# Publish to Photoshelter using Pactsoftware Plugin



## lgphotography (Oct 29, 2013)

So my first question is I've been wondering if anyone is using pactsoftware's plugin?
http://www.pactsoftware.nl/photoshelter-publish-service/lightroom-photoshelter-publish-service.html

I've been having a lot of trouble with it (failing to upload SOME files, and other woes).  One of my main problems I need to solve quickly however is due to something the developer had me to do "fix" one of the problems.  He told me to delete the Photoshelter publish service in LR and then rebuild it.  GIANT FAIL - it did not find a large portion of my images on PS due to the fact that they are scans from film and do not have the metadata that is necessary to rebuild the collections.  However, before I deleted it I backed up my catalog so I do have the old publish service collection as well as the new incomplete one.

Is there a way for me to move a publish collection to another catalog?  I have since done a lot of work in the catalog (importing new files, develope adjustments, etc.) and the original catalog is no longer up to date but has the most complete publish collection.  I have thousands of files on Photoshelter and need to know what is up there and what isn't.

Not sure I've been completely clear here so please ask me questions so that I can give more necessary info and get myself out of this mess I'm in.  Thanks!

Running OS 10.6.8 and LR 4.4.


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## Victoria Bampton (Oct 29, 2013)

Hi lgphotography, welcome to the forum.

I haven't used that plugin, but tidying up the catalog is something we can help with.

There are a couple of options.  There is a plugin that can transfer publish services data between catalogs http://alloyphoto.com/plugins/lrvoyager/

Alternatively, it might be easier to duplicate the backup catalog, and then use import from catalog to pull the updated photos and new ones into it.

Do you know which photos you've edited, or are they spread around?


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## lgphotography (Oct 29, 2013)

Thank you so much for replying, Victoria.

I really have a mess here due to the fact that once I backed-up my catalog, deleted and then recreated the publish service for Photoshelter, reported my results to the developer, it took him over 3 weeks to get back to me.  I should have returned to the original catalog and kept working there but I'm only a photographer and didn't think of the consequences of not doing so and all the data that three or more weeks worth of work would generate.

Also I'm not as familiar with the powers of Publish Services as many.  I hardly even noticed it as the plug-in did all the work for me and created it by itself at some point.  I'm only really needing it now as Photoshelter is now HTML5 and (long story) I had only been uploading my files to my account at 900px wide.  Now my website is responsive to all platforms and I need to reupload every image (almost 3000 but many are on the backend and not visible in portfolios so I can do less) at full-size, so knowing what is up there and what isn't is important.

The images I've worked on since are spread around.  I just watched a Kost video on importing from another catalog.  It appears that I could just import everything (45k files) and then choose one of the "changed existing photos" option to something - just not sure what I would do.

The idea of using the plugin to transfer the publish service seems viable if it works.  In the newest catalog though many of the film scans that are on PS are not labeled as being on PS but they are in the old catalog.  Would bringing the publish service with everything intact in the old catalog bring in the metadata and the Photoshelter ID with it?  In the new catalog those files do not have a PS ID and are marked as not on PS.

My head hurts :crazy:


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## lgphotography (Oct 31, 2013)

Would love to get to work on this soonish.  Victoria, when you get a chance can your offer further advice in response to my questions above?  Thanks so much.


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## johnbeardy (Oct 31, 2013)

OK, let me clarify the problem for myself. I don't know that plugin, but I've a bit more technical experience with this area than most here. 

- You have a backup catalogue which shows 3000+ images allocated to various folders in the publish service, and a current catalogue with an empty publish service and which has lots more work?

- "Lots more work" - does this mean only to images which aren't on Photoshelter, or could published images also have updates in the last few weeks? What kind of things have you been doing? Have you been re-organising keywords in that period?

- How many subfolders are in the published service?

Can you answer these directly for me please? Depending on your answers, we can do this in a few ways. As Victoria said, it might be a case of getting your recent LR work into a duplicate of the 3 week old backup, or alternatively of finding a way to reconstruct the published folders in the current catalogue. My preference would be the first, which is the option Victoria described as easier but it is also better as it's more complete. Most of all it will retain the record of photos' Photoshelter ID and URL, so publishing modified photos will update the photos on Photoshelter rather than creating duplicates (there are other benefits too). Personally I would avoid trying to solve it with another plugin as it'll be generic and best suited to repeat processes, not a one-off exercise which will have important nuances.

