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Lesson Info

Folders, Collections and Smart Collections

before we do the little import export. I do want to talk about folders, verse collections. If you're using folders and you're completely attached to folders and folders or your best friend, at least spend some time with collections because they do a couple of things. And if you're just in light rail when you're like you know, I am a grid geeky scroll person, you don't know what a collection is. Ignore your folders, so if you're not attached to them, don't worry about cleaning them up. Even it's not gonna matter. The folder structure is legacy for how come how we organize. But computers are smarter than us and organizing that data because they can look at data from multiple different points. That's how the metadata works. I want to look at my photos that were shot with a D a 10. I want to look myself shot with Canon with my Sony if we go look at the files. Unless there, named Sony somehow were like Mom know what's what. But the computer could figure that out for us folders is how we hie...

rarchically put stuff into the computer. And so if you're a person, I say that was really attached to that. And you're like, No, I know I have a folder structure that is very important to me. I have landscape travel, my stuffs in the and I spent years cultivating that folder structure. Great. Keep doing that. I'm gonna show you an easy way to move that into collections. But keep doing that, cause that's already your workflow that works. Don't adopt something just cause it's different. But the reason to think about collections versa Folder is a photo can only live in one folder at a time. If you want a folder, a photo to live in a different folder, you have to make two copies of that photo, a copy in the one folder and a copying the other folder. Which photo is the correct photo? You edit one. It's not the other one. You come back, you're like Wait a minute. I edited that. No, I didn't it that I did the one down there, but those are the exact They're supposed to be the same. That's the folder. Problem Collection allows a photo live in multiple collections without duplicating it on the hard drive, so it has a one to many relationship. One photo can live in many collections. That is one of the great parts about collections. The other part is, it has nothing to do with your hard drive. It has nothing to do with your story to anybody who's ever moved. Ah, photo outside of light room knows that light room gets very angry, and it comes back with the question mark. Like I call it the question market stupidity, because I feel like that question Mark says to meet your an idiot, you should have known better than to do this. And I'm like, No, no, I just cleaned up my hard drive. Okay, Once light Room has access and knows where those photos are on the folder, you have to move them in light rooms. Most people have learned the hard way, but collections not attached to the hard drive at all. I can move stuff around, delete, add change, don't have to worry about anything changing, because the collection lives in the light room database and nowhere else. It's not physically on the drive anywhere, so I don't have to worry about anything weird being moved outside the collection. There, outside, on the folders in the world of collections we also have. There's three buckets underneath there. So in the collections panel, I've got a collection, a smart collection and a collection set. A collection set is a container toe. Hold collections, collections, hold folders, cheese collections, hold photos. They are analogous to a folder, so collection holds a photo. So collection set holds collections or other collection sets and collections hold photos. I have tried many times to throw photos into a collection set, and it won't let me do it because I want a junk drawer. I don't know what I want to do with that. Just throw the junk drawer. Love junk drawers. It's like data mining. Oh, a screwdriver. Oh, yeah, I want that in light room won't let me do it. Ah, smart collection gives me a set of pre defined rules that the folder always stays up to date with. So if I say create a smart collection and I could name the smart collection, I can put it inside a collection set. It asked for a series of rules. So this is all the things that I can pivot off of in the collection set. So in this case. What has rating? If the rating is greater than equal, the four stars put it in that. And if the star rating a new photo comes in and I put a four on it, it will just automatically appear in that folder. So the smart collection is smart because it's always looking at the metadata and keeping itself up to date. If a photo has four stars and it gets dropped to three leaves the collection. If I come in and add a second parameter and I say Hope, I had a second premise of the plus sign over here I had a second parameter. So the label is red and the star ranking is four stars up here is the match all any or none? So all the rules have to be met, so it has to be read and have four stars. Any of the rules have to be met. It has to be read, and for four stars or none of the rules, show me none of my photographs that have that so you can build these generals most the time. I could tell you when you make when you do a collection, it's in this little rule setting when you're like No, no, I know. I have read photos with four stars. It's this any all issue there was between all rules have to be met or any of the rules have to be met. Now there is another little option in here, from a workflow efficiency standpoint with smart collections that it is kind of a hidden little feature. But it's a really important one if you're gonna make smarter, smart rules. If you hold down the all key on the PC and the option can IMac that plus sign turns into a past tag pound sign? If I click on that, it now creates a sub rule against that top rule. So what this means is the label color is red, and then these rules air applied to the color red labels. So I'm basically getting a little bit more granular filter on my ruling so I can come in and say any of the following Your true, the rating is greater than equal before and say the has a smart preview. It is true. So now it's gonna go find first things that are red, and then it has to find four star and a smart preview. So it just allows me to get Mawr more granular down with the with the ruling. So it's a little piece in there if you're trying to get a much more specific looking a smart collection, great way to go, the piece that they've added and it's in the library search we're gonna look at when we saved searches. But one of things that was added in a recent update is If you come