I’ve just released version 3.3 to fix a harmless bu t very annoying bug that I introduced yesterday – sorry – and I took the opportunity to address what must be one of the most frequent questions about the plugin – why can’t it access the User Comment field?

No-one knows why Adobe have never made this field available to plugins – it looks like a simple oversight – and despite many requests from plugin developers Adobe have never gone back and added the field to the SDK (the mechanism plugins use to access Lightroom data).

Using the back door SQL method I mentioned when version 3 was released, Search & Replace can now read the EXIF User Comment and copy it to other fields.

So access to User Comment is read-only – the plugin can’t update the field values. While I suspect I could use some SQL to update the catalogue, that’s a red line for me.

My jb Video Metadata 3 plugin lets Lightroom save metadata into videos and read it from them – an amazing omission by Adobe.

It now also lets you add metadata to videos which are exported from Lightroom, and it looks very different:

• Instead of the previous “ignore these fields” concept, it’s now a conventional “choose these fields” approach
• More IPTC fields are available
• Fields from the Video metadata panel are available for saving
• Some QuickTime fields are available on an experimental or “at your own risk” basis
• Reading/Writing XMP sidecars is now possible, mainly for those who want to exchange metadata with Lightroom Desktop (Cloudy)
• The log files are now more readable as well as extensive

Let me know if you try version 3 and give me your feedback – good or bad.

Get Search & Replace from Photographer’s Toolbox

A couple of changes to Search & Replace plugin (available from here) may appear small on the surface, but in fact they are built on such a significant extension to the plugin’s capability that they merit a jump to version 3.

What’s new is that the plugin is now reading information directly from the catalogue SQL data to:

• Get people named by LR’s facial recognition and list them from left to right
• Convert reverse-geocoded locations to locally-entered values

Over the years many people have asked me about using this information. Often they question why the plugin’s Caption Builder or Transfer functions don’t read the four IPTC location fields like Country and Location for some photos, and it was usually because those fields displayed text in italics. This indicated that they were “reverse-geocoded” or obtained from Google, and Adobe have never allowed plugins to read this data. The solution was to enter the location fields manually, which is tedious. Similarly, maybe as a result of privacy concerns or some 3rd party licences, Adobe have never let plugins read the facial recognition regions, and other potentially-useful information isn’t available too.

Others’ plugins have worked around these limitations, bypassing the Google-based geotagging or by using 3rd party tools to access the catalogue’s SQL. I just preferred Search & Replace to focus on the best use of SDK, Adobe’s approved and documented way to access the Lightroom catalogue.

Last week I got yet another request from a user to generate captions with people identified by LR’s facial recognition,listed left-to-right. Keywords were no use, because any photo would have lots of other keywords, and in any case LR lists keywords alphabetically. So I dusted off those earlier experiments.

The big challenge was figuring out how Adobe store the data. The database organisation is not publicly-documented and was never designed to be accessed in this way. What’s more, the structure is as opaque as one might expect of something that it’s been implemented by a variety of developers over Lightroom’s 20 years.

Still, once I’d done it for Named People, I then moved on to the italicised IPTC Location fields. I’ll look at other gaps in the future – especially Sync data such as Likes and Comments. Going beyond the SDK and interrogating the database will enable the plugin to find and use such data, and this additional capability seems worth a major release – 3.0.

Named People – two ways to use the field

The new Named People field can be used like any other field

In Search & Replace’s main dialog box, field drop down menus now have Named People L-R listed under the main IPTC fields (below), so you can access it like other fields:

• If LR’s facial recognition has tagged a person, or if you added faces manually in Loupe view their names will be output left to right using the region data recorded in LR
• You can copy Named People L-R into other IPTC fields or to the plugin’s custom fields
• Or use it to create captions on the Caption Builder tab

Secondly, in Library Filter there is now a Named People * custom field:

