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Tips, Tricks & Troubleshooting

now let's look at a few tips tricks and troubleshooting techniques for working with Lightroom. Classic. First a tip and that is so far we've looked at organizing our photos using folders, collections and keywords, but we can also do so in a map Here. I've clicked on all photographs. So that lightroom is thinking about all 248,000 photos that I have in this catalog file. I'm going to click on the map tab and it will take in a moment to think about all those images, but it will attempt to place them on a map. And when I'm in the map, I can click on any one of these particular points and if I do, I can figure out which photo was taken in that spot. Here's one taken in North Dakota. And if we are head over here to Utah, there's six of them total right here And I can use a little arrow here to go through all six. Well, how do I get my images to appear on a map? Well, it's rather actually rather easy. Let's go back to the library module and see if we can find some images that are not current...

ly on the map. I'm just going to come in here and pick any random year and I'm going to pick a random folder in here, let's say this one in san Diego California. Now I'd like to put these images on the map. Well, as long as I'm viewing that folder, I can go to the map and see if they're going to show up and I can already tell you that a couple of them will. And the reason why I know that is if you look at these images you see these tiny little icons in the lower right corner of each one of them. Which is this one here has a special icon right there. That's supposed to look like one of those pins on a map. And that means this one has location data included. If I were to click on that image and go to the right side of my library module and I were to come under here under metadata. And if I change my viewing preset for metadata to location we can see what's in there. And if any of your pictures have a location with GPS information tagged to it, then it's going to automatically appear on that map. And this information was most likely added by an accessory I had attached to my camera that automatically tagged it with a GPS location. But let's figure out how to get these other images to appear in a map as well. Well let's go to the map module and in the upper right we have the choice of searching the map. Let's go to SAN Diego because that's where those photos were taken then I can zoom up further on the map in the lower left. We have little plus on here and we can view this map either as a satellite view or in the lower left where it says map style We could also view it as a roadmap or just a normal satellite view where you don't see the roads. But I know some of these images were taken over here at the SAN Diego Zoo. So in the upper right I'll search for SAn Diego and then just put the word zoo in after and hopefully it'll zoom up on that general area. Then I can go to the bottom of my screen where the film strip is and I believe this was taken near the SAn Diego Zoo. And so all I need to do is click on this image and if I knew its precise location, I can just drop it on the map and even if I don't know the exact location, I can still drop it on the map and it is going to take it with an exact location, but it also picks up the city, the state and other things and that's going to cause it to appear on the map. So this is another one taken in the same general area. And so I'm going to drag it onto the map and each time I drag it onto the map, when I zoom out of the map, it's going to appear uh where I've placed it. So here, all I need to do is zoom out further and you can see all those points put on the map. So all you need to do is search for the location and see if you can find an approximate nearby location. With changing the map style and zooming and then drag your image on top of the map. If you want to see all your images on a map, then go to the top left of your library module, choose all photographs and then go to the map module. Just know that it's only going to show you those images that you've dragged the map or that have GPS data. And I got a bunch for the U. S. Here. I went across on a cruise ship and I had an automatic GPS logger attached to my camera And you can see where a half a good number of images tagged and as you zoom up, these numbers will spread out. So here it says 213 over here in venice. But if I get close enough, you're gonna find that that 2 13. Unless I dragged all 213 images onto one spot on the map, they should spread out once they get close enough so I can see more distinct locations. And if I want to see the images that were captured, they're simply click on the number that appears or you can just hover over and you'll see a picture and then you'll have the little arrows here to cycle through. But that's how to get your images onto the map in lightroom. Let's head back to the library module and look at some other tips when it comes to your folder list, sometimes you'll find that you've navigated quite a few folders and it's starting to look a little bit cluttered in here. And if you've expanded many of these folders and then collapse its parent and then expand it. Once again, you're gonna find it remembers all the folders and their position like where they expanded or collapsed. But if you hold down the option key, when you click on the little expansion triangle, it's either going to collapse all the internal folders or expand them depending on what you started with. So, I'm going to option click this 2017 folders. Little triangle. Then I'll expand it again and now notice that everything has collapsed. I'll do it once again when it's collapsed. Hold option and click and that's going to expand them all. So now I can see all the sub folders. Other folder related tips. If you know you've saved an image into a particular folder, let's say it was in 2019 and one of these folders you've saved an image into. But when you click on it, it just doesn't show up here in lightroom. Well, you can force Lightroom to compare what it's showing you currently in the Lightroom catalog to what's actually on your hard drive and you do that by right clicking on the folder in choosing