Here are some of the questions we get asked most often. More will be added as they arrive!
Lightroom
I bought the plugin but it's still in demo modeThe plugin license keys are all specific to the email address that was used to buy them in PayPal. For the Alamy plugin, the email address you gave as your Alamy login is used instead.
To enter the license correctly, you need to use
exactly the same email address, including the same case, as your PayPal account.
The plugins all store their settings using Lightroom's standard functions. The settings themselves are stored inside the Lightroom Preferences file. The location of this varies depending on your OS and is described in this Adobe knowledgebase article:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/333/333660.html
If you want to clear your settings, you can remove the "Lightroom
x Preferences.agprefs" file. This will reset Lightroom to all default settings.
You can temporarily clear your settings by simply renaming the same file. Lightroom will create a new one when it is next run. To revert to your original settings, delete the new file and rename your original copy.
You don't need any extra software to have your Lightroom catalog backups compressed.
All current versions of Windows support automatic compression on NTFS filesystems. All you need to do is switch it on.
- Find your backup folder using "Edit->Catalog Settings", then clicking on "Show". The folder that gets opened should have a sub-folder called "Backups".
- Right-click on "Backups" and click on the "Advanced" button.
- Set "Compress contents to save disk space" to "on", and then click "OK" and "OK" again.
- A window will appear asking how you want to apply the changes. Select "Apply changes to this folder, subfolders and files".
Now any file that gets saved into the Backups folder will automatically be compressed. You don't need to do anything to decompress them, Windows takes care of it for you.
There is reportedly a similar feature in Snow Leopard : http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20090902223042255
Duplicate Finder
No "Find Duplicates" menu itemThe first thing to check is that you're looking at the right menu. Lightroom has three "Plugin Extras" menus, and the one used by all the plugins here is the one on the "Library" menu.
If this doesn't help, check to see that the plugin is enabled.
1) Open the Plugin Manager (from the File menu)
2) Look for a "Find Duplicates" entry on the left
3) If it's not there, use the "Add" button at the bottom to find the plugin and add it.
4) Check for a green dot next to the "Find Duplicates" entry.
5) If it's grey, you need to enable the plugin. Select the plugin and click the "Enable" button on the right, in the "Status" panel.
The plugin uses EXIF metadata to match the files rather than image contents or a simple file compare. If the EXIF metadata is different, the files will not be matched even if the image itself is the same. This is intentional; checking the image contents is not possible from inside Lightroom, although other programs exist which will do this.
It checks the capture time, camera serial number and ISO rating by default. You can choose to also match several other fields which will probably be the same for duplicate images.
If you're sure you have two images which should be matched, please open a ticket and attach the two images so that we can check why they're not being matched.
Once the plugin has identified duplicates, it is usual to want to remove at least some of them.
It's not possible to delete a photo directly from the "Smart Collection" because Lightroom only offers the option to remove photos from the collection, not to delete them. There is an easy alternative though, which is to use the "Flagging" system to mark which images you want to delete.
To do this, you select the images you want to remove and then either use the small black flag icon below the thumbnail area, or simply press "X" on the keyboard. Each of the selected photos will be marked as "Rejected", with a black flag icon. You can then select some more and reject those in the same way.
Once you have finished, switch back a view of the normal Library, for example by using the context-menu's "Go to Folder In Library" command. Now, use the "Photos->Delete Rejected Photos" menu item. Normally you would leave at least one from each set of duplicates as not rejected, because the "Duplicate Pictures" Smart Collection will show all matching images. If you reject and delete the entire contents of the "Duplicate Pictures" collection you will remove all copies of any photo which has a duplicate.
The plugin doesn't automatically select duplicates because it has no way of telling which copy you would want to keep.
A bug in the public beta of Lightroom 3 has broken the "Smart Collection" feature. It is not able to access metadata defined by plugins. This means that although duplicates are still identified by the plugin, the "Duplicate Images" collection always shows empty.
