Lessons

Lesson Info

Folder Status Plug-in

the first session we have is one that shows you how you khun find just about any image you've shot in a matter of seconds needed to do a little bit of work ahead of time you could make it so much easier later the problem I find is if I go and look at any of my folders for where my images are I just shoot so often that oftentimes it's a little bit too easy to get behind on things if I look at my list of shoots for instance here I'll just goto a folder you'll see that in a particular month I'll end up coming in here like in june and shooting all sorts of different areas of the country and just keep shooting and shooting but the problem is a lot of things she's keep backing up as far as what has been processed what hasn't what images should be used for my portfolio what images are ready to be printed how do we figure all that out because right now it just seems like a big list of folders and it's not the best way to necessarily manage your life so I want to show you some ways that I have ...

started changing that to try to make it so it's much easier for me to find any particular image that I've shot and I can figure out what have I done to any particular folder in light room so first there is a way of extending light room adding features to it that don't ship with the product and I want to share with you one particular website where you can get plug ins for light room that'll add additional functionality these plug ins you can usually download a demo of it and use it for free for a limited period of time and then you need to purchase it but the person who creates these particular plug ins it's donation where which means you can donate a penny and own it it's a matter of he's just encouraging you if you want to encourage him to make more plug ins you know give him the money s o we show you a website I'm going to go here in fire fox it's not the simplest web address but I'll zoom up on it so you could write it down right up here if you go to that particular website you're going to find a page that has a long list of plug ins that are available for light room all the plug ins you can use and they are like us a donation where but the smallest donation is whatever the smallest amount you could send to somebody on paypal and I think what happens is if I remember right it's like a penny in that pen he actually goes to paypal is there processing fee and the author wouldn't get it if you sent only that amount but if you find it to be overly useful then sentiment came out of money because it encourages him to create more of these plug ins and they had a lot of really cool functionality to it so let's take a look at one that I really like to use so first off if you look at this page you can scroll through and it'll give you a list of a whole bunch of plug in some of these plug ins you will find their similar functionality built into light room for instance there is something for exporting to smugmug built in tow light room but here this person would have found more functionality that they wanted that they couldn't find in light room so they created their own that gives you a lot more control over what you're doing but if you go down here and just scroll through you'll find a huge list well what I like though under the section of utility plug ins there is a plug in here called fuller st us photo folder status it's under the heading of utility plug ins and that one as well as there's one down here called meta data viewer preset builder just look at the ones that are in general highlighted in white here and those air once that I really find to be useful I'm just going to show you one of them right now and it's called folder status I've installed that plugged in already but it to install plug in just so you know how it's done when you download the plug in it will just be a file on your hard drive and you can store the plug in wherever you would like but you might as well store where other light room plug ins or stores you keep them in one consistent location otherwise he might have it on a random area of your hard drive and you might run across it one day and go what's this you just throw it away not realizing what it wass so let me show you how you can install plug ins and where you can find out where your current plug ins are located if I go to the light room menu and come down here tio choi actually file choose me the file mannion and she's plugin manager file playing manager that's going to bring up a dialog box and on the left side you'll have a list of some plug ins you won't have anywhere near as many as I have and the ones that have a little green light next to more turned on the ones that have a white circle next tomb are disabled I have a bunch of them because I'm doing some experimentation with a bunch of different plug ins so you will have nowhere near this this number but what you can do is click on any one of these plug ins and over here you'll see settings for the particular plug in you can ignore just about all of those settings and just look for an area called status in under status it will tell you the path for where that particular plug in is currently stored on your hard drive and there's a button which on a mac is called showing finder in windows I'm assuming would be called showing explorer because they call it windows explorer of the part of your operating system where you navigate your hard drive but if you click on that it will bring you to the folder where your plug ins are and so if you download a new plug in like once from the website I just showed you this is where I would end up putting them in the same location that you have your other plug ins so you could after downloading the plug in simply drag it to this folder dragging it to the folder though is not enough to install it in order to install it on the left side you see the list of all my plug ins well at the very bottom of the list is a button called ad and if I click on that it'll bring up an open dialog box and if you haven't messed with things usually don't be pointing at the same folder you have your plug ins in and if it's not you can navigate the same way you navigate your hard drive usually and you click on the particular plug in you would like to add and in the lower right there's a button called ad plug in so in essence you're clicking on an existing plug in you're finding a button called showing finder to figure out where these things stored you're putting your blufgan in that same location and then they actually get it so light room knows it's there you get the ad button down here and just tell us where that plugging its tell which one it is once you've done that you khun disable in rio naboo plug ins by clicking on the name of a plug in and there will be a choice right down here of enabling it we're disabling it I've disabled most of my plug ins because I didn't want you guys to see a bunch of things on the menu that you're not used to seeing I wanted it on ly be the ones have talked about and that's why a lot of miner turned off but there are instructions for how to install plug in also on that plug in website so if you missed something there I know that you can read up on it if you'd like so let's see what is one particular plugin do that he has the one called folder status well I find that when I look through my folders it just seems to be a jumble of names in dates and it doesn't really help me to know did I ever process the images that contained within this folder and light room doesn't really have a way for me to mark this folder with any kind of a status so if I go to the file menu and I come down here to a choice called plug in extras this is where you can access the functionality that's contained within any plug in that you've installed in here you'll find one that I've added called folder status dialogue you won't have that one unless you've already visited that web page you've already downloaded it and you already installed it now with folder status dialogue I can click on any folder in my folder list and after I choose that this comes up and if you look here it gives me the name of the folder on the left and then a bunch of check boxes I could turn on to tell it the status of that particular folder so I can go over here and I've set this up the way I like to have it and let's just take a look at what it I's talking about here you ever we had talked about my star rating system where we had one star for something I was going to keep