don-mckee.com

Today, I received a trouble report that the plug-in was failing with the following:

Unfortunately, this may be an indication that Shutterfly has finally shut down their developer API after several years of letting it run on auto-pilot. There’s always a chance it’ll start working again, but, after a nearly 12 year run, this may spell the end of the Shutterfly Upload plug-in. RIP.

Stay safe out there, get vaccinated, and wear your mask! 😷👍

UPDATE 03/06/2021:

Shutterfly customer support shared the following via “chat:”

I do apologize but I am seeing here that the API had been discontinued and you are able to upload the photos via the website at shutterfly.com.

Unfortunately, they had no information regarding when the API was “discontinued” (it may have been recently when the failures started happening, or it may have been years ago when all of the API documentation disappeared, and developer support stopped responding to email). The bottom line is that it doesn’t look good for a resurrection of the plug-in. ☹

I’ve received a report that image uploads using “Seamless Sign-in” have stopped working. I was able to reproduce the problem using Shutterfly’s own developer tools on their web site, making it pretty conclusive that something has changed on the Shutterfly side. I’ve reported the problem to The Black Hole Shutterfly Developer Support.

In the meantime, if you’re having problems, turn off the plug-in’s “Use Seamless Sign-in” option using the Lightroom Plug-in Manager (see the plug-in help for more information). Be sure to reload the plug-in, or restart Lightroom, to activate any configuration changes that you make!

A user of the Shutterfly Upload plug-in recently notified me of a problem occurring during “seamless sign-in” account authentication (thanks, Taci!). It seems that Shutterfly has implemented a change on their side that now requires user intervention to complete the process.

First, a bit of background. When you press the “Authenticate...” button in the “Export” dialog, the plug-in opens a browser page to Shutterfly’s site that allows you to give permission to the plug-in to access your account. When you grant authorization, Shutterfly sends an acknowledgement back to the plug-in via a page on my web site (don-mckee.com).

The acknowledgement is supposed to be sent to an “http://www.don-mckee.com/” address, but it is being routed to an “https://www.don-mckee.com/” address, instead. My web site does not have “https” support, so the request is not working as intended.

Most likely, you’ll see some kind of a “warning” page indicating that the site may not be what it says it is. If you ignore the warning, and continue to the site, you’ll see a page of HTML code rather than the page I originally intended for you to see.

One work-around is to look at the address in your browser’s address bar, and change the

https://www.don-mckee.com/lightroom/...

address to

http://www.don-mckee.com/lightroom/...

press “enter”, and carry on.

The other work-around is to complete the authentication process manually. After pressing the “Authenticate...” button, in addition to opening the browser page to Shutterfly, the plug-in also opens a dialog that looks like this:

It may be hidden under your browser, so you may need to look for it. Anyway, after authorizing the plug-in on the Shutterfly site, you can press the “Complete Manually...” button in the dialog and ignore what’s happening in your browser. The plug-in will connect to your Shutterfly account using the credentials you provide and verify that it has permission to access your account in the future.

Sorry for the inconvenience that this causes. Unfortunately, Shutterfly has not responded to my call for help, and I’ve been unable to work-around the issue on my web server’s side. For now, you’ll need to pick one of the work-arounds listed above, and go with that. If you need any help, send a note to

don -at- don-mckee -dot- com

(replace “-at-” and “-dot-” with “@” and “.”, respectively) and I’ll see what I can do.

There have been several reports recently of users being unable to upload particular images: most will upload fine, but a handful refuse to go.  The error message being (incorrectly) reported makes it sound like there’s an authentication/sign-on problem, but that’s obviously not the case since some of the uploads work OK.

Log files have shown that Shutterfly is reporting that an “Unexpected exception” occurred while processing the images.  We discovered that we could get the images through by editing the images differently, or, more easily, by changing the “Metadata” setting in Lightroom’s Export dialog:

Something in the image metadata is apparently causing Shutterfly to choke!  If some of your images refuse to upload, try changing the “Metadata” setting, and see what happens.  I don’t have confirmation that this is a 100% work-around for the problem, but at least it’s something for you to try!

I just tried the Seamless Sign-in feature and discovered that it’s functional again! I never did receive any word from engineering acknowledging the problem existed in the first place, so I can only keep my fingers crossed that it’ll stay “fixed”. But, for now, it works!

I apologize (on Shutterfly’s behalf) for any inconvenience this issue caused, and appreciate all of the trouble reports I received. Please let me know via the Feedback page if you encounter other issues in the future.

-Don

Unfortunately, no good news to report on Shutterfly’s code problem that’s causing the seamless sign-in function to break in the Shutterfly Upload plug-in. Shutterfly’s Level 2 support has punted the problem back to me, and has asked me to work with engineering directly via their developerhelp@shutterfly.com email address. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that anyone is home — I have yet to receive any acknowledgment of my trouble report. Sigh.

I’m not giving up yet….

After several phone calls to Shutterfly, and working with four different Level 2 Support agents, I was told today that engineering is aware of the problems with their Seamless Sign-in facility, and that it’s being worked on. I’ve been told to expect a status update soon. When I hear something more, I’ll post it here.

Until Shutterfly fixes the problem, please disable the Shutterfly Upload plug-in’s “Use Seamless Sign-in” option using Lightroom’s Plug-in Manager.

Following code changes on Shutterfly’s servers, the Shutterfly Upload’s “Seamless Sign-in” functionality is broken. I’ve spoken to Shutterfly’s Level 2 support, and they’re looking into it. In the meantime, if you’re having problems, turn off the “Use Seamless Sign-in” option using the Lightroom Plug-in Manager (see the plug-in help for more information). Be sure to reload the plug-in, or restart Lightroom, to activate any configuration changes that you make!

The much anticipated (by me, anyway 😉 ) release of version 1.4 of my Shutterfly Upload export plug-in for Adobe Lightroom has finally happened! This release contains lots of new goodies:

• Seamless sign-in (a.k.a. application authentication)
• Lightroom Publish Service support
• Shutterfly “folder” support
• integrated “help”
• and much, much, more!

Take a look at the Change Log for a few more details, or better yet, visit the product page to download the latest-and-greatest and check it out for yourself!

For folks upgrading from a previous release of the Shutterfly Upload plug-in, I encourage you to enable the new “Seamless sign-in” option (by default, it won’t be enabled for you). Please refer to the included “help” for more information.

Version 1.3 of my Shutterfly Upload export plugin for Adobe Lightroom 2 is now ready for you to install. This release contains some minor bug fixes, but no new features. Take a look at the Change Log for the details.

Visit the product page for more information and to download the latest-and-greatest!