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I'd like to announce the availability of the new Plugin version of my popular MapiMailer Lightroom Export Action. It can be downloaded from the MapiMailer Export Plugin page.
This plugin is intended to make the existing MapiMailer obsolete, and I hope that everyone will find that the advantages of having it now fully integrated into Lightroom as a plugin will encourage everyone to upgrade as soon as possible.
This plugin is for Windows users only.
A Little History
I wrote MapiMailer shortly after Lightroom 1 was released because Windows users did not have the same ability to send multiple images as email attachments as the Mac users had. It turned out that no Windows email programs would accept a command line full of images, and instead would only attach the first one to the email. From reading various forums, this seemed to be a great source of frustration for many Windows users, and since I knew how to fix it, MapiMailer was born.
Because of the way that Lightroom passed the list of images to the old MapiMailer, there was a limit to the number of images that you could attach to a single email. This was the one big problem with the old way, and there was nothing I could do about it because it was a limitation built right into Windows.
Lightrooms Plugin API
Although Lightroom added its new export dialog, and plugin architecture quite a while ago, it required that I learn to program in a language new to me called Lua, and then learn a new application programming interface, and I did not see any immediate benifit for MapiMailer being rewritten as a plugin. It worked just fine, and many people are using it every day. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that by rewriting it as a plugin, I could get rid of the cause of that attachement limitation, as well as a cleaner, safer way of dealing with the cleanup of the temporary images created for the attachments.
So I've finally done it. My first export plugin, and it can be downloaded from the MapiMailer Export Plugin page. It works great and it's easier to use. I'm quite proud of it and I hope everyone who uses it will think so to. Hopefully, it will be the first of many projects for me. The genie is out of the bottle so to speak.
For Users of the Old MapiMailer
Although the new plugin can run side-by-side with the old MapiMailer, current users can find some helpful tips on converting any saved export presets you may have at my page of Tips for users of the old MapiMailer Export Action. |
