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Importing WidePhotoViewer Selections into Lightroom

Here's how to export photos from Lightroom into WidePhotoViewer, make selections, or have your customers make them, and get the selections back into Lightroom:

1. Export the photos from Lightroom to SmugMug, using FTP directly to WidePhotoViewer, or to a Dropbox folder on your computer (with Lightroom's "Export to Hard Drive" exporter). Don't use Flickr, Facebook, or the Photo Library because those don't preserve the Lightroom file name, which is needed to synchronize the selections back into Lightroom.

   Make sure you keep the filename when you export—don't add a sequence number or change it in any way. It's also important that each original photo in Lightroom have a unique file name (not including extension), which will be shared by derivatives (e.g., MJR_20061221_0258.nef, MJR_20061221_0258.tif, and MJR_20061221_0258.jpg).

2. Select photos in WidePhotoViewer by tapping and holding a photo until a green star appears.
3. Choose Save Selections from the selection menu (pointing-finger icon) at the bottom of the screen.
4. If you're making selections on your own device, a file containing information about the selections will be saved on the device and also copied to your Dropbox folder. If the album name is, say, "Smith Wedding", the selections will be in a folder named "Smith Wedding-Selected-In-WPV". Inside that folder is an index.html file that you can open in a browser, and also a file named selections.txt that you'll need for Lightroom (see below).
5. If other people using their own devices are making selections (from SmugMug, presumably), they should tap the Email button that appears after selections are saved to email the selections to you:
   

   For more help on how others can use WidePhotoViewer to view your photos click here.

6. When you get the email (skip this step if selections weren't emailed), it will look like this in your email client:

   Save the email as plain text to a file anywhere on your computer. (The layout of the email may differ somewhat from the example shown here.)

7. One way or the other, from steps 4 or 5 you have a text file containing selection data on your computer. Its name is either selection.txt (from step 4) or whatever named you used to save the email as text (from step 5).

   Install the Lightroom plugin WPV-Selector, available here for a nominal extra cost. To install it, unzip it and copy the file/folder WPV-Selector.lrplugin to anywhere on your hard drive. Then use the Lightroom Plug-in Manager (on the File menu) to install it. Start by pressing the Add button at the lower-left of the dialog that appears. (You only have to do this once, of course.)

8. In Lightroom, select the menu item Library→Plug-in Extras→Import Selections from WidePhotoViewer:
   

   You'll see a dialog that looks like this:

   

   Choose the file that contains the selections (from step 4 or 5) and choose whether to mark the selected photos with a color label and/or the keyword WPVselected. Then press the Modify Metadata button and the plugin will mark the photos whose file names match the ones in the file of selections saved by WidePhotoViewer. The extensions don't figure in the matching, so a selected name like MJR_20061221_0258.jpg will match MJR_20061221_0258.jpg, MJR_20061221_0258.dng, and MJR_20061221_0258.nef.

   In addition to the label and/or keyword, the plugin also marks photos with a plugin-specific keyword that's equal to "Latest" for the photos matched by the plugin in this execution of the plugin, and "Yes" for previous matches. This allows you to set up two smart collections, one for each value. (You do this; the plugin doesn't do it for you.) One of them shows the images just modified, and the other shows images that were ever modified. Here's the smart collection showing the latest matches:

   

   From here, you can set additional keywords, add the photos to another collection, print, or whatever you want.

   Importing WidePhotoViewer Selections into Photo Mechanic

   The steps to import selections into Photo Mechanic are similar to those for Lightroom, but with the following restrictions:
   1. The actual files in Photo Mechanic have to be JPEGs. You can't export an embedded JPEG from a raw, for example. This is because, unlike the Lightroom plugin, Photo Mechanic matches on the complete file name (case sensitive), not just the part without the extension.
   2. When importing selections (using the Edit→Load Selection menu command), the photos to be selected from have to be in the current contact sheet (grid view). By contrast, the Lightroom plugin finds the photos by searching the entire catalog.