Non-sortable & non-removable album image

I am running BL 4 & Lightroom with newest updates. I had a couple of Lr-published albums with a Lr-managed custom sort order where the first album image displayed by BL is always the same, regardless of where that image was manually placed in Lr’s sort order for that album. Setting the album’s sort order to some BL-managed setting (eg, “By File Date”) does result in that image displaying in its correct (non-first) position. I then removed that image from the album, republished and it is still displayed by BL – still always as the first image when “Managed by Lr” and elsewhere within the image sequence when managed by BL.

I then set the album to BL’s “Custom Order” within Lr and used BL to inspect the album. Sure enough, BL shows that problematic image as the album’s first (within the previous custom sort order as defined within Lr). I then manually deleted it using BL (ignoring warning that it had been published from within Lr), went back to Lr and reset that album to “Managed by Lr”. I then added the problematic image back into the middle of the album & republished … all seems to be well now. Fingers crossed…

After making changes to the sort order in Lightroom, did you then republish?

Yes, sorry that I didn’t explicitly say that.

There is a bug in Lightroom that causes it to only send the Custom Order to the server on the initial publish. If you then change the order after publishing photos then the new order isn’t communicated to your server, and so has no affect.
It’s for this reason that we provide options other than “Managed By Lightroom”. If you do need a custom order then you’ll need to log into the Backlight Admin, navigate to the album via the Publisher menu and set your order there.

Thanks, Ben. I knew that you guys were struggling for a long time with Lr Publishing Service bugs, but this is the first time that they bite me. It’s an intermitent bug for me – I often later change a Lr album’s sort order after initial publishing without a problem. And the fact that I removed an album’s image within Lr and it remained in BL’s published album is yet another bug :frowning: .

Thank goodness there’s the BL direct interface for fixing these issues when they arise!