Lightroom Plugin Update #2,800

Over the years I've published about 50 plugins for Lightroom, and of the
40ish that are still actively maintained, as of today I've put out a combined total of
2,800 updates.

I provide an
RSS feed for updates and so I normally write here only about the
release of new plugins, but today I pushed out a new release for my Folder
Watch plugin that made me reflect on just how much the plugins grow
over time.

Folder Watch originally grew out of a request from a Lightroom
friend for better automatic importing, such as one might want when
shooting tethered (especially since Lightroom didn't support any kind of
tethering at the time, in the spring of 2009). The first version could scan
a folder for new images, import them, and optionally have some simple
metadata like the title set. That was it.

Now, four and a half years later, with advances in Lightroom and what it
allows a plugin to do, Folder Watch offers fully-automated end-to-end
processing — import, develop, export — if you like.

Here's what the configuration looks like at the moment:

The last item on the list — the ability to have an automatic import trigger a publish operation — is
one of today's addition. Combined with, for example, an export-to-Facebook
plugin, you can create fully-automatic camera-to-Facebook processing.

It'd be nice if the plugin supported all the options that Lightroom's
normal import supports, but Lightroom offers no such hooks for this. That's
often the most limiting factor in all my plugin development... what hooks
Lightroom does and doesn't offer. (My stress and time are next on the list
of limiting factors.)

Another addition today is the ability to write dynamic values to the
title and caption fields, via the template
tokes my plugins support. This includes the ability to use the special
{LUA=...} token to execute
arbitrary code.

Folder Watch is certainly not my most popular plugin, but I spent
several days working on the various enhancements anyway, because it's fun
and I enjoy it. I hope someone finds it useful.