• It is populated when you run Search & Replace’s Workflow Filters command
• It’s available so you can filter the catalogue to find pictures which are / aren’t face tagged
• Once Named People * is populated, you can use it in like other custom fields in Caption Builder as an alternative to the real time Named People field
• Remember that Named People * isn’t real time – to refresh it, you’d have to re-process those photos with the Workflow Filters command

In Caption Builder, the Named People L-R field adds the names of people tagged in the photos, listing them left to right

You can filter the catalogue to find pictures which are/aren’t face tagged

IPTC locations

There is a new button on the Workflow Filters tab which lets you convert italicised or reverse-geocoded IPTC locations to regular fields stored in the catalogue. This makes them available to plugins and also saves the values to XMP.

On the Workflow Filters tab, you can convert reverse geocoded values into regular values in the catalogue

Italic text indicates these locations are reverse geocoded by sending the GPS to Google

How is it done?

The data extracts are stored in a subfolder of the user’s Documents, jbPlugins folder

As the plugin is unable to get this information via the SDK, the new features use SQLite to access the catalogue. On Mac this utility is usually installed as part of the OS, and for Windows an executable is now inside the plugin.

Each time you open the plugin’s main dialog box, Search & Replace sends SQLite an instruction to query the selected files’ data and output a text file, which it then reads and obtains any information.

And why might that matter?

There are separate text files for Named People and Locations, and these files should be generated so quickly that they are ready by the time the plugin reads them.

But if very large numbers of photos are selected, it is conceivable that a file hasn’t been output quickly enough and the plugin would be unable to read the Named People or Locations values.

The problem should be fixed by just waiting a few moments for the process to complete, or by toggling the forward and back buttons (bottom left of plugin dialog). Do report any problems in this area.

For some reason this morning I wondered how far I can control Lightroom with an AI tool like ChatGPT, and one thing I tried was to see if it could create a preset based on my edits. So I uploaded unedited and edited versions to ChatGPT, and told it to generate a preset.

Obviously I’m not original in doing this type of experimentation, and in fact I used Anthony Morganti’s prompt from this video.

For anyone interested, here’s the ChatGPT conversation, and the unedited and edited jpegs that I uploaded for it to analyse and produce a preset to simulate the work I’d done:

Back in Lightroom, applying the preset to the unedited raw file produced this:

It’s OK, but not perfect. In my original edited version, I had deliberately lifted the reds in the B&W panel and darkened the blues so the B&W would distinguish the three colours of smoke, and this hasn’t really been reflected in the preset. But that was a first effort, and I bet I could refine the prompt.

Interesting? Useful? I don’t know.

Copilot is in my MS Office sub and I can do something similar as shown here (again I just have to fine tune the instructions), and the subscription means I don’t seem limited to the number of images. Luckily I only have a free ChatGPT account, so my playtime is limited and I can get on with my day!

Sometimes you may be jumping back and forth between photos in different folders and collections, and each time you go back to a folder you go back to its first photo and then have to find the photo you were working on before. It’s not a problem the first time, and it’s not such a big deal even if you are going back and forth a lot one day.

But there’s a nice little preference that’s been added to Lightroom 14.4 which is easy to overlook – a preference to remember the selection in each source.

When it’s enabled, it means that:

• if you have already some photos selected, then go to another folder/collection, those photos will remain selected if they are also in that folder/collection – that’s the same as it’s always been
• but if your selection doesn’t include photos that are in the other folder/collection, now you’ll go back to the photos that were previously selected in it – not to the first photo
• this new behaviour lasts for the current Lightroom session

At first I was sceptical, but I thought I’d leave the preference enabled and see if I liked it. After a week or so, I’m leaving it that way. And that’s what I advise – try it for a while, then leave it on or disable it when you’ve made up your mind.

It’s a small detail, but I’ve found enough occasions when I felt glad they added it.

When correctly installed, the script adds this menu to Adobe Bridge

This is the latest version my old filename to metadata 2020 script for Adobe Bridge.