This has been reported to Adobe and is currently under investigation.
In the meantime, there is a workaround available in some cases. The "Library Filter" feature is still able to search plugin data, but it doesn't allow a specific field to be searched. This workaround will only be useful if there are no other active plugins which define metadata.
- Run the duplicate search as normal.
- Define a Library Filter as "Text", "Any Searchable Plug-in Field", "Contains", "0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9". The last entry should have spaces between each number, but no quotes.
- The main Library thumbnail display should now show only those photos which have a plugin ID defined. This is essentially the same thing that the Smart Collection does.
When the duplicate finder runs, it marks all duplicates for display. Normally, there should be a Smart Collection which displays all marked duplicates.
This Smart Collection must be set up manually as part of installation. The full instructions for doing this are on page 4 of the manual. Briefly:
1) Go to the Collections panel in Lightroom and right-click to show a menu.
2) Select "Import Smart Collection Settings" on the menu.
3) In the file dialog, find the plugin's folder (full details in the manual, this can vary across different operating systems).
4) Load the appropriate Smart Collection definition depending on whether you are using Lightroom 2 or 3.
Alamy
Missing UploadsI have been getting increasing numbers of problems reported with Lightroom 2.7 when uploading to Alamy. It appears that although an upload succeeds, Lightroom reports this to the plugin as if the connection to Alamy's servers was broken.
This has been reported to Adobe but I may not get a direct response. In the meantime, please take care if you are upgrading from Lightroom 2.6 to 2.7 on Windows.
Uploading to Alamy's servers works as expected for me (on Win7 64-bit) but not for some others. If you have upgraded to 2.7 and have tried uploading photos to Alamy please open a ticket so that I can track where the problem exists. It is as important to find out where uploads *do* work as where they don't. All I need to know is whether or not you've successfully uploaded anything to Alamy from Lightroom 2.7, and what exact version of Windows you're using including servicepack level if you know it.
You can still upload to Alamy using their uploader tool - the problem lies inside Lightroom, not with Alamy's server. The plugin will pick up these uploads the next time you use the "Fetch Metadata" function.
I apologise for any inconvenience but, since this appears to be a bug inside Lightroom, there is little that can be done to avoid it. With more information a workaround may become available so please do let me know if you are able to upload or not.
When you try to connect to Alamy from within Lightroom, you get this message:
Alamy's server said '200'.
Part of the authentication mechanism is a cookie sent from Alamy's servers. If this cookie is not received, you will not be able to log in. This problem is caused by the Internet Explorer "Privacy" settings being set to "High".
To fix this you can reduce the Privacy settings to "Medium High" or lower, but this would affect all sites you visit. It is better to allow a one-off exception for alamy.com.
- In Internet Explorer, bring up the "Internet Options" dialog from the Tools menu. If no menus are visible, press the Alt button on your keyboard.
- Select the "Privacy" tab. The level will be set to "High" or higher.
- Click the "Sites" button.
- In the dialog that appears, enter "alamy.com" under "Address of website", and click "Allow".
- Close the two dialogs by clicking "Ok" on each.
You should now be able to connect to Alamy from Lightroom. You do not need to restart the PC, or even Lightroom.
You try to log in to Alamy using the Lightroom plugin and receive an error:
"Alamy's server said 500".
The '500' is a standard HTTP error code meaning "internal server error". This is being returned by Alamy's web server. This usually happens while uploading images, but also sometimes during login.
If you receive this error, please check in your Documents folder for a file called "AlamyExport.log". In the case of a failed login, this will contain the actual server response as well as the "500" code. For example:
2010-05-06 11:07:29 +0200, TRACE Fetch UserID using https://secure.alamy.com/logon.asp?returnurl=http://www.alamy.com/stock-photography-link-to-alamy.asp
2010-05-06 11:07:31 +0200, TRACE Response received
2010-05-06 11:07:31 +0200, TRACE Fallback on parsing HTML
2010-05-06 11:07:31 +0200, TRACE Auth failed. Response =
2010-05-06 11:07:31 +0200, TRACE <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML dir=ltr><HEAD><TITLE>The page cannot be displayed</TITLE>
...
