You cannot import, let-alone work on, Photoshop files (“PSB” file extension) in Lightroom.  It flat-out doesn’t support them.  That’s such a weird limitation & oversight, for a program that Adobe now officially names ‘Adobe Photoshop Lightroom’.

See also this six year old thread on Adobe’s website, asking for this feature.

This was a little hack I worked on back in 2004, with Mac OS X Tiger (10.4).  Yes, kids, macOS was called Mac OS X back in ye Olden Times.

Wow, Slashdot looked even uglier than I remember, back then.  Though amusingly my daily reading list hasn’t changed substantially – it still features Slashdot and MacSurfer’s Headline News.

Also… 1024 x 768.  That’s just over 5% of the resolution of my current display (27″ Retina iMac).  It’s nearly as big as my iPhone 6s’s screen.

Man, do I not miss those shitty old monitors.

I don’t recall what the exact impetus was for the project.  I do recall that I was spurred on by Claus Atzenbeck, who was doing some kind of academic work into graphical user interfaces and, IIRC, wanted a way to explore window rotation and general manipulation in a real OS.

Claus’s personal website still exists, all these years later, though alas the link to his relevant research is now broken.

What reminded me of this was finding an attribution to me in a header file that was associated with the project – CoreGraphicsServices.h.  This was something I generated (presumably with the help of class-dump or similar) from the CoreGraphicsServices framework, and then partially reverse-engineered (in the sense of figuring out parameter types, function prerequisites, etc).  It’s what was necessary to find & use the private APIs for doing window geometry manipulation.

And the only reason my name is on it is because I splatted a 3-clause BSD license into the header file I made, which in hindsight seems highly dubious since the APIs themselves are owned by Apple (insofar as one can ‘own’ APIs, I guess…).

A quick web search reveals a few more mentions:

• The aforementioned header is apparently used by Growl.
• “BOMGAR”, some kind of remote computer support software, apparently uses the header too.
• As does something on marsthemes.com, though at time of writing that website has been largely destroyed for some reason.
• This one particularly amuses me – a brief thread on cocoa-dev@ about the header, in which John C. Randolph categorically takes no particular position on the hack. :)

The source & other paraphernalia were originally posted on my La Trobe University student web hosting account, though of course that’s long gone.  Here’s the original StuffIt archive, if you’re interested.  I don’t actually know if it’s the very latest version – I do still have the project in full – but it’s the latest version I ever published, AFAIR.

I leave it as an exercise to the reader on how to decompress StuffIt files in this day and age. :)

enum EmojiErrors: Error {
    case 💩
}

let 💩 = EmojiErrors.💩

Finally you can express yourself honestly within your program:

throw(💩)

Or, if you prefer to be polite & British about it:

func flinging<E: Error>(_ error: E) throws -> Never {
    throw(error)
}

try flinging(💩)

You can go further, if you like, and have all manner of interesting things thrown about your program:

enum EmojiErrors: Error {
    case 💩
    case 🖕
    case 🐞
    case 🎮
    case 🏈
    case 💣
    case 📱
    case 💻
    case 🖥
    case 🎉
}

Microsoft’s “Word Flow”:

• I have to be a good day and night and day and night and day and night and day and night and day and night and day…
• I’m going on with your friends are for convenience and the rest in the morning to the public health care system and a few minutes and a few minutes and a few minutes and a few minutes and the rest in the morning…
• I think you are not responsible for any other person in my life.

Apple’s built-in keyboard:

• I’m not going home after a while but I’ll probably get home and go to get home from home and work on a Friday or just for the next few days hope I can be a bit more fun with you and you can get me some good morning text.
• You don’t get a chance but they have the right hope that your team will have you back.
• I’m not a fan of a good day but it has been a bit fun and I have no hope for any reason.

So, I spent kind of a ridiculous amount of time looking for and at various options. What follows is my overview of the options I found, and their major pros and cons. It’s listed roughly in descending order of preference, for my use-case (for now I have chosen Pixieset, and it’s worked pretty well for my first gallery).

Pixieset

✅ Attractive gallery presets and display.
One of the few, if not only, sites in this list which renders photos sharply.

✅ Decent client proofing workflow.
Clients can have password-protected access which lets them do a few extra things, like view otherwise unpublished photos (e.g. drafts) and mark them as private (no longer visible to guests).

Additionally, anyone – whether with the client password or through regular guest access – can create a favourites list tied to an arbitrary string (ostensibly their email address, but no validation is performed), which can be seen by the photographer in the gallery’s dashboard (and converted to a CSV list of filenames, for example). There’s also a few handy additional features like the ability to create a new ‘Set’ (album within the gallery) based on their list of favourites. Unfortunately there’s currently no way to sync those new sets back to Lightroom, short of manually finding & arranging the photos in Lightroom to match.

Furthermore, there is a separate, optional, password for viewing the gallery at all, even as a ‘guest’. Thus you can have a password-protected gallery that also has a separate, client password.

✅ Galleries & photos load very quickly.

ShootProof

✅ Attractive & performant gallery templates.

✅ Decent client proofing workflow.
Very similar to Pixieset – you can assign a particular client (identified by email address & a pin number) to a gallery, and they can have unique privileges, protected by a pin code, like the ability to hide, label (tag, using a list of tags pre-defined by the photographer), and favourite (if you otherwise disable favouriting) photos.