To install it

1. Launch Bridge
2. Open Bridge’s preferences dialog
3. Click the button “Reveal Scripts in Finder/Explorer”
4. Drag & Drop the unzipped jsx file into the Startup Scripts directory
5. Quit and restart Bridge.

Please note that it’s unsupported.

A new version of my ListView plugin is coming, and you can try it now.

ListView dates from when I was first learning the Lua programming language which Lightroom uses. As the years passed this made it hard to update, even with little changes like supporting new fields or fixing small bugs and foibles. Once or twice I considered bigger updates, even began rewriting whole sections of the code, but these efforts never went anywhere. People had built workflows around ListView, it worked well for them, and the plugin remained popular – so I left it alone.

But I was never happy with the situation, and it really wasn’t doing all the things I knew it should be able to do.

So in late-2024 I began preparing a version 2 of ListView with the benefit of a decade’s hindsight and experience coding for Lightroom. I rebuilt the plugin from the ground up with totally-new code, and including features tried and tested with my other plugins.

In summary, version 2’s objectives are to:

• ensure people can do everything they did in version 1
• reflect how people used ListView more for export than I’d expected
  • Mac users can now export to Numbers (as well as Apple permit!)
  • It’s possible to set up two more external editors
• encourage users to use ListView as a list view for Lightroom, which was how I originally thought it would be used
• add big new capabilities:
  • importing spreadsheet data from Excel or Numbers
  • in-cell editing

I plan to release it soon. But try it now and please let me know what you think. Also see below:

• Known Issues – especially on Windows 11
• Installation recommendations

Instead of going into a separate dialog box, you can now change columns by choosing from these drop down menus

Version 2 Highlights

1. Existing ListView workflows should be unaffected and you should be able to continue doing what you’ve been doing, but with more flexibility, more fields, more efficiently
2. Columns
   1. Up to 20 columns of data, double what was available before
   2. Change the field shown in any column by choosing from my standard field choice drop down lists
   3. Set column widths more flexibly by setting the default and then making some fields double or triple width
   4. Delete columns or move them left and right
3. Export features
   1. Two additional external apps can be configured
   2. Export CSV and TXT to Numbers (Mac only)
   3. Export Thumbnails begins automatically in the background whenever you start the plugin so all the thumbnails are already generated and in ListView’s cache, ready when you export to Excel or a browser
   4. JSON export available
4. Metadata editing
   1. 1. 

         The updated edit window now lets you edit multiple image

         ListView 1’s one-image-at-a-time dialog remains

      2. Premium registration code makes new editing features available
         1. Edit directly in cells
         2. Select multiple photos and apply edits
         3. Auto-complete gets suggestions from other images, other fields, your metadata presets and custom lists
         4. Apply metadata presets
         5. Import spreadsheet data
            1. Export a defined format from ListView
            2. Edit values in Excel/Numbers
            3. Import this spreadsheet by copying and pasting
            4. It’s not a generic import feature – for that you need LrTransporter
         6. Changes are immediately displayed in the ListView window and saved to the catalogue
5. Quick Access URLs
   1. You can launch the plugin and a preset by calling a URL like lightroom://uk.co.beardsworth.listview?preset=MyExport
   2. URLs can be set up in third party keyboard consoles

The premium editing features greatly expand ListView’s use to update metadata

Installation

I suggest renaming the old ListView in Finder / Explorer, and putting the new ListView in the same location. Definitely restart Lightroom before using it. If things go wrong, just reverse these steps.

Beta Updates

Lightroom 2 isn’t part of the Auto Update process and I may update the beta. So I recommend returning to this page and checking the build number (top right).

Just use it and let me know

I really welcome feedback on this. At the moment I want to get the plugin established, replacing the old code, and then I will add new features.

Known Issues

Windows 11 alignment problem

There was a problem on Windows 11 with column widths and alignment (see right).

It looks like text isn’t wrapping onto extra lines and instead is bumping all the other data to the right. As well as Mac, I run Windows 10 and it doesn’t happen there, so please look out for this problem.