in ignore two stars for something that was going to process three stars for a priority processing that kind of stuff well here I have a checkbox for legacy ratings that means before I developed that system I might have had some writings in a folder and I just want to make sure I know are they part of that mindset that I have developed that I'm using nowadays where is this an old folder that have never read visited with that new mindset and if so I'll say it's got legacy ratings meaning that I should not think of them with the general mindset that I described to you earlier if on the other hand they're not old ratings before I came up with that system instead their current ones then the very first pass I go through is when we give them between one and three stars one star for keeping ignore two stars for process three stars for priority processing and if I've done that toe entire folder of images then I'm going to turn on that check box so I know it's been done and I know if I see any star ratings in there I know what they mean because they conform to my system then usually after rating images what's my next step will my next step is to process the ones that are three stars or above didn't we have a search where we could easily find the ones that are three stars and above those of the ones that need a priority processing because they look really good well if I had gone to that process I collect this and then when I come back to this folder aiken tell if I've gone through that step or not then I'd like to process the things that are two stars and above if I have time I often don't have time it's when I get some free time well if I come in here I can tell has that been done yet or not over here it says sequences resolved that means have I looked through all the images that I flagged remember I use a flag too marcus sequence of images well did I ever go back and review those flagged images and process them and resolve them down to are they worth processing or not if I have I turned that on then over here we haven't really talked about these parts of the process that I go through yet but over here it says three plus ki worded in we're going to talk about keywords this morning but I don't keep word every image that I have instead I only keyword the good ones and so this means did I keyword the ones that got raided three stars are above if I did I'd turn on that check box and that we can talk about with these others mean but you can set up your own system you don't have to use the one I have this just shows you how I like to have it set up so what I'm going to dio is there is two buttons up here one is called ad folder status field all that means is ab another check box in here if I click that I can type in the name I want for a new check box maybe it's just called done and down here I can type in her description so if I ever come in to edit it again in the future I can figure out what that means click okay and now once I click okay I have an extra check box in my particular case though my screen is too small it's not wide enough to have to scroll now but usually amount of twenty seven inch display and I got plenty of space now that's just for adding fields the button on the right side the button to the left is for editing fields that already exist if I click on that it will give me a list of the fields I already have and in here I can change the order of them the top one is the first check box that will appear on the one below that would be the next one over and you see these up and down buttons that would allow me to move one of these upper down so here's the one called done I'm just going to hit the up button we'll hit the up button and I could move it all the way to the top if I chose to and then it would appear is the first check box in the list or if I decided I didn't want it on the right side there's a button called delete row and that means just get rid of that particular one and since that's not part of my system that done check box I got rid of it so you can see that you can change the names of these particular fields and you come over here and type in a description just in case you forget what they mean so now let's take a look at this I've turned on to check boxes for this particular folder I'll click save and what it just did is it created a little tiny hidden file inside this folder like you know how we have ex mp files for our raw adjustments will now there's equivalent to an ex mp file for this folder that on ly this plug in reads and so it just went in there and created a little text file that told it which ones of those check boxes were turned on now I could select a range of folders I click on this bottom folder actually it's going to these click on this bottom folder hold shift and come up to here I can then go back to that same plugin extras folder status dialogue and I can see what status are all of those folders in do you see in the left side's the list of the folders to the right of that I can't tell if this has these have legacy ratings before I came up with that rating system because I'm just now doing those this one has used the new ratings schtum these half three stars and above processed so therefore when I come back to work on a folder in the future I'm not clueless as to what's already been done instead I got a pretty good idea of how far did I get through with processing the contents of that folder that makes sense these ratings they get completely messed up whenever I teach and think because we keep checking these check boxes when I'm not thinking so whatever folder it was we edited earlier today we'll be on the wrong status that's why you work on duplicate catalogs and other things when you're teaching so that's one of the plug ins that is available on that website and I find that one to be overly useful because otherwise how do I know what I've done any folder in here just memory for the most part and with that it really gives me a solid idea is long as I remember each time I'm done working on a folder if I got it far enough along to go back up to the file menu choose plug in extras and then get into my folder status it will just list on the left side however many folders you have selected you can select forty folders and will be a list of forty here but if I want to change the staffs of just one I just work on the one all right so I think that's pretty cool and so explore the other plug ins he has one of the other ones that I think is pretty cool is that you khun how it analyze your entire er foto catalogue and tell you what you're most common lenses that you use like we focal length and things if you want to think I want to buy new lens soon you could look do you shoot mainly at the at the wide end of your wide angle where you should get an even wider one you know what is just the most common so I find it to be great so before we move on we're going to get into key wording next any questions about that plug in and just the general use that you have for it yeah I do have a couple questions I'd love to ask about plug ins kind of general bret easy wonders whether these plug ins destabilized software at all or are they pretty solid well the ones from that particular person get updated quite frequently and so you'll find if there's an issue that is that comes up he's usually relatively quick it updating them and so there's always the possibility anytime you you know add something just like you had a plug into photoshopped you could run into issues but I haven't run into issues with the particular plug ins I've mentioned and actually that is the next question sam costs one and in general are the light room plug ins version specific that is do you have to get new plug inversions whenever light room is updated you depends on what they've changed in the version of light room but often times you would need to get in updated plugin if they've changed to feature that that particular plugging its utilizing but again he's very uh it's very frequent that he updates its plug ins in the updates are usually free on so I find that if you go into thinking we do this now if I go to the file menu and she's plugging manager if I click on one of his plug ins usually it will say right here there's a version that's now available he updated it they'll be a what's new button saying figure out what he changed maybe there's some sort of a bug fix where a new feature he's added and then right there there's an update now button and it would go download the new version