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My Lightroom image catalog contains a mixture of JPEG images as well as raw files developed inside Lightroom. I'd like to upload my unedited JPEG images to SmugMug "as-is" (i.e. "Original", no resize/recompress), while still allowing the publishing plugin to convert my developed raw files to JPEG at a quality I set.

Is this possible?

The "File Settings" dialog which allows me to specify either "JPEG" or "Original" for upload. Selecting JPEG means that all images get converted to JPEG (resulting in re-compression of my original JPEGS). This is not what I want. Selecting "Original" doesn't work because the raw files need to be converted to JPG for upload.

Is there any way to do what I want? I can get around this issue for my hard drive publishing services (I create two - one for unedited JPGs, another for everything else), but that approach seems awful messy (perhaps not even possible) with the SmugMug plugin since it is syncing between LR and SmugMug.

Ideally what I would like is this: Under "File Settings", to be able to select "JPEG" and then have a preference "Do not recompress unedited JPEGs".

Any ideas?

Thank you. Chris

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3 Answers

up vote 4 down vote

Give this new version of the plugin a try.

A new option has been added to the Publish Manager screenenter image description here

Please let us know if this works as you expect.

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Hi, sorry for the late reply - I only just now saw that you replied. This is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for! Thank you! I will try it out soon as i can (probably in next day or two) and will report back. I'll also submit this as a feature request to Adobe to allow this capability natively in the 'File Settings' dialog in the Publish Manager. – Chris S Mar 1 '12 at 18:22
David, afraid it didn't work. Here is what I did: 1. Installed plugin. 2. Sync with my SM account. 3. Photos synced as expected. 4. Now, I added 2 keywords to an unedited (in LR) JPG image. Image now shows as "modified photos to re-publish". 5. Publish. Now I go to Smugmug and download the image to my computer. Metadata indicates it was written by LR and is 2MB smaller than original, suggesting decompression. My settings: i.imgur.com/frYZY.png – Chris S Mar 4 '12 at 4:18
Sorry for poor formatting above, I tried to follow the guidelines in the help but couldn't get it to work. One other interesting point: it seems (sometimes?) that if I just right-click an unchanged image and then "Mark to Republish", then Publish, that it does not recompress. Changing metadata then publishing seems to trigger a recompress. – Chris S Mar 4 '12 at 4:56
@ChrisS I'm using an 'editCount' parameter via LR SDK and it appears that LR might increment that parameter under circumstances other than actually editing the photo. I'll do some more testing and see if I can come up with a different method but it might be out of my control. – David Parry Mar 4 '12 at 7:12
OK, understood. In terms of Smart Collection rules, I'd like any image having ["File Type" "is" "JPEG"] && ["Has Adjustments" "is false"] to not be recompressed. Not sure if you have access to that data via SDK though. (?) I did make a formal request to Adobe: goo.gl/S82yl – Chris S Mar 4 '12 at 14:20
up vote 1 down vote

We should be able to add this setting, but we won't be able to add it to 'File Settings' section of the Publish Manager, as that is a pre-defined section that we can't modify.

I'll ping you when I have a version available for testing.

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I am curious how this would impact SmugVault? – Bradford Benn♦ Feb 25 '12 at 5:28
@BradfordBenn Not sure how this jpeg-only workflow affects SmugVault ? – David Parry Feb 26 '12 at 0:07
I did not catch it was JPG only. I was thinking RAW files being stored as well – Bradford Benn♦ Feb 26 '12 at 2:50
up vote 0 down vote

I just ran a few tests that may answer your question.

1) Set the LR plugin file settings to 'Format: Original' - upload one .CR2 (RAW) file - upload one .jpg file

Then I downloaded both from the gallery to my computer to compare to the originals. The CR2 was converted to a JPG - I'm assuming this conversion is performed server-side as a requirement of displaying the file. The .jpg file was not compressed at all - at least the metadata said so, and the file size was slightly bigger than the original (because LR added extra metadata)

2) Set the LR plugin file settings to 'Format: JPEG' and set 'Quality: 100' - upload one .jpg file

Then I downloaded that jpg file and compared to the original on my disk. Again the metadata shows no compression was applied. HOWEVER The file sizes were significantly different:

orignal.jpg 1,849 KB uploaded.jpg 3,177 KB

LR added some of its metadata prior to upload, but not 1 MB worth. I suppose this is an artifact of JPEG compression which I'm not familiar with, perhaps a bunch of padding was added unnecessarily to the file. If that's the case I feel sorry for Smugmug's hard drives.

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Compressing at 100% JPEG quality just results in a larger file; it's not necessary to go that high. Jeffrey Friedl did a good writeup on this: regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/jpeg-quality – Andrew Maiman Feb 24 '12 at 1:11
That's a great analysis from Jeffrey, thanks for the link. So I think the answer to the question then, based on that and my own testing is - upload as 'Format: Original'. – webby Feb 24 '12 at 4:46

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