On Mac, Excel should be open before you export metadata to it. If you don’t do this, sometimes it doesn’t display the thumbnails.

Future of version 1

If all goes well I may remove it, but I may just leave it there as it does no harm. Just in case I make up my mind though, I’d suggest you learn to use the new dialog and let me know if it doesn’t let you do what you did before.

Pricing

Registration codes have always been “lifetime” – ie updates are at no cost.

The in-cell editing and import from spreadsheet features will be a premium extra, at the same price as ListView itself. These are completely new features which not everyone will want, they were never offered in ListView 1, and lots of my time went into the update. I don’t feel I’m being unfair by charging for such substantial extra capability.

While I’d previously evaluated Adobe Portfolio, which is included in the Lightroom subscription, and had considered moving my photography site to it, it was only last week that I finally made the move – and here is my photography web site now on Portfolio.

When it happened, the switch was unplanned and was forced upon me by my web host taking my previous site offline without notice (they had acquired my previous host and never reminded me to pay the annual renewal). Fine, if that’s typical of how the new guys do things… And after a day or so I was up and running again and Portfolio johnbeardsworth.myportfolio.com URL was replaced by my own beardsworth.co.uk.

In short, while the site is not yet finished (if web sites are ever truly finished), maybe you’ll find it helpful to learn that I found Adobe Portfolio viable as a replacement for a self-hosted site.

All the photo pages are integrated with my main Classic Lightroom catalogue, so each page corresponds to a collection which is “synced” to Adobe’s LrMobile cloud. So any edits to pictures, titles or captions, or changing the picture order, will be synced automatically to Adobe. I then just have to go into Portfolio and “reset” the page’s integration to update the live site.

While Wayback Machine meant I could rescue plenty of the text from my vanished old site, I lost one or two bits of custom code and things that I’d set up in WordPress. Most I can live without, but an awkward one was the Instagram panel which I’d included in the old site – awkward because I know of people who went to see if I was still alive and kicking!

Portfolio does have a way to “embed” some external content in its pages, and this is documented at this Portfolio FAQ page. It  means that you just add an embed box and enter a little code, and the FAQ examples including YouTube. But Instagram was missing and while there are some hints offered in Adobe’s forum the solution was quite simple once I had figured it out with a bit of experimentation.

Here the crucial details are:

1. your Instagram USERNAME must be followed by “/embed”
2. in Instagram>Settings>Sharing and Re-use, you need to enable “Website embeds”

Other than the width and height, I don’t see a way to customise how Portfolio displays the Instagram grid, for instance having more rows or columns. If you do know, I’d like to hear it.

But I hope that’s useful. Portfolio can’t please everyone, but I hope my experience indicates that there’s plenty you can do with it. And it is a lot less effort than maintaining your own WordPress site!

GPU options are in Preferences/Performance

I wanted to test LR’s GPU export options  with the new MacBookPro M4. The export sample was 312 48mb Fuji raw files (with lots of LR adjustments) exported as 2048 pixel JPEGs, and the results were interesting.

First I exported with the default “Auto” setting (ie not using GPU for export) and then I tried again with it set up like on the right.

The initial default GPU-off “Auto” completed in 375 seconds. Enabling GPU for export, it was all done in 215.

Not quite half the time, but a more-than-40% timesaving. More than interesting – rather useful I’d say!

Apart from noticing that Adobe had acquired Frame.io 2-3 years ago, I’ve never investigated the product or gone beyond noting that it seemed to be a cloud-based team collaboration tool for multimedia assets (Frame.io’s Max presentation gives an idea of the product’s marketplace).

But this morning I did notice this intriguing tweet by Adobe’s Terry White about Frame.io’s C2C Camera to Cloud integration with LR. In short:

• If your camera can be connected to the internet, it may also have Frame.io installed.
  • Fuji are already doing it, Nikon and Canon are on the way
  • While it’ll be limited to very recent cameras, it’s a good excuse to take a look in the darkest corner of your camera’s menu system.
  

