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Lightroom Publisher Plug-in

At this point, you've already installed the Publish Services plug-in for Lightroom. Now, let's develop a better understanding of the thing.

Once installed, "TTG Publisher" will appear in your Publish Services panel in Lightroom's Library module, beneath Folders and Collections on the left-hand side.

You can access the publisher's settings in either of two ways:

  • Double-click TTG Publisher.
  • Right-click TTG Publisher, select "Edit Settings..." from the context menu.

This will open the Lightroom Publishing Manager.

Editing Settings​

In the Lightroom Publishing Manager, select "TTG Publisher" in the list of Publish Services.

Under Settings, the plug-in settings will appear, divided into sections. Your choices here will impact all albums and album sets belonging to the publish service.

Publish Service​

Description​

Name your publish service. This is only visible in Lightroom, and typically will indicate what the service is used for. For example, name your publish service for its respective website.

Publisher API Details​

As described in the installation document, the API details connect your publish service to Backlight, allowing Lightroom to communicate with your website for the purpose of creating and managing albums, album sets, images, metadata, etc.

  • The API URL will be http://yourdomain.com/backlight/publisher.
  • The API Key, you will have set on the Quick Settings page when installing Backlight.

The API Key is arbitrary, so use anything you like, similar to creating a strong password. The only requirement is that you use the same API Key both in Publisher's settings and in Backlight's settings.

Other Publisher Options​

Top-level galleries directory​

Specify a folder name to act as parent to your albums and album sets; we use "galleries" by default, but you can change this if you want to, or if you're publishing to a second (or third!) location and "galleries" is already taken by another instance of TTG Publisher.

The top-level of your album structure will be visible at http://yourdomain.com/galleries, or whatever name your provide if not using "galleries".

Show albums in browser after publishing​

After completing a publish job, publisher will open the newly created or updated album in a browser window.

Preserve capitalization in slugs​

If disabled, album slugs will be converted to lowercase, which is usually considered to be best practice. If you have reason to preserve capitalization, though, this will do it.

Push metadata without updating existing photos​

This option is solid gold. Normally, when an image is marked to re-publish, Lightroom redoes the entire job, creating and uploading new JPGs for each defined image rendition (large, thumbnail, etc.) and updating all associated metadata. For images already published, this option allows you to push only the metadata, a huge time-saver when you only need to update, for example, image titles or captions.

New images, not already in the gallery, will be published in full, even when this option is enabled, so this will not hinder your publishing of new images or albums when checked.

Publish thumbnails without updating other renditions​

Similar to above, but pushes only the thumbnail renditions. Use this option when changing album thumbnails sizes or grid layout, saving time by not having to regenerate larger renditions.

Delay API Requests by XX seconds​

A troubleshooting feature. Rarely, some hosts will interpret publisher's connection requests when uploading images as a DDoS attack on the server, preventing publisher from doing its job. For the vast majority of users, this is not an issue, but it has come up a few times with GoDaddy subscribers in particular. By introducing a short delay between requests, you can try to mitigate this issue.

Other Options​

The HTTP Authentication, File Naming, Metadata and Watermarking settings should be fairly self-explanatory. If you have questions regarding these, please ask in the forum.

Multiple Publishers​

If you need to publish to more than one website or location, you can create multiple instance of TTG Publisher. Right-click TTG Publisher, then select "Create Another Publish Service via TTG Publisher" from the context menu.