I would also recommend that you don't give up on the developer of that plugin. I don't know much about him, and 3 weeks' response time isn't good, but it is well-regarded. Any plugin  author should anticipate the need to reconstruct a service from online data, and certainly in my own publish plugins I have built in code to rebuild a service in a new catalogue and ensure IDs and URLs are recorded, so I know it can be done. Maybe he has done the same but hasn't quite understood your problem? 

John


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## Victoria Bampton (Oct 31, 2013)

Sorry lrphotography, I got caught by a sudden influx of emails.  John's our resident expert on all things plug-in.


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## johnbeardy (Oct 31, 2013)

Just don't let him babble on about plugins in every single post....

J


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## Victoria Bampton (Oct 31, 2013)

LOL  Your name's not..... nope, won't say it!


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## lgphotography (Nov 6, 2013)

So sorry, for dropping out.  I need a few uninterrupted hours to tackle this and respond.  Haven't had them yet and I'm hoping I can respond to you, John, tomorrow sometime.  Thank you both!


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## lgphotography (Nov 7, 2013)

I definitely have to give up on the developer.  The current nightmare I'm describing was caused by his solution to my myriad problems I was suddenly having.  We went back and forth for many, many months (mostly me waiting for him to reply) and then suddenly he decided that he couldn't help and didn't want to.  I've shared his emails with the support folks at Photoshelter and they agreed I should give up on him as well.  Happy to forward you the email though, John, so you can see what we were working on that he gave up on.  Let me know if you think it would help, but remember those are different issues than what I'm trying to solve here.



> - You have a backup catalogue which shows 3000+ images allocated to various folders in the publish service, and a current catalogue with an empty publish service and which has lots more work?
> - "Lots more work" - does this mean only to images which aren't on Photoshelter, or could published images also have updates in the last few weeks? What kind of things have you been doing? Have you been re-organising keywords in that period?



I have a backup catalog that most closely resembles the structure of folders/galleries that I have on PS.  However this catalog does not have any of the work I've done in the past 6 weeks or so: importing, developing, keywording, rating, exports to catalog, etc.  Nor would it have my most recent uploads to PS.  Changes are to images that are AND are not on PS.  Yes, published images could and do have updates since the creation of the new catalog and publish service.

- How many subfolders are in the published service?
I've attached screen shots for you.  Now the other potential problem is that at some point my PS structure was very simple, then sometime in the past few months I created collections that contained galleries thus creating a nested structure in the newest catalog.  But then about a week ago I went back to the old system with NO collections.  So PS looks most like the old catalog currently.

Also you can see in the screenshots from the new catalog that many of the galleries are missing images completely (zero) and most (but you wouldn't know) are completely wrong on the count and many have the completely wrong images in the publish service folder.  This is especially true for film scans where it identifies a random image and is wrong but also it has pulled in JPG derivatives of DNG files and the DNG is the one that should be in the publish service collection not the JPG.

What I wish I could do with my magic wand is just sync what is on PS with my catalog somehow.  Like magic PS would tell my catalog what's on there and where it is.  Can you be my genie?

I do hope I've been clear here and, yes, my head still hurts :(

Here are the screenshots.  Not sure if you can see the file names or how it will look when I post.  So in sequence: Newest Catalog Parts 1 & 2, then Old Catalog Parts 1 & 2.


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## lgphotography (Nov 7, 2013)

Here is one more screenshot that might be helpful.  It is of my PS galleries on the management backend where you can see the structure and the image counts.  This just might be confusing as well so feel free to disregard


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## lgphotography (Nov 9, 2013)

John?  Are you able to help?  Just checking that you saw my reply.  Thanks.


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## johnbeardy (Nov 9, 2013)

Sorry, I did see it and planned to respond once I'm through a couple of busy days. Hold on.

The basic approach seems to be to go back to the backup catalogue with the more-complete PS, then import more recent work into it. That will mean identifying recent work in the current catalogue (Edit Date > yymmdd) and exporting as a catalogue. But I want to think through other angles - and I'm off to photograph a vintage car rally on a mountaintop!

john


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## lgphotography (Nov 9, 2013)

Oh, that 'sounds' visually awesome to shoot.  Have fun!

I look forward to hearing your further thoughts when you get back.

Questions I hope you can address in your response.  I have mostly DNG files and do save the metadata to them.  But I also have lots of JPGs from my iPhone as well as derivative JPGs that sometimes I make further adjustments to.  Is data saved to JPG files?  Will I see a complete history state of each step upon import if I do export to a new catalog and then import those into the old?  I rely quite a bit on looking at the history steps of my images.


