So… a few weeks after I first thought up the idea, I’m officially releasing my Lightroom plugin for Sta.sh, as far as emailing links to people is ‘official’.
The plugin exports the IPTC Title, IPTC Caption and any keywords you have tagged the image with, as well as the image to Sta.sh. From there, you can submit to your dA gallery.
If you only care about the plugin, go to the page in dA and download it from there.
If you want to read about my impressions of stuff during the development, well, read on:
The actual coding was deceptively easy. I had the barebones of the export portion done in a week, based off the demo Flickr plugin that Adobe provided. Then I spent time mucking around with the Publish support in Lightroom, trying to get it Lightroom to sync up with dA’s API. Which, I can say right now, didn’t happen. The dA API right now is hit or miss. And when it misses, it does the equivalent of thermonuclear war on the uploads.
The initial upload to sta.sh works fine, and that forms the basis of the export plugin. But trying to get the publish functionality of Lightroom working with the way sta.sh tracks uploads is difficult, mainly because the dA team is seemingly still working the tracking part out. Right now, reuploading an image with the same sta.sh ID seemingly deletes the original image, and gives you back an error. (internal_error_item, I loathe thee. But perhaps this is why I can’t find the ‘Live Daylight Map’ on kouiskas‘s Gallery anymore.)
In contrast, the Lightroom API was a veritable joy to work with.The only really difficult thing was getting to understand Lua’s use of tables – and that’s not really the Lightroom people’s fault. So, of course, in grand cosmic irony, I groused about the Lightroom SDK, not the dA API. Mainly because I was silly enough to talk without trying it. Turns out, among other things, the reason you don’t need to specify a secure connection should be used because Lightroom is intelligent enough to detect that you used “https” instead of “http”.
This would have been of no significance whatsoever, except that I groused to Juileanne Kost over lunch while she was in Singapore. (Yes, the Juileanne Kost who does product evangelism for Lightroom/Adobe.) Now I feel bad about doing so, because the problems that I had with the SDK? Were actually my own problems. Mea culpa, Juileanne, and tell the Lightroom people thanks.
Also, thanks are due to Jeffery Friedl, for releasing a Lua JSON parser, without with I assure you this plugin would have never been completed. Never. (Go shower him with praise.)
And you, reader, since you bothered to read so far, mind posting a comment mentioning how you got here? A curious mind wants to know where he got mentioned. If anywhere.
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Cross posted to my dA Journal too, just for good measure.