Community @ The Turning Gate

Ahhh, yes! I now have a working test.

Good catch - my installation of PHP7 doesn't have short tags enabled, which would account for the borkage.

Now all I need is the time to configure it!

Many thanks, Daniel

Thanks for the replies - I'll have another try and report back later

Castell Coch was a late 19th century "restoration" of  a ruin. It is deeply unreal, and all the better for it

It's what happens when somebody incredibly rich hires an imaginative architect. They did some impressive work at Cardiff Castle, too.

I did a bit more digging and found the Lightroom Voyager plugin, which does what I'm after.

What it does is export the albums and publisher settings as a catalog (optionally including the source image files). This can then be imported into another instance of Lightroom. If there's no matching Publish Service, it creates it as a new one, complete with all albums. If there is a matching Publishing Service, it adds any missing albums and updates existing ones.

If the images already exist in the destination catalog, you need to tick the box to import metadata and publisher settings, otherwise it'll just stare at you and not want to import anything.

It's free to try (limited to exporting 50 images at a time), and costs US$20 to register. Works for me on macOS with LR Classic CC.

Lightroom Voyager Plugin

While working form within Lightroom suits my workflow, I can see the advantage of an independent publisher.

Feature request: cloud (Dropbox/iCloud/etc) sync or storage for managed albums, so albums can be published from multiple computers when needed (main computer at base, laptop when travelling or on site), but all albums can be managed from any computer. Does that make sense?

Yup, tested and working on my MacBook (the bigger catalog on the iMac will have to wait for now)

There's another approach you can use for functions you want to be always available regardless of theme changes.

You can put the functions into a simple plugin - the source I borrowed the idea from called this a "functionality plugin" (I can't recall where I got the idea, as it was a few years ago).

Create a suitably named folder in the WordPress plugins folder, and add your new PHP file in there. It should looks something like this:

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: My Site Functionality Plugin
Description: Repalces functions.php in child theme
Version: 1.0
License: GPL
Author: Your name
Author URI: http://yoursite.com
*/

// Note about the following function

// Your functions here

?>

Once it's saved, it will appear in your plugins list where it can be activated as normal.

I find this handy for various little WordPress tweaks.