Sync metadata with SmugMug

[Boatguy]

Right now the integration between SmugMug and PM is pretty basic, just FTP.  With the catalog coming, all my metadata will presumably be centralized in the catalog.

Now I need a cloud solution and I don't like Photoshop.com.  I'd like to be able to sync data from my PM catalog with my photos in SmugMug.  In conjunction with SmugMug's smart folders I could reconfigure, reorganize and change my presentations on SmugMug just by changing the metadata in PM.  Very powerful.

It seems like a natural alliance, or at least a nice piece of functionality, that would be beneficial to both companies.  Wishful thinking?

[Kirk Baker]

Right now the integration between SmugMug and PM is pretty basic, just FTP.  With the catalog coming, all my metadata will presumably be centralized in the catalog.

Now I need a cloud solution and I don't like Photoshop.com.  I'd like to be able to sync data from my PM catalog with my photos in SmugMug.  In conjunction with SmugMug's smart folders I could reconfigure, reorganize and change my presentations on SmugMug just by changing the metadata in PM.  Very powerful.

It seems like a natural alliance, or at least a nice piece of functionality, that would be beneficial to both companies.  Wishful thinking?

Unless your images are permanently offline, your metadata in the catalog and the images themselves will always be in sync.  Without re-uploading your images to SmugMug, I'm not sure how PM would let SmugMug know about the changes you've made to your images.

-Kirk

[Boatguy]

I'm not familiar with the SmugMug API's to know exactly what is and isn't possible.  However when I asked them about LR and PM, I received this reply:

"If the images were published from Lightroom, the metadata can be synced between the images published and the originals in the LR catalog. Any metadata added on the site will not be synced, like keywords and captions. Comments, are able to be synced back to the images in LR."

One of the things that SmugMug and LR users keep asking for is a way to sync "Favorites" metadata from SmugMug to LR.  This allows customers to review a shoot on the SM site, and their selections to be fed back into LR.  It's high up on the list of requests so I suspect SM will enable it in their API.

I'm going to do some testing to see how this really works.