Community @ The Turning Gate
Support community for TTG plugins and products.
NOTICE
The Turning Gate's Community has moved to a new home, at https://discourse.theturninggate.net.
This forum is now closed, and exists here as a read-only archive.
- New user registrations are disabled.
- Users cannot create new topics.
- Users cannot reply to existing topics.
You are not logged in.
- Topics: Active | Unanswered
Pages: 1
#1 2020-04-30 23:01:31
- Pfredd
- Member
- Registered: 2014-04-16
- Posts: 189
JSON
Thanks for the addition of the JSON interface in Backlight 3!
Any plans to add support for creating albums & uploading photos to Backlight with JSON? That way extensions could be written for other photo handler software, such as gThumb, on Linux.
Last edited by Pfredd (2020-04-30 23:02:46)
Offline
#2 2020-05-01 02:16:09
Re: JSON
That's a neat idea, and one I hadn't thought much about. We'll surely discuss it, and see where it leads ... my hope is this is just the beginning for the JSON API, and that we'll be able to expand it to do more heavy lifting over time.
Offline
#3 2020-05-01 07:27:29
- Ben
- Moderator
- From: Melbourne, Australia
- Registered: 2012-09-29
- Posts: 4,399
Re: JSON
This could already be done with the existing API that Lightroom uses. There's no need for an extra API. We haven't documented our API, or made a decision about whether it is a good idea to do so. (e.g. if it's in a a state of flux, or will cause support issues).
Offline
#4 2020-05-01 22:51:20
- SunFoxNC
- Member
- Registered: 2015-09-04
- Posts: 80
Re: JSON
One of the things I would love is some way to automate the creation of a hierarchy of album sets and albums in such a way that it is visible both in Lightroom and Backlight. It's not uncommon for my daughter's dance studio recital shoot to have two levels of album sets (top level and then 3-4 different shows with 20 dance routine albums per show) and creating them through Lightroom is rather painful.
I'm not sure what the best way to do that would be.
The most likely candidate (in my mind) would be a LUA script in Lightroom to interact with the Backlight Publisher directly to create the album sets and albums programmatically considering that implementing a true two-way sync between Lightroom and Backlight is likely to be far more of a pain than it's worth for the few of us who build massive gallery collections.
What would be really cool would be taking a top-level folder in Lightroom and having some sort of plug-in traverse the folders to build that hierarchy in the Backlight Publisher...all we'd really need to do is provide a slug prefix for the album sets/albums and the templates to use for album set and album and let it pick the name and description out of the folders themselves. And if such a hypothetical beast could automatically add the files to the albums wherever they exist, that would truly rock. At that point, my workflow becomes load the pictures, sort them by show and then dance, kill the rejects, and then let this thing build the huge recital galleries and hit [Publish] once it's done and let it run overnight! 
Push comes to shove, my current workflow (whilst somewhat painful) does the job I need it to do and Backlight's part in it really does shine in spite of Lightroom's limitations. If it weren't for the fact that Lightroom Mobile my iPad Pro is where I prefer to sift through the 14,000+ recital pictures, it'd be much easier to divorce myself from the Publisher for these massive galleries.
Offline
#5 2020-05-01 22:59:18
- Ben
- Moderator
- From: Melbourne, Australia
- Registered: 2012-09-29
- Posts: 4,399
Re: JSON
That's all very interesting, but also quite niche. Perhaps others better versed in the management of photos and collections will be able to suggest better ways of managing that workflow.
Offline
Pages: 1