<H2 style="FONT: 8pt/11pt verdana; COLOR: #000000">500 Internal Server Error - The network logon failed. (1790)<BR>Internet Security and Acceleration Server</H2>
</FONT></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></BODY></HTML>
2010-05-06 11:07:31 +0200, TRACE (End response)
2010-05-06 11:07:31 +0200, TRACE Server status: 500
2010-05-06 11:07:31 +0200, TRACE Lightroom: 3.0
2010-05-06 11:07:31 +0200, TRACE Headers:
2010-05-06 11:07:31 +0200, TRACE Cache-Control = no-cache
2010-05-06 11:07:31 +0200, TRACE Pragma = no-cache
2010-05-06 11:07:31 +0200, TRACE Content-Type = text/html
2010-05-06 11:07:31 +0200, TRACE Content-Length = 1731
2010-05-06 11:07:31 +0200, TRACE status = 500
2010-05-06 11:07:31 +0200, TRACE statusDes = internal server error
If you receive this error, please raise a ticket here but also with Alamy. This shows that their servers are overloaded or broken, and they should be advised as soon as possible. Send them the specific error message that appears in your AlamyExport.log, similar to the one highlighted in red above.
You have run the "Fetch Alamy Metadata" exporter but not all of your photos have had the Alamy details added to them.
When you upload a photo to Alamy they assign a value called "Your Reference" which is normally the filename, minus the file extension. That is, a photo called "IMG12345.CR2" would have a "Your Ref" value of "IMG12345". They also assign an "Alamy Reference" value which is unique, and will be a short sequence of letters and numbers e.g. "A3FM0K".
To correctly identify which photo in Lightroom's catalog matches a photo in Alamy's catalog, the plugin will try to use an "Alamy Ref" if one has been assigned. The problem is that this value is assigned by Alamy after the photo has been uploaded, and so the first time you try and match the images Lightroom doesn't have this value. It must use the "Your Ref" value instead.
This raises lots of potential problems. In the simplest case, you have only one photo in your catalog which matches the "Your Ref". However, it is also common for people to have several photos with the same filename, for example as virtual copies or "IMG1234.DNG" from different cameras. Some people renamed all their photos after uploading them to Alamy, some may have several copies of the same photo in different folders (backup, working copy, original etc.).
To try and work round this problem, the plugin gives several options to try and help identify the correct photo. These are the rules it follows:
1) Search the catalog for any photo where the filename matches the "Your Ref" supplied by Alamy.
2) If there is no exact match (i.e. no matches, or more than one), then try to find a photo in the catalog where the "Alamy Ref" value matches the one supplied by Alamy.
3) For each photo that's been found by (1) or (2), remove any that don't match the keyword list in the Export dialog if that keyword list is not empty.
4) For each photo that remains in the list, remove any that don't match the Virtual Copy name in the Export Dialog if that name is not empty.
5) If more than one photo remains, see if one has a "Media Ref" value set. This is assigned by the plugin when you use it to upload photos to Alamy. If one does, assume this is the correct match.
6) All remaining photos have the Alamy data assigned to them.
This sequence means that under most circumstances, most photos are matched. For the ones that aren't, it is up to you to match them. If you check the HTML logfile after a Fetch operation, it will show which photos couldn't be matched and will provide a link to Alamy's website for the preview of that image. You can then use the normal Lightroom library tools to find the corresponding image in your catalog. To manually match the image, copy and paste the "Alamy Reference" value from Alamy's preview page into the "Alamy Ref" field in Lightroom's Metadata panel. To show the right section of the panel, select the "Alamy Plus" Metadata group; this shows the new Alamy data as well as the more common IPTC and EXIF fields.
