rock
	Lizard Penninsula
	Minions
	Morwellham
	Mousehole
	Newquay
	Poldhu Cove
	Pollurian
	Pollurian Beach
	Porthleven
	Sennen Cove
	St. Ives
	Trebah Gardens

This begins to make the list more manageable.

We can further add to this, Cornwall is in England (although many argue it is separate country altogether!) which itself is in Europe, and is a location.

Location
	Europe
		England
			Cornwall
				Cape Cornwall
				Cheesewring
				Cotehele
				Eden Project
				Gweek
				Kynance Cove
				Lanhydrock
				Lion Rock
				Lizard Penninsula
				Minions
				Morwellham
				Mousehole
				Newquay
				Poldhu Cove
				Pollurian
					Pollurian Beach
				Porthleven
				Sennen Cove
				St. Ives
				Trebah Gardens

And Lightroom displays this as shown. Note that we have created a further hierarchy with Pollurian and Pollurian Beach.

When you create Keywords in Lightroom you are offered several options at creation time.

1) You can enter Synonyms. Synonyms are related or implied keywords.

There is some confusion about the use of Synonyms. Essentially, they are a way of entering related keywords for a master keyword, then you don’t have to spend extra time entering the same keywords time after time. For example you might use the English language name for Wales, but include as a Synonym “Cymru”, or Cardiff could be given the Synonyms “Caerdydd, Wales, Cymru”. This saves you entering Wales, Cymru, Cardiff and Caerdydd (and any others you choose) each time you Keyword. Synonyms can then be included as Keywords when you export an image. 

2) When a Keyword selected in the Lightroom interface, you are given the choice to insert your new Keyword “inside” the selected Keyword; this creates the hierarchy.

3) You can add your new Keyword to all the images you have selected.

4) You can include the Keyword when you Export the image, by default

5) You can Export the containing Keywords

6) You can Export the Synonyms

These actions can be entered into our text version of the Keyword list, with the use of symbols.

Here is an example of a Keyword list with Synonyms (with all options selected when entering the Keywords.

Location
	{Place}
	Europe
		{continent}
		England
			{country}
			Cornwall
				{county}
				Lizard
					{area}
					Kynance Cove
						{beach}
						{sea}
						{sand}
						{water}

The Synonyms appear on separate lines from the Keyword (as well as indented) and are surrounded by curly braces {}.

If you want to exclude files on export then surround them with square brackets []

Using the example of the list above, I might just wish to export the final term, Kynance Cove, not all the parent terms. This would look like this.

[Location]
	{Place}
	[Europe]
		{continent}
		[England]
			{country}
			[Cornwall]
				{county}
				[Lizard]
					{area}
					Kynance Cove
						{beach}
						{sea}
						{sand}
						{water}

Once these have been imported into Lightroom you still have to decide whether you want the Parent Keywords exported.

And with this setup, when you Export a file, you can choose to include or exclude the hierarchy. In the case of the above list, exporting the hierarchy will export Kynance Cove, beach, sea, sand, water. Not exporting the hierarchy will just export the Keyword Kynance Cove.

With these principles in mind you can now create a Keyword list outside of Lightroom.

There are also commercially available Keyword lists, such as Controlled Vocabulary, which provide hierarchical lists of Keywords in extreme depth. You can then edit these to take advantage of Synonyms and the export controls which you prefer.

To use this new Keyword List in Lightroom, you need to have Lightroom open, be in the Library Module and select Metadata > Import Keywords… from the menu. Navigate to your newly created Keyword List, then import them.

Thanks to Eric Scouten, for providing some clarification.