A function to clean up the album would be nice

[PCCounselor]

Is there a way to delete photos from an album on the server using 'piwigo Publish.lrplugin'? Currently, the only option is to delete the entire album.

Example:

I transferred the Piwigo directory structure to LrC using the command "Import existing albums from Piwigo".

'piwigo Publish.lrplugin' doesn't transfer the photos from Piwigo back to LrC. Therefore, I don't know which photos are on the Piwigo server.

To see this, I have to switch to the PiwigoExport.lrplugin.

When I copy the photos from the PiwigoExport.lrplugin directory to the Piwigo Publish.lrplugin directory in LrC and then transfer them back to Piwigo, the photos appear twice in Piwigo, so I have to delete them first.

Alternatively, I can delete the entire album and recreate it in Piwigo Publish.lrplugin. That's inconvenient, though, because I also have to recreate the album description.

A function to clean up the album would be nice.

[mmpm]

As I understand your description, you are referring to linking already existing images inside a Piwigo album. That functionality is planned (see README.md), but it is not available yet. For the time being, the plugin can therefore import only the album structure.

At the moment, the plugin also cannot remove images from an album if those images were not uploaded by the plugin itself, because it has no reliable way to determine their internal IDs.

If images are re-uploaded, new IDs are assigned, which results in duplicates and a new set of associated metadata. In other words, only images that are already known to the plugin from the LrC publishing workflow can be managed (including deletion). Without the linking information, that is not possible for existing uploads.

Given this, it may be worth postponing a full migration for now (I assume you have been using the Alloy plugin as well) until the image-linking feature is implemented. With a large number of folders, doing this manually can become quite time-consuming. I am currently planning to wait a bit before attempting a migration myself.

If your Piwigo images do not carry important server-side metadata (for example, comments), there may be a possible workaround:

• Create sub-albums for each existing album.
• In Piwigo, move the existing images into the respective sub-albums.
• Publish the corresponding images from LrC to the original (main) albums.
• Delete the sub-albums. The main albums should remain, including their descriptions.

However, if you need to preserve metadata such as comments and ratings, this approach will not be suitable, because re-uploaded images receive new IDs and therefore do not retain the existing metadata associations.

Finally, the planned linking function would also be important in scenarios where you initially populate a Piwigo album directly (e.g., uploads from a smartphone) and later import the same photos into LrC and want the plugin to match them to the already-existing items in Piwigo.

[PCCounselor]

Thank you so much for the explanation. I'll probably wait a while before I use the 'piwigo Publish.lrplugin' tool in a production environment. But what I've seen so far is already more than I dared hope for.