How to link uploads back to Lightroom?
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When you are a Lightroom user and have a Photoshelter account for your photography business, life became so much easier since the lightroom export plugin turned into a publish service. But what if you have uploaded some or even thousands photos before you started using the export plugin, then you have many images on Photoshelter that are not linked to the originals in your Lightroom catalog. There is a way to solve this.

Linking uploaded photos to lightroom

The pact export plugin stores the Photoshelter image ID in a custom Metadata field of photo in your Lightroom catalog. It also marks the photo as "On Photoshelter".

Both custom metadata fields are editable so by filling in the correct Photoshelter image ID it is possible to manually link Photoshelter images to your lightroom Catalog. If you have many images uploaded before uploading with the export plugin, this can be a tiring procedure.

These custom metadata fields are searchable so you can create a smart collection to contain all photos marked as on Photoshelter.

Locate images on Photoshelter

I added two options to the "Plug-in Extra's" menu of lightroom.

Locate images on Photoshelter

This option will query all your Photoshelter Archive folders for photos and tries to locate these images in your Lightroom catalog. For images that are found, it fills the custom metadata with the Photoshelter image ID. To identify the correct image in Lightroom it uses the filename. It assumes you have unique filenames in Lightroom and that this filename is used or is used as a prefix on Photoshelter.

uniquefilename.nef uniquefilename-title.jpg

The locate process is very time consuming and its results vary. I recommend using this option since it stores the found image IDs in the custom metadata. The import images option when creating a publish service uses the same slow search process but it first looks in the custom metadata to see if the image ID is already available.

remove photoshelter images links

This option removes the stored custom metadata from the selected images. It is useful to clear the Photoshelter image IDs from images that were incorrectly identified with the locate images option.