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Sessions by Collection Set per Project

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Michael Naylor

Active Member
Joined
Nov 21, 2016
Messages
145
Location
Spain
Lightroom Experience
Intermediate
Lightroom Version
Classic
In my ongoing attempts to rationalise and use LR at intended, I’ve begun to make use of Collections more seriously. I’m leaning towards doing it like this…

Projects
Project 1
Sources
Selects
Intermediates
Finals
Derivatives​
Project 2
Sources
Selects
Intermediates
Finals
Derivatives​

…and so on. The Intermediates collection can contain PSD files, etc. The upper tiers and Collection Sets and the lower are normal Collections which I simply drag & drop images into.

Problem#1 - LR doesn't copy the child Collections, so having an empty project template is not helpful. In other words, Collection Sets are not objects (like folders, for example)

Problem #2 - Dragging & dropping between Collections is like a “copy” operation, rather than a “move” operation. An option to choose “copy” or “move” would have been nice.

In addition to this, I have a few Smart Collections to help identify what needs doing, but thats another subject.

All comments and suggestions will be humbly appreciated.

Mike.
 
This is where I would use smart collections rather than normal collections. You can have an image move automatically from one collection to another by changing an attribute like the star rating or its color label.
 
This is where I would use smart collections rather than normal collections. You can have an image move automatically from one collection to another by changing an attribute like the star rating or its color label.
Take a look at John Beardsworth's Workflow Smart Collections. It can be used or modified to manage almost any workflow. I have it extended to include Smart Publish Services. It is not necessary to create derivative finals since republishing can always regenerate a new copy of the derivative final.
 
Take a look at John Beardsworth's Workflow Smart Collections.
Now playing with John Beardsworth's workflow and understanding how useful it will become.

At present, my 25,000 images lack any consistency regarding keywords, star ratings or labels. In addition, around 7,000 are scans that still need keywords, EXIF dates, coordinates and sensible IPTC Sublocations. For dates and geotagging I'm using JB's CaptureTime to Exif and JF's Geocoding Support. This process will take months, because I'm finding it difficult to remember things from so long ago. For example, I have about 10 years of unidentified holidays, meaning the where & when.

Many more recent images imported into this now master catalouge are from a complex folder structure used when making composite images (i.e. Photoshop projects where each final was composited from multiple sources). I like to have some kind of audit trail so I can remember how the final was produced. Often, there are multiple PS versions for the intermediate stages.

Other projects have been calendars where the final derivative is either a multipage PDF or an InDesign document.

Right now, I think I need a way of recording my progress so I can randomly jump around, as and when forgotten memories return or when one clue leads to another.
 
Given your requirements, I'm not sure whether JF's Folder Status (also works on Collections) could be of use; you're obviously familiar with some of his stuff so you may already have been there.
 
Given your requirements, I'm not sure whether JF's Folder Status (also works on Collections) could be of use; you're obviously familiar with some of his stuff so you may already have been there.
Thanks for suggesting this. I'll take a closer look over the next few days.
 
I've always wanted an annotation feature in Lr. There are places in IPTC metadata to put notes, but it's for an individual image (I like "instructions"). I would make a key image (and add that name to the filename) if I needed to remember stuff for say a project or an event. You can use Photoshop or Bridge too.
 
I've always wanted an annotation feature in Lr. There are places in IPTC metadata to put notes, but it's for an individual image (I like "instructions"). I would make a key image (and add that name to the filename) if I needed to remember stuff for say a project or an event. You can use Photoshop or Bridge too.
Thanks for this, but it makes we wonder why the Comments tab always displays "Comments not supported here"?
 
Now I understand, so I guess it won't be useful to me as I won't be sharing the vast majority of my photos.
There are other suitable IPTC fields for notes and John Beardsworth has a Big Notes Plugin that will add your note to the LR data base catalog file
 
Thank you all for the suggestions and particularly for recommending JF's Folder Status plug-in, which I'm finding to be enormously helpful. With all the plug-ins I seem to be accumulating, I'm beginning to question why I need LR at all [sic].
 
With all the plug-ins I seem to be accumulating ...
I know what you mean. I've had LR for a while but have only just started really exploring plug-ins. I just need to rein in and pick those that genuinely add something to my workflow.

I do have quite a few of JF's simply because they do just what I want. Oddly I've had a very techie IT book of his on my shelf for several years and was somewhat surprised to find the same guy writing LR plug-ins!

Following some of the threads on here, including this one, has lead to downloading a couple more to try ... just can't help myself ;)
 
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Following some of the threads on here, including this one, has lead to downloading a couple more to try ... just can't help myself ;)
One just has to be careful. For example, I'm making much use of JF's Capture Time to Exif. It works great until asked it to edit 4000 images in one go. After 12 hours there was still very heavy disk activity going on the background. The system logs caused me to think it was stuck in a loop (I don't understand log files), so I quit LR and rebooted. Fortunately no harm is apparent, but most of the 4000 had not been processed.
 
JF's Capture Time to Exif

JF's? It's JB's ;)

4000 is a lot, but essentially you're sending 4000 Exiftool instructions to the operating system. Once they are sent, you can in fact close Lr because the OS + Exiftool are now chugging away. Since each instruction is rewriting files, as safely as it can, that's likely to take some time. I suggest you select the first few in Lr and do a Metadata > Read Metadata to see that it has worked.

John
 
JF's Capture Time to Exif

JF's? It's JB's ;)

4000 is a lot, but essentially you're sending 4000 Exiftool instructions...
I accept most people would never dream of submitting so many images, but I'm working with loads of scans and wish to add the scanner name as the camera make/model. By the way, I had noted your warning to allow the process to proceed unseen (i.e. the LR Activity Bar ends first), so I was monitoring disk activity and waiting for it to steel down.

My humble apologies to JF for getting that wrong and thank you, JB, for explaining what was going on. I can now relax, although a random check did confirm no damage was done.
 
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