down to develop, you can now see has edits, had adjustments before, but has it? It's the difference when those two is what it looks. A crop in couple of parameters and some of the panels. But we can now come in and search by photos that I've edited, which is nice to be able to say, Wait a minute that I edit those or not in this piece. Does it by chance, have a smart collection that can have a marked as sink to your CC. Uh, I have not seen that, um, in there. There's a source for collection in the collection name contains. If you put the word sink in your collection, names that were sink than you could build a smart collection that were the collection containing the name sink. Um, for that smart collections, you can get pretty advanced with, um and use a lot of my work flow is kind of just in the more simple collections. But I do have things like missing copyright data. Show me all of my photos shot in the last three months. Show me foot because the last three months that's my window Upload for copyright. So I could get my unpublished photos last three months and still be in the copyright protection window. Just random little things I might want to find and keep up to date with. My workflow is star rankings. Three stars get edited to be edited. Four stars are edited. Five stars are printed so I could go search for all five star photographs knowing that those theoretically been printed. I need a six time Probably gonna change that because I'd also like to, uh I'm having to figure out of a sold question inventory thing. And I'm trying to figure out how that little pieces and I'll talk about that one gets some of the metadata, but all these little pieces you get moved. Ran on. But like I said, I'm kind of committed into that 345 scenario. So if I make a decision to change that, I got to think about Oh, I got unravel a bunch of stuff now, so usually it's on additional component. And that's where a smart collection would work. Because if I used to say, Ah, keyword for sold, I could make a smart collection for five stars in the words sold. And that would tell me that that was a sold photograph that had also been printed or something like that question. Yesterday you showed of finding pictures by the content like an elk. Can you translate that into a collection? Okay, so in light room CC, you can use Adobe since a search engine to find photographs. Okay, so the in that sinking world, the key wording doesn't sink back down because of the hierarchal nature of the way keywords work in classic verse, CC title and caption Sync back there is a plug in that almost does this. We'll talk about plug ins, but there's a plug in that will do a search and transfer, and it doesn't quite do the keywords the way I expect, but John is working on. I've been with me on back and forth. I'm hoping he'll be able to do something that where I could put those seat search parameters into the caption field or the title field. NCC. They'll sink back down and then I could transform up into the keyword field. So at some point I think they'll be that work around. But right now, it's not a that's not a sink option. Yeah, I was right there. That was my first thought. Was like find stuff and not have to be lazy. Key order. Basically, Um, for that, that's probably gonna Hopefully that workflow will come out. Show up. So collections if we get over here. So here's a collection of HDR photos. Here's a collection stompin Bob says pinball, but it's got a couple of birds in it if I want this photograph, but I want this photograph to be in, say, this HDR collection. All I do is just drag and drop it on to collect that HDR collection, and now it's in that collection not moved on the folder. Nothing's moved is in the collection. If I right click on it. I can remove it from the collection. No change anywhere. Nothing's nothing's been altered. If I right click on the collection and I choose set target collection, it will get a little plus sign next to it. What that means is I can use the keyboard shortcut B as in boy or Bravo. And if I get onto a folder, I hit the Beaky and let's start moved into that collection automatically. So if I've got my target collection, I can hit, stroll through a bunch of different photographs and just hit the Beaky. Select a range of photographs at the beach. You know, move those into there. So that's a kind of a quick way to move something into a different collection. I mention you can export a collection as a catalogue. So if I come here, I've got this sharpening collection by right click on there. There is export this collection as a catalogue. I select that it's gonna ask me where do you want to save that? To create a new fuller here called Export CEO. What do I want to call this new catalogue? In this case? I'll call it sharpening, and that's asking me down here. Three kind of important questions. Export negative files, smart previews and available previews. The negative files is your raw files of your J pigs or PSC's. Whatever those are. If you select that it's going to copy those out of the catalogue I'm in, the actual physical files will get duplicated and export it out. If I don't select that, it's gonna assume I want them left at the original. If I'm doing this because I want to move these probably somewhere else. So I always use the export the negative file, cause if I'm going to give it to somebody, I want them to have the files to work with or I'm gonna move it to another hard drive and I want to make sure the files were going with it. Now I'm gonna have two copies of these files now, but it's two different catalogs. So once I make this decision, I'm accepting the fact that I'm gonna have multiple copies of my photographs if I don't one copy the photograph. But now I've got the same problem I kind of have before, about if I leave that catalogue and the photos were at home I've lost access to him. Keeping those once I click Export catalogue does the export. And I can keep working because you can see the status bar is up here processes long It finished. We come back out, look at the desktop where I thought I put it. I put it somewhere, Expel that right they're sharpening. There's the sharpening catalogue and there's the photos that were exported out. So in the structure they had before. So if I open the sharpening catalogue, all that'll be there is the 11 photos that were in the sharpening cattle. So if you're in that world of I've got things commingled now build collections for the photos you want out to separate your catalogues and just export that collection, you know, and then just move the photos with it, and then you can delete the photos out of the old original master if you don't want them in there anymore. So that would be your split your split out