Problems authorizing the Facebook Publish Service

Question

I'm using Windows 7/32 + LR 3.2 + FF as my default browser
For the last several days I've been trying to get the Facebook Publish Service authorized against my facebook account without sucess.  Facebook would add the lightroom application to my list of approved applications, but LR would not recognize that the auhorization was sucessfull after I clicked the "Allow" button in Facebook.  I tried this with Firefox, Chrome, and IE and all three browsers failed.  Firefox threw an error about the (lightroom) protocol being unknown and then redirected to my Facebook Wall.  IE would simply say that it could not open the web page.  And Chrome did something similar but I cannot remember the details (I think it redirected too). In all cases LR would report that the Facebook Publish Service was not authorized.  I tried reinstalling LR several times and I tried adding the lightroom protocol to FF and associating it with LR but to no avail.  Finally I stumbled upon a process that worked for me.
If this is the error you are seeing, then the procedure below should allow you to get properly authorized in LR:
If you already tried and failed to authorize then go into you Facebook Application Settings (Account --> Application Settings) and remove/deauthorize the LR application (using whatever browser you like to do this).
Make IE your default browser.  This is just temporary, unless you like it like that.  You have to use IE, FF won't work and since IE worked here I didn't try Chrome.  When LR opens the browser to authenticate you it needs to open IE, not FF
Open LR and click the "Set Up..." link for Facebook Publish Service.  Then click the "Authorize on Facebook" button.  When IE opens log into FB if your not already, then click the Allow button to authorize LR.
If your having the same problem I did then IE will immediately throw up an error saying that it couldn't open the requested page.  Look at the URL in the address bar.  It should begin with "lightroom://...".  Select and copy the entire URL to you clipboard.
Go back to LR and click the "Done" button. This will return you to the Facebook Publish Service Setup Dialog and you should see that you are still not authorized. Dang!
But you'll notice that the "not authorized" label is not a hyperlink.  Click it.  This will open a dialog prompting you for the authorization URL.  Paste the URL you copied from IE into this box and click OK.
You should now be authorized.
You can now restore you prefferred default browser.
Hope this helps anyone else having the same problems I did getting Facebook authorized within Lightroom.

Answer 1

On Windows, the process for authenticating with Facebook depends on some registry keys. If these keys failed to be written during installation, for whatever reason, authentication is not going to work as intended. (There is a fallback solution, which is referred to in the initial post in this thread.)
To check if the required registry keys are present on your machine, you can open up a command prompt and execute the command:
regedit /E lightroom.reg "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\lightroom"
If the keys are indeed present, this should result in a file named lightroom.reg with contents that look something like this:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\lightroom]
"URL Protocol"="\"\""
@="\"URL:Lightroom Protocol\""
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\lightroom\DefaultIcon]
@="\"lightroom.exe,1\""
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\lightroom\shell]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\lightroom\shell\open]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\lightroom\shell\open\command]
@="\"C:\\Program Files\\Adobe\\Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3.2\\Lightroom.exe\" \"%1\""
These registry keys are supposed to be written at install time when lightroom.exe is invoked with a '-register' option. (The user is comletely unaware of this, of course.) This is something that can be attempted after installation as well, and to increase the chances of success, 'lightroom.exe -register' should be invoked after making sure that lightroom will be run with administrator privileges. (On Windows Vista, this can be done by right-clicking the shortcut to lightroom.exe and checking the 'Run this program as an administrator' option in the 'Compatibility' tab.)
If running 'lightroom.exe -register' fails to inject the expected keys into the registry, regedit can be used to insert the keys manually. However, I would not recommend modifying your registry manually unless you have experience with that kind of thing already. A lot of damage can be done to your system if you do something wrong.