  Here’s one way Frame.io suggest people might use this workflow

• Once the camera is connected to Frame.io, new photos can be sent from the camera up to Frame.io’s cloud
  • Selectively or automatically
  • There’s a choice of file type
• Frame.io can now be linked to Adobe’s Lightroom cloud
  • New photos in Frame.io are automatically imported into an Lightroom cloud account
  • Lightroom cloud makes them available to the various Lightrooms including Classic
• Frame.io initially announced C2C last year and now seem to have a free basic use plan offering 2gb.

Terry showed the process using a Fuji X-H2S and with my Fuji X-T5 it only took me under 10 minutes to get up and running with these instructions from the X-T5 manual .

I’m not sure I will ever need to use this in practice, but I think someone will, and they may well love the workflow. And it makes me think that if you can upload directly from a camera to Frame.io C2C, why can’t you do so directly to Lightroom Cloud?

I’ve just released an update for a minor but annoying bug.

Also, in response to a new user’s question, I prepared this quick video (watch in YouTube) showing how to use Syncomatic’s options for syncing items in stacks.

Yesterday I released version 5 of Syncomatic which has some big changes:

• It’s now a single menu item and dialog box including all ways of matching files
• It can now copy from Masters to VCs and vice versa, with an option to target only the selected VCs/stack members or to extend the sync to all the source photo’s VCs/stack members elsewhere in the catalogue
• There’s a new Before / After report making it easy to review the results of running the plugin
• Dry run generates the Before / After report but doesn’t apply changes to files

If the plugin is already installed, you may be notified of the update automatically. Alternatively, get it from Photographers Toolbox.

Lightroom 13.3 is out today, and I recommend you watch Julieanne Kost’s excellent video on the new AI-powered Generative Remove tool introduced in Lightroom 13.3. Stay till the end – the three quick tips are real timesavers.

In some cases you may not want or be allowed to publish any AI-generated content in a photograph, but it can be hard to remember if you’ve used that feature. So notice that you can now filter on photos that contain AI generated content.

For me Point Color is the most useful feature in the newly-released Lightroom 13, allowing subtle and accurate shifts in colour.

If you read anything about Lightroom 13, put aside any of your thoughts about HDR and read this article High Dynamic Range Explained by Adobe’s senior engineer Eric Chan

But if you read anything about Lightroom 13, put aside any of your thoughts about HDR and read this article High Dynamic Range Explained by Adobe’s senior engineer Eric Chan:

For the past two years, I’ve been working on a project for viewing, editing, and sharing [my emphasis] High Dynamic Range photographs. I’m thrilled to announce that this feature is now shipping in all Lightroom products (on desktop, mobile, and web) and Camera Raw. In this post I’ll explain what it is, how it works, and how to get the most from it.

To see the photos in this post in High Dynamic Range, I recommend that you use a macOS or Windows system with Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge version 116 or later and a High Dynamic Range display that supports 1000 nits or brighter. Note that other browsers and platforms may not display the photos on this page in HDR. Recommended displays include Apple XDR displays, such as a MacBook Pro with an XDR display (2021 or later), and any display VESA-certified as DisplayHDR 1000 or DisplayHDR 1400.

Does the term “High Dynamic Range” make you cringe and recoil? Does it make you think of overcooked images with big halos and garish colors? Let me assure you — that is not what this feature is about.

HDR editing may seem irrelevant for those photographers who expect their pictures to be printed and who correct them in that expectation. I am in that group and I am certainly surprised that Adobe prioritised HDR editing.

Look at the second paragraph in this quote and ask if you are using that browser, if your monitor is HDR. Maybe you are, and maybe also when you switch to your other computer or device, but there’s a fair chance you’re not using an HDR display and think about everyone who might be viewing your pictures – certainly you’ll never be able to make a print that is HDR.