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## johnbeardy (Nov 12, 2013)

The key to this seems to be identifying what you've done in the last 6 weeks. Maybe start a smart collection with "any" - capture date after X or edit date after X. 


Let's say say this is clean-cut. You'd select the items, do an export as catalog, import it into the 6 week old version, and you would have your history. One detail you would lose is new images posted to PS, so another bit of preparation might be to identify these in the original catalogue and add them to a keyword or a regular collection. This would allow you to identify them in the rebuilt catalogue and add them to the published service. Here I don't know what will happen if you republish these pictures- it'll depend on the publish service plugin. They will initially be shown as new and unpublished, and my guess is there will not be an alternative to completely republishing (removing them from Ps via the web, then uploading again) but first I would see what happens if you simply try to publish them again. PS may recognise the filenames and simply update the records. Do try that with one or two.


See how far that gets you.


john


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## lgphotography (Nov 13, 2013)

So I tried to create a smart collection as you suggested.  Please see screen shot for what I did.  Bad news though is that when I asked it to ONLY get all images EDITED since Sept. 1 it grabbed 45k images - all but about 200 images in my catalog.  What happened????

If I just ask it for images CREATED since Sept. 1 I get 605 which when I look through them seems accurate.  Here's the screen shot of what I was asking when I asked for both created and edited with the same result of 45k. But it is EDITED that is the problem.

Ideas?  Thoughts?



Also I'm unclear on what you were saying about how to handle images that were published to PS since this mess.  But I'm not sure that is as important as figuring out how to merge the info of imaged created/edited since creating the new catalog.  Thanks, John.


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## johnbeardy (Nov 13, 2013)

My guess is you're getting 45k because it's picking up some changes to keywords. Might that be right?

Let's start with the 605. First create a collection set "Rebuild" which we'll use to get publication info over into the rebuilt catalogue. Select the 605 and add them to a new collection "All" in that set, and then identify which of these 605 have been added to PS. Select them, and add them to a new collection "PS" in that set. Now, depending on how much effort it would be, you could create extra collections for each PS published collection. So at this point we've identified our 605 and grouped them so we can reconstruct the PS collections.

Now select the 605 and use File > Export as Catalog. Ensure "Export selected items only" is ticked, but don't tick smart previews or negatives (regular previews can be ticked or not). Export this catalogue to your desktop - let's call it Lifeboat. You can open Lifeboat and check that it's got the correct info.

Next get your September backup and work with a copy of your last good catalogue - let's call it Rebuild.lrcat. I'd review this to make sure that none of the 605 is in it - we're just checking that the 605 is accurate and shouldn't be 570 or 410 or whatever. Now choose File > Import from Another Catalog and point to Lifeboat. Bring these into Rebuild. 

You should then be able to use the Rebuild collection set to find the members of the 605 that have to be put on PS and to republish them. At that point, go over my previous post - it might now make sense.

John

PS I put some snaps from that vintage car rally in this post about standing around in streams in the rain and snow….


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## lgphotography (Nov 18, 2013)

Love your photos!  Looks like a place I would just love to visit.  And of course the song from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is now stuck in my head 

So luckily there were only 2 images that I uploaded to PS of the 605 (which is now 653) so I needn't worry about that part of this.  I know which two they are.  Also on PS I can do a search for images uploaded since early September if need be and there were about 130 of those.

Ok, so I just did what you said above: created a copy of the catalog from Sept. with the good publish collections, imported into it a catalog created from the smart collection called REBUILD. All seems good including complete history in Develop.

Mostly now it seems I need to get the changed/edited files over to this catalog, right?  I'm not sure why when I tried to create a smart collection of images edited since early September it is showing over 45k since I haven't done any major keyword work in a while - I think, but not sure.


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## lgphotography (Nov 18, 2013)

I noticed that when I sync a folder in the REBUILD catalog it brings in any new keywords and updates the develop module.  But the history step just says "from metadata".  This might be ok if we can't figure out anything else.  There are not that many folders I would have to click on to sync to bring the catalog up to date.  It would be nice to have all the history steps but at least the new files that we brought in tonight have them, and that is probably most of the editing work that I've done besides keywording.

However I did notice that Collections are not up to date, but this is not the end of the world really...


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## lgphotography (Nov 18, 2013)

More thoughts...

I guess I could also just export out as catalogs the folders that I think had the most keywording/developing and then import them and I will have the history steps and everything, right?


