setup alamy lightroom bridge

[James Hodgson]

Hi

The instructions for using this are a little beyond me. Can anyone help in the setup process?

It just doesnt seem to work..

Thanks in advance...

J

[Russell]

Don't despair James. It does work, though not necessarily in the way you intuitively think it will. I too had a lot of trouble to start with, and even now I'm working on some issues with the developers.

 

I'm going to assume that you are trying to integrate your existing Alamy collection into the Bridge. The key here is the filename for the image and the filename on Alamy. For the Bridge to initially pick up the Alamy data and match it to an image in LR they MUST have the same filename. In my case they didn't as I had created descriptive filenames (e.g. "Bridge over the River.jpg") for my Canon raw image nnnnn.cr2 files.

 

So I realised that it was going to be hard to download the Alamy data for my 1,800 or so images on Alamy and decided to take a gradual approach. So I've manually (copy & paste) added the Alamy reference for selected images (all those that have sold, all those that had been zoomed, all of the 2018 uploads) to the Alamy reference field in the extended metadata. Once the Alamy reference is added, I then used the Bridge export/download Alamy data function to retrieve full Alamy dataset for these selected images. Over time I'll update all of my images in this way.

 

Meanwhile I now use the Bridge to upload my images to Alamy (I don't bother keeping the .jpg) and that works pretty well though I do have a problem with it not properly updating the tag/supertag counts which I'm working on with the developers. The other major change that I have made is that I've modified the LR import to add the date to the beginning of the canon generated filename. This is because the counter had repeated so I had occurrences of duplicate raw filenames which confuses the Bridge.

 

Hope this helps, let us know how you get on.

[Matt Limb]

10 minutes ago, Russell said:

The other major change that I have made is that I've modified the LR import to add the date to the beginning of the canon generated filename. This is because the counter had repeated so I had occurrences of duplicate raw filenames which confuses the Bridge.

 

A workflow that creates unique and easy to generate filenames, that is automatically done on import into LR, are key not only to Alamy Lightroom Bridge but for everyday digital file management.

 

For what it is worth, I do not have any descriptive text, commission details, location data or other text in the filename - all that can be added into the specific metadata fields, this keeps the unique filename short and easy to manage and allows a full automated import.

 

All my files names follow this routine:  ML_YYMMDD_00001.xxx   -  ML are my initials if another photographer works for us we use their initials, in the early days when we were busy scanning film and digitising the collection we used SC to show scanned.  The date group of YYMMDD is self-evident plus the 00001 allows up to 10,000 shots a day to be imported without the risk of duplication - yet we maintain a short file name, which has great advantages when communicating with clients.

 

Hope that helps.