Publish a mirror of a collection or folder

Question

Is there a way to publish a mirrored copy of a collection including having all of the sub folder hierarchy intact?  I am trying to start an account on SmugMug and I do not want to have to replicate all of my work on collections and smart collections for the publish section. I just want to publish exact copies of them to SmugMug. Why can't we just drag a collection into a published service?

Answer 1

I think maybe I understand your question, my apologies if not.
I think you may be having a similar problem to that which I have with LR – namely I publish photos in several ways, to Flickr, to SmugMug, to the hard disk for my iPad and over the network to my TV and I want each of them to have exactly the same content.    With my published photos spread across 34 different Smart collections I now have quite a maintenance overhead if I change these smart collections because each publish service contains a replica of all 34 and if I want to do the same with another publish service then tediously I have to recreate all of 34 the smart collection yet again.
Hopefully this is somehow close to the problem you are describing so here are some answers to the kind of questions I would want answered…
Q – Can you tell one publish service to simply mirror a set Collections / Smart Collections declared in another publish service?
No you cannot – but not surprised because not all publishing services support a hierarchy, for example SmugMug does but Flickr does not.
Q – Can you tell a publish service to simply mirror a set of Collections / Smart Collections declared in another folder of Collections / Smart Collections?
No you cannot.
Q – Can you have a folder of Collections / Smart Collections which automatically mirrors the content of another folder?
No you cannot.
Q – Can I copy a Smart Collection and Paste or drag copy it into another folder / publish service?
No you cannot which in my view is strange omission, but you can export the settings of a smart collection to an external file and re-import these settings into a published service.   One at a time only!
Q – Can I create a Collection in such a way that it automatically mirrors the content of another collection?
No I don’t think so.
Q – Can I create a Smart collection in such a way that it automatically mirrors the logic of another smart collection?
Unfortunately not and I think a great shame.   Ideally I would like to see LR be able to inherit the settings of another Smart collection and optionally extend the logic – but you can’t.
Q – Can I create a Smart Collection that will automatically mirror the content of a non-Smart Collection (published or not).
Interestingly you can!   In your smart collection you can simply say “Source Collection” or “Source Published Collection” contains whatever the name of the collection you wish to mirror.  It is disappointing that there is no option for “Source Smart Collection” in the available rules for the logic.
Hopefully one or more of these Q&A’s is relevant to you.
If I got any of the above wrong I would be delighted to be corrected by anyone.
Alan.
PS – I would be more delighted if LR 6 introduced the concept of a “Mirrored Folder” which automatically replicates the content of a Collection folder – unlikely I think, because each publish service seems to have customisation of these folders.   I would also be delighted if LR 6 added the “Source Smart Collection” and “Source Published Smart Collection” to the list of available rules because this would add powerful opportunities to the Smart Collection concept as well as allowing me to maintain 34 SCs instead of 136 of them.