synchronized folder. That's going to look both for missing images that are on your hard drive, but not in the Lightroom catalog and the opposite where images are showing up in Lightroom but they aren't really on your hard drive anymore. When you choose synchronized folder, it's gonna analyze the folder and it'll tell you if any images need to be imported or removed in this particular case, nothing has changed in this folder. So it doesn't need to do anything. But that's how you get it to update. A particular folder is to right click and choose synchronized folder. Now here, you'll notice how my folders start with a year but there's actually no images in the base level of each one of these year folders. Instead there are sub folders that tell me where I was shooting each time. Well, you might have these extra levels of organization but you don't have to show them in Lightroom. If you have folder here that does not contain any individual pictures instead, it only contains folders. Then you can right click on it and there's a choice that says hide this parent. If I choose that it can take light room a little bit of time to sort it out. So it's doing quite a bit. But now you'll see that it no longer shows that more base level. Fuller. I'll do the same thing here to 2018 Right clicking and says hide this parent now. Instead of seeing 2018, I'm going to see all the folders that were contained within it. And so therefore even though in my hard drive, I might choose to organize my pictures into these various folders based on here, I don't have to show that here in the folder structure. If I want to go back I can always go back to one of these folders, right click on it and I can choose show parent. Then it's going to look at my hard drive to see if that folder was contained within another folder. And if so it's going to show that within the lightroom a little folder tree And I can continue doing that right clicking on H1 and choosing show parent folder because if this was in another folder, this would cause it to show up. And that can be useful because if you do that all the way back until you can no longer show anymore levels. You're going to get the name of your hard drive showing up in the list. It's a personal choice asked you how much of your drive you would like to have visible in your folder. Uh list. Now let's look at a few troubleshooting techniques. I'm going to go to a folder that we work with earlier here are some images that I imported previously and there are in this little sub folder called in progress. If I right click on this folder, I can see show and find her and I can actually see the files on my hard drive, I'll move that over to the right and I'm gonna make my Lightroom window a little smaller so you can see both of these side by side. Now if I make any changes on my hard drive, I can mess things up because here are all the file names the Lightroom keeps track of and if I come in here and decide to add some spaces in here, then this file no longer lines up with what Lightroom has in its catalog file. And so if I come over here lightroom you're going to find this little icon up here in the corner and that icon right now is indicating it does not have the original picture. You can tell if you go to the right side just underneath the hissed a gram click on on one image you see It has the original photo and it happens to have something known as a smart preview. But I go to the other file that I've changed the name of and it says it only has a smart preview. It does not have the original picture. So how can I fix that? Well, the only way I can fix it is to change the name of the file on my hard drive to match the name that is recorded in lightroom. So if I look at the name, there's just a dash before the number at the end and here we have spaces. So all you need to do is rename it back to what matches in Lightroom. And if I actually wanted to make that change to the file name, then I do it here in Lightroom. I'll go to the right side of my screen under metadata right there is the file name and I can click on it and if I wanted a bunch of spaces before the number, just do it right here because then whatever I do here in Lightroom is reflected not only on the hard drive, you see those spaces added, but also in Lightroom itself and nothing gets out of sync. So if you've accidentally renamed a file on your hard drive, just go back and rename it back to what you see in Lightroom and then make the change in Lightroom itself. So me taking out all those spaces is gonna make it think that this file is missing. So I just need to go back and put those spaces back but I need the exact number of spaces and then the change itself can happen over here in Lightroom and whatever changes you make in Lightroom are reflected on your hard drive. Well, I hope that gives you some ideas on how to work a little bit more effectively in Lightroom Classic. Now, if you go from start to finish with organizing your images using Lightroom Classic. And you start off using unique file names, unique folder names, then you'll always only have one file that a file name can refer to. Then organize your images based on status using your folder list. I showed you how to do that organized projects using collections. Make your images searchable using keywords And then take advantage of smart collections to have it automatically collect your images depending on what you're looking for. If you want to make an automatic portfolio or if you want to find all the images that were shot in the last 90 days that was shot with a wide angle lens and that our panoramas, you can easily do that with smart collections. We can also view our images on a map in all sorts of other things. But I find that utilizing Lightroom Classic for organizing all my images that if I truly think about it and implement most of the ideas that are in this class, then I can find my image is just about as fast as I can think about. The main thing is I typed command off to find and then I start searching for keywords. If that's not enough, I might start viewing images on a map or browsing my keyword list as a whole. I'm Ben Wilmore. I hope you enjoyed this class and Creative Live and have many other classes. So be sure to check them out