What is the Lightroom to Brickshelf Export Plugin?

It is a free software component that you can add to Lightroom to help you upload you pictures to brickshelf.com directly from Lightroom. It allows you to upload selected photographs (or entire folders) to your Brickshelf albums with just a few clicks. It will even create new folders in your Brickshelf account for your uploaded photographs. Additionally, if you tag your photographs with keywords, it will update your folder with the keywords for all the photographs it uploads.

Brickshelf is the worlds largest online collection of LEGO images and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 is a fantastic photograph management tool.

How much does it cost?

It's free! It's my way of giving back to the software community. If you are interested in developing your own plugin (or helping improve this one), the software is available for download under a free and open source license.

What do I need to run the plugin?

The plugin is written to be cross-platform compatible so it should work equally well on a Macintosh or a Windows computer. That being said, I've only tested it on a Mac. It also was designed to work with Lightroom 2 but may work with older versions of Lightroom. Again, I haven't tested it on older versions.

How do I install the plugin?

Download the zip file containing the plugin from the plugin download site. Once you've downloaded the plugin you need to unzip the downloaded archive. This will give you a file called "brickshelf.lrplugin". Move the brickshelf.lrplugin file to either

/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Plugins

(if you want this plugin to be available for every user on the computer or

~/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Plugins

if you want this plugin to be available for just the user installing the plugin. These directions are for installing the plugin on a Macintosh but installation on a Windows machine is similar, it's just the folder locations may be different.

How do I configure the plugin?

When you first run the plugin you need to enter your Brickshelf user name and password using the "Change User..." button under the "Brickshelf Account" section. The plugin remembers your name and password so you don't have to re-enter it every time you upload pictures.

I would recommend changing the File Naming section to use sequential numbering if you want your images to be displayed in your Brickshelf folder in the same order as Lightroom (assuming you use custom sorting like I do).

What about keywords?

If you assign any keywords to your photos, the plugin will update the folder with those keywords. Be careful, since it replaces all the keywords on the folder and does not update them. For example, if you already had the keyword MOC set on the folder and you uploaded a new picture with Train, the folder will not read MOC and Train but just Train. That's why it's better to upload all the pictures in one go.

To make my life easier, I created the following hierarchy in Lightroom which I use to keyword my photos:

These keywords map to the keywords Brickshelf uses when creating a folder. You can also add additional keywords. I like to add the names of the people in the photographs as well as other descriptive data.

What about bugs?

Bugs, in my code? Say it isn't so.

Well, I've been devloping software for most of my life and I fully except there are bugs I haven't found yet and for that I appologize. If you think you have found something which looks like a bug, please report it.

If you have a cool new feature you'd like to see added to this plugin I encourage you to you can submit the suggestion but I highly encourage you to take the code and make the change yourself. I would like to make additional changes but since I have many things going on in my life, it may take a while before I can implement certain changes.

Who are you?

I'm Abe Friedman. I develop software for a living and play with LEGO in my spare time. I'm also a freelance photographer and this was an opportunity to join all three of these skills. I was frustrated in how long it took for me to get my photographs uploaded to my Brickshelf account so I decided that, since I was using Lightroom 2 as my Digital Asset Management software, I could write a plugin to help me upload the photos.

It sounded like a good idea at the time. Unfortunatly it has taken me waaaaay longer to develop this plugin than I ever imagined and I'll never break even on the amount of time it has cost me versus the amount of time it will save me. Well, that wasn't the only reason for doing this. It gave me a chance to learn the Lua language and gave me a lot of satisfaction in finally finishing it.

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