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## johnbeardy (Nov 18, 2013)

Yes, Export as Catalog and Import from Another preserve history steps. If you can identify the changes by folders, it makes more sense than the 45k.


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## lgphotography (Nov 22, 2013)

Ok.  Looks like I'm in much better shape.  The worst of it seems to be that somehow all the previews went missing from the catalogue so it is now wait and see everytime I scroll through.  But I am having an easier time updating the galleries on my website.  There are some inconsistencies but I'll deal!

Thank you so very much for your patience and expertise


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## lgphotography (Jan 4, 2014)

Do you think you could help me with one more thing, John?  Since the maker of the plugin that caused all this trouble basically gave up on me I have no one to ask for help and am still struggling to get the plugin to work 100%.

Basically the plugin is designed to upload images and/or sync IPTC info to Photoshelter.  It works for me most of the time but what has been happening pretty consistently is that when I upload a group of images there is almost always one image that fails.  Then it becomes impossible for me to upload that image on its own or in a group of new images.  It just fails to upload.

The developer has been telling me that the problem lies with my ISP.  Not sure how that can be.  So I don't know much about all the backend of this stuff but I have the log file that LR plugin creates when things fail.  Perhaps you might be able to gleam something from it and help me figure out this nightmare?

What is really weird is that it is pulling descriptive text from my galleries into the file.  I can't imagine that is normal.

Oops.  Turns out the log file is too many characters to post here.  Can I email it to you?  Thanks for your help.


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## johnbeardy (Jan 4, 2014)

Lauren

I see you'd put the log data below your email. Unfortunately I don't see anything that explains why the process is failing, but I'm not the developer so I might not recognise anything significant.

Why not try uploading from a different location, testing the ISP suggestion?

"Then it becomes impossible for me to upload that image on its own or in a group of new images.  It just fails to upload."

No error messages? With one of these, is it shown as published or new? 

But it should be the developer who answers. Or maybe Photoshelter? Do they have a help forum?

John


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## clee01l (Jan 4, 2014)

lgphotography said:


> ...when I upload a group of images there is almost always one image that fails.  Then it becomes impossible for me to upload that image on its own or in a group of new images.  It just fails to upload...


 Is it always the same image?  or same images?  If so, then this suggests some problem with the image itself.  Perhaps Photoshelter has limits on pixel count, file size etc. and the image fails to load for one of these reasons and the plugin doe not handle the exception.


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## lgphotography (Oct 29, 2013)

So my first question is I've been wondering if anyone is using pactsoftware's plugin?
http://www.pactsoftware.nl/photoshelter-publish-service/lightroom-photoshelter-publish-service.html

I've been having a lot of trouble with it (failing to upload SOME files, and other woes).  One of my main problems I need to solve quickly however is due to something the developer had me to do "fix" one of the problems.  He told me to delete the Photoshelter publish service in LR and then rebuild it.  GIANT FAIL - it did not find a large portion of my images on PS due to the fact that they are scans from film and do not have the metadata that is necessary to rebuild the collections.  However, before I deleted it I backed up my catalog so I do have the old publish service collection as well as the new incomplete one.

Is there a way for me to move a publish collection to another catalog?  I have since done a lot of work in the catalog (importing new files, develope adjustments, etc.) and the original catalog is no longer up to date but has the most complete publish collection.  I have thousands of files on Photoshelter and need to know what is up there and what isn't.

Not sure I've been completely clear here so please ask me questions so that I can give more necessary info and get myself out of this mess I'm in.  Thanks!

Running OS 10.6.8 and LR 4.4.


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## lgphotography (Jan 10, 2014)

Thanks for your responses.

The developer sucks, quite honestly, and has decided it is too much work to help me although I did email him one last time and begged him to support his plugin.  Haven't heard back yet but when he was 'supporting' it he most often took over 3 weeks to reply.  Photoshelter support has listened to my woes and has been sympathetic but they don't support the plugin.

It varies as to what images this happens with but 80% of the time when an image fails it refuses to ever upload it after that.  This is not about pixel size however.

I will try your suggestion to test my ISP.  Sometimes the problem is with a new image, sometimes it is an image I am trying to replace/update.  It is so random what happens that I'm having a hard time following my own dilemma.  And sometimes it doesn't LR/the plugin doesn't give me any error message at all but I can see in PS that the image was not updated.

I just thought maybe, maybe, that there is something obvious going on here and I appreciate you trying to understand.  Thanks.


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