Finally, if you have an image which you believe should be matched automatically but wasn't, please check in your "Documents" folder. This will contain a file called "AlamyExport.log" and, after a Fetch, this will show many details of the Fetch process which will help to find out why the photo wasn't matched.
You need to resubmit some photos to Alamy but you get a message saying they have already been submitted.
When the plugin uploads an image, it stores the Alamy Media Reference in the submitted photo's metadata as an indication that it has been submitted. This is done for two reasons; first, it allows you to check which photos have been submitted. Secondly, the Media Reference is used when matching photos during the metadata download under some circumstances.
The "Media Reference" is not the same as the "Alamy Reference". The "Media Ref" is the same for each photo in each uploaded batch, and will typically be "OL#####". The "Alamy Ref" is unique to each picture.
The plugin will refuse to re-submit a photo if either the "Alamy Ref" or the "Alamy Media Ref" values are set. Clearing these is simple; select the photo or photos you want to re-submit and just erase the contents of those two fields using the Library's Metadata panel. They will be visible if you use the "Alamy" or "Alamy Plus" presets.
If you transfer your Lightroom catalog to a new machine or reinstall Lightroom from scratch, your Pseudonym file will appear to be older than the catalog and Lightroom will complain. Normally the plugin will be able to repair this on its own, but sometimes it needs some help.
To repair this, follow these steps:
1) Download an empty Pseudonym file from
here
2) Find the existing file. On the Mac it will be wherever you expanded the .zip file; on Windows it will be in %APPDATA%\Lightroom\Modules\AlamyUpload.lrplugin . In either case, you can find the exact path using Lightroom's Plugin Manager, even if the plugin fails to start.
3) Replace your existing Pseudonym file with the empty one.
4) Restart Lightroom. If it request another restart, do so. Then, run a Metadata Fetch export; it will re-download your pseudonyms and request that Lightroom is restarted (again!).
Your pseudonym file should now be repaired.
After you upload photos to Alamy, some of the fields are present but others are missing.
When you upload a new photo, the plugin will add as much of the standard metadata as it can to the JPEG. This covers the majority of the fields, specifically those which map directly to an IPTC metadata field. This is because the file that gets sent to Alamy is just that - a standard JPEG - and there is no way to send the Alamy-specific metadata at the same time.
On upload, Alamy accept it provisionally and only assign it a unique reference number and add it to their catalogue after it has been accepted by their QA. At this point they should email you, and you can now use the "Fetch Alamy Metadata" function to get their unique identifier for your photo. Now, Lightroom knows how Alamy refer to your photo and you can exchange the other metadata.
You can now use the "Set Alamy Metadata" function to send all the Alamy-specific metadata fields such as Essential and Main keywords, model release etc. At any point from now on you can use the Set or Fetch functions to synchronise the metadata, no matter whether you use Lightroom or Alamy's online tools to edit it.
SoftProof Plugin
Missing Profiles for SoftProofThe plugin searches for valid ICC profiles in the following locations:
Windows:
\system32\spool\drivers\color
Mac:
~/Library/ColorSync/Profiles
/Library/ColorSync/Profiles
/System/Library/ColorSync/Profiles
By default it shows only those profiles that are marked as belonging to a printer. You can choose to show all profiles by un-ticking the "Output Only" tickbox, to the right of the drop-down list of profiles.
It may be that the profiles are only currently available to the printing system in MacOS X, but not available for applications to use. This article from Epson, although written for the R360, would be relevant to many other printers:
http://www.epson.co.uk/Printers-and-All-In-Ones/Inkjet/Epson-Stylus-Photo-R360/Drivers-Support?target=article&extn=.html&articleId=1974
The Gamut warning box is disabled if you also have white-point simulation enabled. This is simply because of a bug in the underlying colour management engine. This has been reported to the author some time ago but, at least the last time I checked, has still not been fixed.
If you disable white-point simulation, the gamut warning tickbox should be enabled.
Useful
Not Useful
