Open directly from Lightroom, and then

Retrobatch
1

I’m currently using a little app called PhotoBulk to prepare photos to submission to a client. I export from Lightroom at a particular pixel size, then go into PhotoBulk and perform two operations: optimize JPEG quality (I’ve found that setting PhotoBulk to its middle setting works well) and save (which PhotoBulk does in a subfolder), then copy the optimized versions over the originals; as a separate operation, load those optimized copies into PhotoBulk and resize to 800 pixels on the long edge (again, saved to a subfolder); finally, rename the 800 pixel versions with a suffix in Path Finder before compressing and uploading. This process works, but could definitely use less involvement on my end, and Retrobatch looks like it has the potential to make that happen.

First things first, I need for Retrobatch to be able to open directly from Lightroom, which has the ability to open exported files directly in another application at the end of the export process. This works with PhotoBulk, but Retrobatch says it is “unable to open files in the Preview.app Document format” for the exported JPEGs, which seems odd, since RB is perfectly fine loading a folder of JPEGs from within the application.

Once we cross that hurdle, I’d like to be able to do a JPEG optimization - resaving over the originals with a specified quality works well enough for my purposes - and then resize to 800 pixels on the long edge and save to a subfolder of the folder the original images loaded from (with a filename suffix, which seems to work fine already).

If it could then ZIP compress the contents of that folder, with the reduced-size subfolder included, that would be a bonus, but just getting to the point where I can just run a batch with minimal involvement would be a big step in the right direction.

So, is there something I can do to get Retrobatch to open a set of files directly from a Lightroom export? From there, I think I can save optimized JPEGs over the originals, and I believe saving (in my case, the 800 pixel versions) to a folder relative the source folder is already a feature request, but I’m not sure if/when that might be coming.

Thanks for all the work you’ve put into an interesting tool - I’m hoping it will be able to handle my specific use case at some point in the future.

2

I think Lightroom is trying to pass the images directly to Retrobatch, instead of a workflow within Retrobatch. Retrobatch can only open workflow files directly (like when dragging on it’s application icon).

Not currently- though we’ve had a couple of requests to be able to drag and drop images onto the app icon, and then run that image through whatever the open workflow currently is. So that’s something we’re considering, and would possibly work out well with Lightroom.

-gus

3

Gus - thanks, that all makes sense.

In an ideal world, might there be a way to designate a default workflow in Retrobatch that will run when it is called to open something other than a workflow? I guess this would be one step beyond running the currently-open workflow when files are dragged onto the icon.

Rick

4

The default workflow is something I had considered, and another is to say “the currently open workflow, when there’s only one open right now”.

We’ll see- the default one probably makes the most sense. And if one isn’t set, maybe default to whatever’s open?

5

I honestly didn’t know if the “default workflow” idea was even workable, to it’s good to hear that it’s something you were considering.

That would be pretty much ideal for my purposes, while also accommodating users who are looking for more of a drag-and-drop solution. Combining that with the ability to tell a workflow to save in a subfolder of the folder containing the currently-loaded files would get me most of the way to my objective.

Thanks!

6

I just realized that another future thing we’re going to do would work perfect for this situation. At some point we’re going to add droplet support, which are basically little applications that run workflows. Then you could point Lightroom to that, and it’ll do what you’re after.

7

That would be perfect. Let me know if you need help testing when you get to that point.

8

Retrobatch 1.1 now comes with Automator support, meaning you can now use Automator to make a droplet which runs a Retrobatch workflow.