Since upgrading to 3.1 all hero images have been changed to random. Also, the selection box for the hero image isn’t wide enough for filenames so the filenames get cut short so you don’t know which image to select. This is taking so much time to correct. This needs to be sorted.
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see this similar post
you no longer need to choose the hero image by the list, you can use the album view in Publisher. click on the thumbnail of the image of choice. Click the Slide show image menu. set the hero image.
See Matt’s video:
https://blog.theturninggate.net/2020/09/17/backlight-3-1-released/
Hi Rod,
I’m using LR to publish my galleries, I see now there is an option in publisher, right click and one of the options is “Use as cover photo” if this is what you are referring too it doesn’t work, or at least it doesn’t for me.
I select an image, right click and select use as cover image, i then see a tick on that image image only, but it has NO bearing on anything it has not changed the cover image in the “edit album” nor does it change the cover image on the website even after I re- publish
No, go to Publisher in Backlight to use the new feature where you can click on the thumbnail.
Matt demos it in that video
But assuming i don’t want to be jumping backwards and forwards between a web browser and LR, all that would then mean is that my galleries are not fully managed by LR??
The right-click option in Lightroom for “Use as Cover Photo” is unrelated to our work on cover and hero images. I don’t know what it does.
Ok,
@PhotOne and @mridley note the new function under Special Links to synchronise the setting for cover image to hero image. This is essentially the missing function to set this value correctly during during the upgrade to 3.1.0. See whether that helps get things back in order.
As Matt has elaborated on in the announcements, the experience in Backlight’s Publisher may be superior in some respects from the LR Publisher. What we can do within Lightroom is limited to the functionality that Adobe provides for plugin developers. An example of that is that the cover and hero images can only be selected from dropdowns. In Backlight’s Publisher, we’ve been able to improve on this by providing a function to denote a particular photo as the cover or hero image for either than album or one of its ancestors.
You can still achieve the same thing in LR, but with a less intuitive interface.
The only functionality that I’m aware of that can only be performed within Backlight is custom album ordering. Adobe does not provide us with a way to do this from within plugins.
I believe that’s to do with Lightroom’s “Stacks” feature in the Library module. When you stack images and collapse the stack, the cover photo is the thumbnail you’ll see.
I understand what you’ve explained. My gripe was the fact that I had to amend all my hero images that were set, but the upgrade to 3.1 set them to random. That was most unwelcome.
It’s much more efficient to load albums and images via Lightroom as it’s a one step operation and one doesn’t have to export edited images from Lightroom and then upload them via Backlight. That to me is too time consuming.
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Does the new function solve the problem for you?
We are not forcing anybody to use the Backlight Publisher. We endeavour to provide equivalent functionality between the two approaches and make no apology for limitations we meet in the LR environment, or for opportunities to improve the experience in Backlight’s Publisher that are not available in Lightroom.
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Hi Ben, I get it. I just find that as I process images in Lightroom, it’s easy to upload after they’re processed to a collection, I don’t have to leave Lightroom. Once the images are up I can use Backlight’s facilities to amend what’s needed.
We understand it. I use LR’s Publisher for my own workflow.
Does the update address the issue at hand with the hero image setting? Or have you already moved on with your own updates?
Hi Ben, I had to manually reset all of the Hero images after uploading 3.1. No, it didn’t resolve it, it caused it. Some sort of warning this would happen may have softened the blow? It was just so irritating that I/we had to alter every Hero image that the update obliterated. I purposefully use horizontal images so that most viewers will see the whole image. But I was horrified to see vertical images were randomly displayed cropped awfully, looking terrible because I had the Hero images set to full frame in the 3:2 ratio so the vertical images displayed made a mockery of the site and I was unaware of it. That’s what made me so angry.
If they knew this would happen they would have addressed it before release. Ben already acknowledge the oversight in this post: 3.1 hero image mix up
(also posted above)
It was a human mistake, which has been acknowledged. And remedied as much as possible.
We’re talking about two different things. Backlight 3.1.1 introduced a function to copy over the value from the cover image setting to the hero image setting. It’s available under the Special Links section of the Backlight Admin landing page. That’s what I’m asking about.
The lack of migration of this value in 3.1.0 was an oversight on our part, after which I madly scrambled over the weekend to remedy in 3.1.1. Had we been aware that users would lose this setting then we would have added this migration as part of 3.1.0. Your time would have been better spent disabling hero images until we had this sorted instead of getting angry at us. We’re all busy as well and spent the best part of the weekend to remedy this.
I had already manually changed the hero images which was time consuming, i bit the bullet based on Matts comment below,
“You’ll need to manually select hero images for your albums. I don’t see a change incoming.”
So no the fix didn’t help much either in my situation!