lightroom: how to upload photos to flickr and prevent duplicate uploads

Question

Test case:

• Collection C1 contains photos {A, B, C, D}
• Collection C2 contains photos {A, C, E, F}

When I upload these from Lightroom to Flickr (whether at the same time or in separate uploads), I should get 6 photos uploaded in two Flickr sets.

Instead, the photos that are in more than one set are uploaded multiple times.

Does anyone know a bugfix or workaround? I've tried the builtin flickr uploader and Jeffrey's Lightroom Exporter.

Answer 1

While Jeffery's Lightroom Exporter does seem to upload multiple times when using the traditional export mode, it at least doesn't result in multiple copies on Flickr (assuming you've set it to remove older copies of the same image).

It'd be nice if it could recognize no further edits have been made to the photo since you last uploaded it, but aside from that, there are also sharpening and JPEG quality settings in the exporter to contend with as well.

It looks like the Publish service is able to handle this:
http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/flickr/publish#comment-40161

Granted, I wouldn't be surprised if you publish to one set first and then go back and publish to another it'd upload again.

Answer 2

In the workaround category, you could use smart collections to identify which images haven't been uploaded.

In your example, you could create a smart colleection with the criteria of being in collection C2 and uploaded to Flickr being false.

It's not very graceful, nut it would solve your dilemma for a limited number of collections.