Can Lightroom 3 publish services be migrated when merging catalogs into Lightroom 5?
Asked 2/25/2015
4 views
2 answers
0
I’m moving from Lightroom 3 to Lightroom 5 and merged several smaller catalogs into one larger catalog successfully. However, my Publish Services did not come across. I have many Flickr-linked collections/sets and would like to preserve those connections if possible. Is Publish Service configuration stored in the catalog, or elsewhere? Has anyone found a workable way to migrate or copy those settings manually, even if it requires editing files?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
11y ago
2 Answers
2
I've poked into this a bit in the past, and you won't like the answer much.
Publish services, because they interact with so many parts of Lightroom and with code blocks installed as plug-ins, are complicated beasts. Adobe's chosen to store their configuration information in the preferences file, not in a preset file.
The preferences file for Lightroom 5 (on a Mac) is in ~user/Preferences/com.adobe.Lightroom5.plist
Taking a look at the configuration block for my Flickr publish module (using Jeffrey Friedl's plug-in) it's about 2,000 lines of data out of almost 30,000 lines of preference material.
So if you're going to do this, it's going to be complicated and fussy. there are a lot of opaque content pieces that are likely specific to that copy of Lightroom and won't work if you simply copy/past them.
What I would do if I was going to go down this path: install the plug-in, configure it, and then try copy/pasting the folder structures from one preference to the other and hope it works. It might (it might not). Do this ON A COPY in case things break badly.
if you're trying to pull in presets from three different lightroom catalogs into one and make it all work by hacking presets, I expect you'll spend a lot of time trying and be unhappy on the other end.
At some point, it's faster and less risky to simply do it by hand and reinitialize things. That is honestly what I'd do. I've got a fair amount of experience geeking low level things like this and I wouldn't do it. I don't think this is a problem by Adobe, this is a big hairy beast.
One thing that can save you some (possibly a lot of) time: if you use a plug-in like Jeffrey Friedl's, it can look at your new Lightroom collection and compare it to what is published on Flickr and reconnect the two, so you don't have to republish everything.
http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/flickr/publish
Look in the "Syncing Flickr Data" portion of the plug-in's preference section in the Plug-in Manger (right-click the plug-in name in the left sidebar to bring up "edit preferences"). It'll solve some of the problems. Assuming that works properly (I've had problems with it, problems on the Flickr side -- it's API has been intermittently flakey for a while) that'll get you all of the images tied together and then it's a matter of recreating the collections and etc. Perhaps you might be able to do some of that by copying from one preferences file to another, but honestly, I wouldn't. Too many places for it to go wrong and no real way to debug or fix except blind luck.
good luck.
Originally by user705. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user705
11y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
Lightroom Publish Services are generally not stored with the catalog the way you might expect. Based on the community answers, their configuration is kept largely in Lightroom’s preferences file rather than as simple preset files, which makes manual migration difficult.
That means merging catalogs won’t necessarily bring Publish Services along. The settings can be large, complex, and may include opaque plugin-specific data, so copying them by hand is possible in theory but risky and fussy in practice.
A reasonable starting point is to locate Lightroom’s preferences file for your version and compare the old and new files to identify Publish Service-related blocks. On Mac, Lightroom 5 preferences were noted as being in:
~/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.Lightroom5.plist
Some Publish Service data may also relate to plugin components, so success is not guaranteed even if you copy matching sections.
In short: yes, the information appears to live primarily in preferences, not the merged catalog; there is no simple supported migration path mentioned here; and manual editing is advanced, fragile, and best attempted only with full backups of catalogs and preference files.
Recommended products
UniqueBot
AI11y ago
Your Answer
Related Questions
Can Lightroom sync and update Flickr photos that were uploaded before using Lightroom?
How can I avoid duplicate Flickr uploads from overlapping Lightroom collections?
How can I import my Flickr photos and metadata into Lightroom?
Can Lightroom publish new photos to an existing Flickr album?
How can I have Lightroom 3 publish RAW photos to Flickr as resized JPEGs?