Community @ The Turning Gate

Mostly I am trying to make bigger (useable for iconic) thumbnails, but I have discovered that Lightroom is not making new image editions at all when I "mark to republish". It does make the new renditions (to the size I have set) when publishing new albums. It even does when I add a new photo to an existing album, but I cannot trigger a new rendition for an already existing image.

(yes, I am aware of the "make custom thumbnails post" by Matt. the problem is I really want to have random thumbnails, and I have a lot of album sets to keep track of, too many to choose custom thumbnails for)

Failure process:
- Updated from CE3 to Backlight2
- Accepted when Lightroom wanted me to republish when setting up new publisher plug-in
- "Publish" all albums and sets
- Notice that (in ftp client) the dates of files in "thumbnails" and "photos" have not changed (most date back to 2015, oldest to 2009)
- Notice that thumbnail sizes are really small (long ago setting was 180px)
- Add new photo to album and publish and it gets correct sized rendition

So, it's working correctly for new images (and hence probably not a backlight problem) but Lightroom is not generating new renditions for previously (CE3) published albums.

What am I missing?

There used to be a way to display panoramas (in CE4) with the stage plug-in so that they would scroll rather than scale. There seems to be no way to do this in Backlight. Does anyone have any clever ideas to do this?

I havn’t been able to find anything on the site or docs;

Where and how many times may I install and use Backlight?

I manage several sites, most on one server, but not all. I spin up test sites. I install dev instances in sub directories.  How many times an under what circumstances are allowed for one purchase (order number)?

All the sites I own (I have access to and am putting my credentials into)? Just one?  Just one domain?

Mostly curious,  but it may be handy to use in two domains and have a test “instance” in a subdirectory.

What is the official answer? (Keeping in mind I am unlikely to buy more than one full priced licence)

I have managed to somewhat successfully upgrade my existing site, however:

I can not authenticate the API in Lightroom "Authentication check was NOT successful"
    API URL is http://www.lightsmithy.com/backlight/publisher/  (note that it will not let me delete that trailing slash)

I am also unable to publish an image using the web publisher, "Upload failed" and then "Upload error". I can create an album and album set, but cannot upload an image.

I have:

-  removed all other instances or TTG publisher and older versions from Lightroom, and installed and reinstalled the version downloaded from my backlight site.

-  Reinstalled the entire backlight installation from the modules page

-  Poked around with the designer and Backlight seems to be functional other than not publishing anything in any way.

I can't find any specific match here for my problem and the similar ones have not provided a solution. Not sure how to proceed from here.

Something is causing my autoindex thumbnails to break, and I can't figure out what. (It wasn't what I thought)

see http://www.lightsmithy.com/collections/01parks/

Some of the thumbnails are missing, some are working. All auto indexes were created using the same template with the same settings (cover image set to random). I had thought that it had something to do with nested album sets, until I noticed that Eastern Mountains was broken (it doesn't have any nested sets) and Pacific region is not, though it does have nested album sets (thumbnails on auto index's within /pac are broken when there are nested sets, is that a coincidence?)

I can manually set thumbnails from the list, but that is not as nice as the random thumbnails (IMHO)

http://www.lightsmithy.com/collections/02regional/ is 100% broken

These are a mx of CE3 upgraded to CE4 published incidences and new published only with CE4. Eastern Mountains is upgraded (and does not have custom-thumbnail directory or a mobile-thumbnail directory. Pacific was created with CE4

Any idea what I've done wrong?