Anyone – whether with the pin code or through regular guest access – can create a favourites list tied to an arbitrary string (ostensibly their email address, but no validation is performed), which can be seen by the photographer in the gallery’s dashboard.

Like with Pixieset, this allows you to have a regular guest password as well as a pin-code for privileged (client) access.

✅ Nice “filmstrip” viewer.
When a viewer clicks on any photo to view it larger, in addition to the larger photo being displayed, a “filmstrip” appears at the bottom which allows for easier navigation amongst similar photos. The film strip also shows badges for favourites.

⛔️ Client experience is a bit buggy.
In addition to the share email they’re sent not including the pin code, unless you manually enter it each time, it’s somewhat random as to if or when they’ll actually get a chance to enter it, and unlock their special privileges. In my testing I was only able to browse the gallery initially, and then at a random point it interrupted and asked for the pin.

⛔️ Photos tend to look a bit soft when displayed, as if they’re being enlarged from scaled-down copies.

SmugMug

⛔️ No free plan.
They’re well-reputed and look like they have a lot of good features, but I don’t make money from my photography, so I try to keep expenses low.

Not that they’re expensive by any means, but there are good alternatives which are free (for my levels of use).

Redcart

⛔️ No free plan.

PhotoShelter

⛔️ No free plan.
And their cheapest plan, at $8 per month, doesn’t include client proofing support. Their first tier that does is $25 a month – way higher than their competitors.

StickyAlbums

⛔️ No free plan.
And their cheapest monthly plan is $29, which is way higher than their competitors’ entry-level rates (even ignoring those that offer ‘free’ as their first tier).

Zenfolio

⛔️ No free plan.

⛔️ Buggy galleries.
Despite not being free, they were one of the first on my list (before I’d explored Pixieset or ShootProof, for example), so at that point I was presuming I’d have to pay something. So I signed up for a trial account, and set up a test gallery.

And that’s how I discovered that their web page layout is stupidly broken – the ‘Add To Favorites’ button, crucial to my intended proofing workflow, is obscured by the copyright footer, and rendered unclickable. Ugh… what a stupid bug.

Instaproofs

✅ Attractive pricing.

⛔️ Really ugly galleries.

⛔️ Requires an arbitrary string from all visitors before they can see anything (ostensibly their email address, but no validation is performed).

⛔️ Very much targeted at selling prints.
There can still have favourites lists and a few other things, but the entire interface is very clearly intended to funnel you into a shopping cart. It’s very inappropriate if you’re just sharing a portfolio, but still a bit crass even if you’re doing print-centric client work like weddings or family shoots.

Instaproof only get their income from print commissions, so it’s unsurprising that they try to hard sell at every corner. Unfortunately they’ve done it distastefully and fatally undermined the entire experience.

PASS

✅ Attractive pricing (particularly re. free for any and all galleries of fewer than 100 photos).

⛔️ Does not work.
I was unable to view any photos that I’d uploaded into a gallery – whether going through the ‘normal’ link or a ‘VIP’ invite, it’d prompt for the gallery password (if set), then demand an account be created, but even once that was done, it wouldn’t actually show any photos.

The login prompt says that Facebook is the preferred method, blah blah blah, but doesn’t actually provide any way to log in via Facebook.

Viewing in Safari on a Mac it was showing what very much seemed to be a mobile interface – everything squished into a ~4″ screen space in the top left of the browser window.

⛔️ Limited templates & control over appearance generally.

⛔️ Requires use of a desktop Flash app.
Yep, both Flash and only works after you download and install it.

Furthermore, it doesn’t follow standard user interface conventions, both visually and w.r.t. interactivity – e.g. ‘Select All’ simply doesn’t work (even though there’s a menu item for it).

⛔️ No Lightroom plug-in.

⛔️ Uploads are slow.

⛔️ Doesn’t appear to have any client proofing capabilities.

⛔️ Does not seem to allow you to close an account once created.

As a completely unrelated aside, here’s an interesting party game – find a room filled with crap, fire a wooden peg about an inch long very hard at a random ceiling or wall, not watching where it goes. Then crawl around for twenty minutes looking for it.

The annoying thing now is retuning it every thirty bloody minutes as the strings stretch slowly. I know you’re supposed to give them a good yank straight up to get most of that out of the way, but I’m too afraid too lest I break them or get to play the find-the-peg game again.

It’s sitting behind me right now, and every time I hear any sound it scares me a little.

I also watched August Rush for about the fourth time, but the first with sound, which was pretty inspiring (how hard can it be, after all, to just whack the strings randomly? ;) ).

So I have started playing again. And it sounds terrible. And so I also now have the means to exact cruel revenge upon Francisco if he keeps me up at night. ;)

So I set about that, and it was actually really nice to hear it coming into tune, string by string. Then I got the last string… without any due ceremony at all, it just snapped as soon as I tried to tighten it.

Figures.

So I’ll have to go get a new string (or, strings most likely). I do still have my old nylon strings around somewhere, but I’m not sure that I brought them with me… I remember seeing them while I was packing, but I can’t recall what I did with them. It’d be a bit incongruous, anyway, having five metal strings and one nylon.

But the upside to this is I finally have the all essential guitar string needed to make blinky bugs. :D I like to think I’ll get onto that sometime later in the week. :)

It’s frustrating because I actually do have a cell holder off a motherboard, but the 3V lithium cell that came with it is down to 0.86V, so won’t work. :( I’ll have to get a new one… or more likely just some AAs or AAAs… and some guitar string.