While there are lots of HDR screens out there, they’re not universal, but that does seem to be the direction we’re going. So to me Adobe’s prioritising HDR editing is an educated bet on where we are going to be in the not-too-distant future, it’s Adobe trying to get ahead of the game, and only time will tell – no matter how useless I find it.

I’ve recently added a couple of new features to my Capture Time to EXIF plugin (available here), both requested by users:

• You can now set much older years – a user wanted to set 16th century dates for some family photos
• When updating multiple images, you can now add various intervals to each image in the batch. Previously this increment was limited to one second, but not you can choose intervals of up to one day.

I also took the opportunity to update the look, which I hope is clearer.

Why 2.7 so soon after 2.6? Because after I released 2.6 with the earlier dates, I realized that I had forgotten to add the multiple dates increment.

Adobe have recently said that they’re discontinuing the Creative Cloud Synced files service by February 2024. As the Microsoft 365 account for Office includes 1 TB of free storage, what do you think about it as an alternative?

It works – assuming you have a Microsoft 365 account – but it’s a bit opaque in how promptly it will sync non-MS Office files, though until now I had sufficient cloud space from Dropbox and Adobe and have only really used OneDrive for specific projects which mainly involve MS apps.

One advantage is that MS Office files are continually being saved in the background while you’re working on them, and another is that apps like Excel can reopen recently-opened or pinned files even if you’ve used Explorer to move the files around in OneDrive. You’ve also got browser-based access to these files. I suspect there are more little tweaks for MS apps, but these are valuable to me yet may not be to others.

As a general point I wonder how much trust one can ever place in these “bonus” cloud storage services. After all, you may have received the email telling us that “Adobe is modernising the Creative Cloud storage experience” – in this case “modernising” means discontinuing the Creative Cloud Synced files service entirely. Dropbox could do something similar, reducing the allocation or making it too-annoying with ads. Would Microsoft, maybe, but they’re probably expecting that it’ll be used for MS content rather than for the big bytes that Adobe’s customers would generate, and 1tb means you’ve got plenty of headroom if they ever did decide to reduce the space allocation.

So while I’ve already moved stuff from Creative Cloud folders – some to Dropbox, some as Photoshop Cloud files – I’ll probably move the rest to OneDrive.

Is there an option to create a linked smart object instead of an embedded one when exporting a photo to PS?

No, sadly LR cannot directly create a linked smart object, so you have to do something like this:

1. First in LR select the image and do a Save Metadata to File (CmdS on Mac, CtrlS on Windows)
2. Right click the image and choose Edit In > Open as Smart Object in Photoshop.
3. Now in PS, save the file at this point – it makes the next steps less puzzling.
4. Then still in PS, right click the smart object layer, choose Relink to File.
5. Navigate to the raw file and click Place.
6. In the Adobe Camera Raw dialog, click OK.

If you now make changes back in LR and do a Cmd/Ctrl S, you’ll see the Photoshop link being refreshed.

I am pretty sure that’s all the steps.

PS:

Conrad Chavez: Also, once you’ve got it set up as a linked Smart Object, that makes it possible to send the edits back to Lightroom Classic. If you edit the linked raw Smart Object in Photoshop by double-clicking to open it in Camera Raw, Camera Raw writes the edits back to the external metadata. Which means, back in Lightroom Classic, you can select that photo and choose Metadata > Read Metadata from File, and that will update the original raw file in Lightroom Classic.

I’ve just released version 2.2 of my Search and Replace plugin.

As well as a couple of bug fixes for problems reported by people using old versions of Lightroom (as old as 5.7 for example) the main changes are in the Workflow Filters area where I’ve added more fields which can be displayed in Library Filter or smart collections.

The new Workflow Filters fields:

• Exposure Bias
• Crop ratio
• Count of AI masks
• Count of AI spots heals

For a long time there have also been 5 user-definable fields which Workflow Filters can populate. These now show the name of the field which you have defined.

