SmugMug & PM users - Talk to me about keyword syncing

[Nine22]

Ok, I've heard some amazing things about this software for keywording, one area that takes me hours/days to do when I shoot event. I mainly shoot cross country events, and currently cull/edit photos in Lightroom, and then upload to my smugmug, then I have the wife copy and past names off of a spreadsheet provided by the event host to update the keywords (names and bib numbers). I find the LR process very clunky, especially when sometimes doing 1000's of photos with unique keywords.

Almost everything i've seen about photo mechanic, and smugmug is old and very vague when it talks about the smugmug integration, anyone has experience with smugmug that can explain if it can sync the keywords without having to reupload all of them (the faster the photos up and tagged/keyworded the more the sales).

Thanks

[Kirk Baker]

Photo Mechanic has no way to tell SmugMug about updated keywords.  Our only communication with SmugMug is via uploading of images that contain metadata.

The SmugMug API only offers updating a "Comment" after an image is uploaded.  Nothing related to keywords exists in their API.

-Kirk

[Nine22]

Ah, Once the images are keyworded I just hit the sync/publish button, in lightroom and walk away. So you are telling me its uploading the images all over again(at this point in my work flow I hate lightroom and check it a day later to make sure there was no errors, so it could be taking long enough to reupload all the images.)

[Kirk Baker]

Ah, Once the images are keyworded I just hit the sync/publish button, in lightroom and walk away. So you are telling me its uploading the images all over again(at this point in my work flow I hate lightroom and check it a day later to make sure there was no errors, so it could be taking long enough to reupload all the images.)

Yes, I would expect that LR is uploading the images to SmugMug.

-Kirk

[Nine22]

I looked into this, because the republishing seemed to be fast, the smugmug LR plug in does allow metadata only republishing... I also found a solution to my issue... albit a crazy work around that is still way faster than my old way.

The whole reason why I had to tag later was because its more important to have the photos uploaded than to have images tagged(people will spend HOURS clicking through thousands of photos on my site to find their own). it also didn't help the event coordinator would give me the file like 8 hours after the event ended... But what I did end up doing at my last race, edited the photos in LR and uploaded them to my smugmug, I got the participants list after I was done uploading. What I do before I uploaded the photos to smugmug I exported to a jpg to add the printmark(via watermark feature) the use the upload tool. I then took in those images into PM, and did the key wording, back in LR I then synchronized metadata that PM just added to the jpegs and now can sync the metadata with smugmug!

Thankfully I got the event coordinator to give me the file before my next race so I can do it in the proper order next time.