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Author Topic: Synchronizing image stacks between Lightroom and Bridge  (Read 2628 times)

Chris Pollock

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Synchronizing image stacks between Lightroom and Bridge
« on: May 20, 2012, 03:31:47 am »

I've recently been trying out Lightroom 4 to see if it offers enough functionality to be worth using in Addition to Photoshop and Bridge.

I imported my photo collection into Lightroom and it seemed to get all the metadata, with one exception - it ignored the image stacks that I created in Bridge. Does anyone know if there's a way to make Lightroom recognize stacks created in Bridge?

As an aside, there seems to be something unusual about the way stacks are stored in Bridge. I wrote something in ExtendScript to synchronize Camera Raw settings and keywords between DNG files on my Laptop and desktop by copying the metadata rather than the whole files. This seems to synchronize the files perfectly, but it doesn't copy stacks.
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john beardsworth

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Re: Synchronizing image stacks between Lightroom and Bridge
« Reply #1 on: May 20, 2012, 04:36:40 am »

Chris

The stacks don't communicate at all. Stacking info is never stored in the file's xmp metadata, which explains why LR and Bridge stacks don't sync and why the ExtendScript metadata model doesn't  allow you to sync the stack data. In LR it's stored in the catalogue, in Bridge in the cache.

Re your  "in addition", in general you will find that Lightroom will completely replace Bridge for photographs, and will probably mean you're using Photoshop much less and only for the difficult stuff - eg removing particularly nasty distractions.

John
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Chris Pollock

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Re: Synchronizing image stacks between Lightroom and Bridge
« Reply #2 on: May 20, 2012, 06:07:01 am »

Thanks for the information, although it's not the answer that I was hoping for. :( It seems like a strange oversight on Adobe's part, but we all make mistakes.

I think that Lightroom could indeed replace Adobe Bridge and ACR for most of my work. The only serious weakness that I've noticed so far is that it lacks support for ExtendScript. I've written a few scripts to automate or simplify various tasks.
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john beardsworth

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Re: Synchronizing image stacks between Lightroom and Bridge
« Reply #3 on: May 20, 2012, 06:14:19 am »

There is an SDK based on an obscure language called Lua - OK for trained programmers, a long haul for those of us who aren't.
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Chris Pollock

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Re: Synchronizing image stacks between Lightroom and Bridge
« Reply #4 on: May 20, 2012, 09:34:59 am »

I remember hearing that parts of Lightroom were written in Lua, but I didn't know that there was a publicly available SDK.

I am actually a programmer by trade, but C++ is my language of choice. I've never even heard of Lua except in relation to Lightroom, and know nothing about it. I've found some documentation at http://www.lua.org/manual/5.2/manual.html which I may read out of curiosity. Learning a new language isn't particularly hard, but it would be annoying to spend time learning such an obscure one. I don't much care for JavaScript, but at least it's reasonably widely used.

The existence of the SDK does suggest a way to sychronize stacks between LR and Bridge, albeit an inelegant one. I could write a script to export Bridge stacks to a text file, and a LR script to parse the file and recreate the stacks. I know that the Bridge part is easy, but I don't know if the LR part is even possible. I'll need to have a look at the SDK.
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john beardsworth

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Re: Synchronizing image stacks between Lightroom and Bridge
« Reply #5 on: May 20, 2012, 10:10:14 am »

Then you have an easier start than I did. But AFAICS stacking is only possible when first adding photos to the catalogue.
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