Two new commands can be run independently or as part of the Refresh Workflow Filters command:

• Rename masks from “Mask 1, 2…” to reflect what they contain, so “Lin Lin -Rad” is a mask which contains two linear gradients and one radial which is set to Subtract. It’s disabled by default, but I find it makes the Masks panel a bit easier to read.
• Delete JPEG sidecars for selected raw files to tidy up folders. For a long time I’ve used a separate script to do this, but I thought it made sense to include it as another task in Workflow Filters. Because it’s deleting files, it’s defined quite conservatively.

For those who use Caption Builder, there is a big change which came from user requests – you can now use it write to title, headline, instructions and to the plugin’s 16 custom fields. It’ll still be called Caption Builder but it was an easy change to make.

I should add that while the plugin will continue to support older versions of Lightroom, newer features are disabled – usually hidden. So there’s not much point updating the plugin if you are using an older version of Lightroom.

I’ve just released version 2.1 of my plugin Open Directly which allows you to send raw files directly to other programs. For example, let’s say you want to process a photo in Capture One. If you followed Lightroom’s External Editor method, Lightroom would first convert raw files to PSD or TIF and would defeat the whole purpose of sending them to Capture One. The Open Directly plugin simply sends the photo directly to the other program.

I must admit, it should have been released three years ago.

Back in spring 2020 – just after the first Covid lockdown – someone emailed me asking for a specific improvement to the plugin. As I was already working on big improvements to Search and Replace, it was a perfect time to ask – I certainly had the time, and needed any change of routine. The request was only whether I could increase the number of supported apps from 6, and that was pretty easy, and I ended up polishing a few other aspects of the plugin. As they say, the devil makes work for idle hands….

Quick menu names can display the name of the app which they launch – previously you had to remember which app would be launched

So version 2 has a range of enhancements:

1. Number of apps increased from 6 to 15
2. Second quick menu added, so you can send a photo to an external app without going through the dialog box
3. The user can choose which apps can be launched via each quick menu
4. Quick menu names can display the name of the app which they launch
5. Added reset buttons in Plugin Manager
6. Added a change log

I released 2.0 as a beta, but I really can’t remember why I quickly forgot about it and never released 2.0. At the time I recall mornings lining up outside supermarkets for eggs or flour, and I was pursuing a number projects to make the best of being stuck at home such improving my pasta-making skills (I hadn’t yet learnt to brew beer!). I’d like to think that I must have been thinking through another bright idea but never got round to it. Whatever happened shall remain a mystery, but the plugin is finally available.

The right hand column lets you decide which apps will be available in the quick menus

Like many people I’ve been giving Adobe’s AI-based Firefly and now Photoshop’s beta Generative Fill a good workover and thought I’d share a few words and examples. While there’s a lot of hype – and fear – about Generative AI, I’m still not sure I’ve been able to use it to produce anything that could fool anyone.

So for example, in the first group of images here, I can do better Photoshopping away the boxes myself, although to its credit I thought it was a nice touch that Generative Fill inserted a reflection of a traffic cone. Yet I did spend a lot of time typing in a variety of phrases for it to use to replace the area, and I got lots of artificial-looking results like the basket of roses (and I asked for four) until I tried puddles and hit on one that worked. So was the big benefit for me that the AI had access to stock examples of puddles? That might be valuable, sometimes, but is it really something to fear?

The second set of images came from Firefly, Adobe’s web-based tool, which I asked to create entirely-new photographs, sorry photograph-like pictures. I deliberately used phrases like “Lake District” to test if it would still produce scenery from New Hampshire rather than north west England, and wondered if using “Derwentwater” or “fells” might steer it to the right region. You can see the phrases under the pictures, and while there’s a lot wrong and some strangely-bred sheep, there’s also a lot that is indeed reminiscent of the Lakes. I can recognise an Ullswater and the rainy colour palette.

What practical use is this, I just don’t know!

But of course, the beta’s available and it’s not hard to try it and inform yourself, which has got to be way better than listening to all the hype.

Photoshop’s Generative Fill:

Adobe Firefly: