A while back, I noticed that when I exported photos from Adobe Lightroom and uploaded them to Flickr, not all of my keywords were appearing. At first, I assumed it was just a bug with the Flickr uploader and I would just manually add the missing keywords back in. But lately, I’ve been uploading images to my SmugMug account and I found the same issue. Only certain keywords were applied to my uploaded images. I finally did some research and discovered there was a bug with the initial release of Lightroom 2 where pre-existing keywords in your LR 1.0 database were set to not be exported during the catalog upgrade process. This was fixed in subsequent versions of LR2 so if you upgraded from LR 1.x to the current LR 2.3, you are fine.
There is a fix posted by Adobe on their website. You can find it here: http://www.adobe.com/go/kb405074
The fix actually introduced me to two features of Lightroom I didn’t even know existed. First, if you double-click on a keyword in the Keyword List (right pane in Library mode), you get a dialog with options for that keyword, one of which is to “Include on Export”. Nice. Now I can use special keywords to help organize my photos, but not have to worry about sharing them with the rest of the world when I export them to Flickr, SmugMug, or Facebook. How did I miss this feature?
The second feature was the Scripts menu that appears if you follow option one in the fix. I didn’t know I could write user scripts that would appear in the menu. I wonder what other kind of scripts could be written to automate tasks in Lightroom. For instance, for trektrax.com, I have created multiple export presets to export my images in various sizes for uploading to the web, using in the video slideshows, etc. Could I write a script to run multiple export presets with one-click rather than having to manually run each one? That would be nice. I’ll definitely have to look into this.
Update: Apparently others had the same idea. Here’s a response from Adobe on the user scripts that I found in the Adobe forums:
At this point we won’t be providing any more information about this scripting interface beyond what’s available as a solution for the Keyword bug referenced in the KB article. It’s an API that the development team can use for troubleshooting or solving specific issues.
