This might be a useful feature, but are you ever really, completely finished with the images in directory (or collection) in LR? Don't you ever find yourself coming back to some of those images for additional post-processing after learning a new technique or purchasing some new presets?
I do...all the time.
I download my images from my cards to a 20TB G-Tech Thunderbolt drive which is categorized according to type of photography (e.g., Landscape, Nature, Glamour, Motorsports, etc.) These directories are further subdivided based on geography, type, or year.
For example, I was out photographing the transient Mexican Orca pod yesterday and today; the first time they've been spotted in the Los Angeles area in over 30 years.
The directory is like so:
Nature\North America\United States\California\2018-29-09 California Whale Watching
under this directory I have two subfolders:
\processed \unprocessed
The directory structure is created automatically by a photography program called Light Blue, and their logic is simple. Download ALL images into the 'unprocessed' folder. Cull obvious goofups like no flash fired or an image of your foot or the clear blue sky when the boat was rocked by a wave. Go into Lightroom and perform the import with your import presets.
After keywording all of the images with high-level keywords, my next pass is to apply specific keywords; in this case female, male, calf, feeding, breeching, spy-glassing, etc. It is during this second round that I 'flag' the images I really hate and really like for either disposal or post-processing.
After post-processing in LR, DxO, PS, what have you, I move them into the 'processed' folder. Almost never will all of the images in the 'unprocessed' folder make it into the 'processed' folder, but I do find that from time to time I go back and revist some of the ones left in the 'unprocessed' folder.
This makes the 'processed' folder sort of a living folder, as its ranks may grow, and they might even shrink as I reflect upon a post-processed image and think it might not be so hot. Since photography is art, and artists usually believe that no work of art is ever truly finished, I'm not sure that marking a directory as complete would work for me. However, to each his or her own.
Besides, what would 'complete' mean? Does it mean that you have finished post-processing on all of your images? Or just on the ones you liked? And does that mean the images you thought were not worthy of post-processing were culled out? Or are they still co-mingled with the ones you processed?
For me, having the two separate directories leaves no doubt, or at least less doubt, as to whats what, and where what is. LOL.
Yes, knew about that and I use the colors for the genres, which matches up nicely with the colors found in Light Blue. It was about time LR added that capability, and I was glad to see it.
Since I follow a different workflow as described above, I have no dog in this hunt, but why would it be easier? I do not see the logic here, Carlos. Please help me see what I am missing.
You can also mark folders as favorites, so marking those uncompleted as favorites and then filtering on favorites is another option. That said, I'm not arguing against your idea. ;-)
Dmeephd, we have totally different workflows. I don’t use Light Blue (or Photo Mechanic, which many swear by), but Lightroom and PS (and Nik Collection and Helicon Focus). I have this structure on my Mac: /Data (36TB RAID 5), then Lightroom Photos/2018/BotanicGarden (or Chicago, NYC, Family, Sports, Clients, Projects, etc) I also have a “Photo Club” folder for Fine Art type shots, or competition shots, a catch-all, miscellaneous type folder. When I do a shoot I import into the appropriate folder, and immediately mark everything as a Pick. Then as I cull I use the X key to mark the (initial) rejects, and then delete them from the drive. I mark the folder with a Green flag to denote “to be edited”, and the first shot to process gets a 1 star mark, so I know where to begin. As I edit, I move the 1 star to the next shot that needs editing. As I edit I mark more as rejected, and delete those. When I’m done I take the Green flag off the folder (select None). Yes, I often go back for more editing as I think more about certain shots, or learn new tricks, or get feedback from club members or judges about how to improve an image.
For me LR Mobile is the killer feature, editing anywhere and everywhere is better than sitting at your desk for hours on end! Until other editors can provide this feature, I’m sticking with Lightroom! Hope that helps!
Agreed. And there is no correct workflow that fits all. I use Photo Mechanic as my first import program, simply because of its sheer speed for viewing the images, culling, and applying the first high-level keywords. (Light Blue is for the business side of photography; it is not a DAM tool.)
I have no use for LR Mobile just as I have little to no use for the camera in my iPhone or iPad (except to capture a whiteboard in an office when I have no other camera). I sync my preffered smart collection to LR on my Ipad and iPhone only to show others some of my work. Very helpful with models to give them an idea of what we're trying to do together during a shoot.
But editing on an iPhone or iPad? Not for me at all. I honestly do not see how an iPad can compare with a MacPro with 128GB RAM driving three 34" LG curved 4K displays. I'm pretty sure my old eyes would hate me after an hour or so working on a iPad. LOL
Yes $150 is pricey. Adobe is about $240 a year. Hard to compare, but I prefer a one time purchase for an efficient software without frequent update instead of monthly fee for a frequent updated software.
I've always held to the old saying that "You get what you paid for" and it generally holds true. The $150 is for a lifetime Photo Mechanic license, all the upgrades—typically every six months—are freebies. The ingest performance is amazing, even from memory cards, and the scrolling through the images is an order of magnitude faster than LR or Bridge. I kid you not, the images appear as fast as you can rotate the thumbwheel or swipe across the mouse. Sharp, instantly, and in a logical order. Pick the ones you think are 'kickers', apply whatever keywords you'd like, and then have PM import them directly into LR.
Sports photographers swear by it. When you're shooting fast moving action at 10 plus frames per second, a football game or auto race can generate 2k images in no time. If you're on assignment with a hard publishing timeline, you can't wait for LR.
I will seriously give a try. LR classic becomes laggy and slow. LR CC offer nothing but the cloud. I do really thinking about photo mechanic, OneDrive for the cloud (and real sharing capability) and luminary for development.
Ion on Mac OS and keyword is really effective to generate smart folders. Really.
PM is great as a fast review tool before LR if you continually shoot large numbers of photos and if you don't need to adjust them while you are reviewing. Both conditions are important - if you can't choose between images without adjusting them, it's not much benefit.
The purpose of PM is to flag the images you wish to adjust (post-process) and then import them into LR...only those you want to post-process. This minimizes the import time and allows you to get to production fast.
Later, you could import the rest. Or bring everything in at once at first, albeit that tends to defeat the purpose of alacrity initially.
I would not use folders at all for this kind of things. Folders are needed as physical storage places, but they suck as organisation tool. The main reason is that an image can only be in one folder. And moving images around kills any backup system, unless you backup these images over and over again, just because you moved them.
This is why Adobe created collections and smart collections in Lightroom!
Surely, and I use Smart Collections as well, but only when linked to the 'processed' folders. Collections was a brilliant idea from Adobe. Unfortunately, they are computational extensive and are the last amongst folders and collections to tally up after restart with there image count. The more Smart Collections one adds, the longer it takes and the slower the overall response of LR.
Typical. Adobe invents a great feature and then forgets about improving or providing the performance to support it.
"Adobe invents a great feature and then forgets about improving or providing the performance to support it."
I think this is rather exaggerated. I have a 180,000 images catalog, and use collections and smart collections extensively. So extensively that my folder panel remains collapsed 98% of the time. Yes, it takes a minute or two when I start Lightroom to load everything. But after that Lightroom is running smoothly.
Really? Try using 100 Smart Collections with a catalog of 1.9M images. That's when the performance of the Smart Collections started bogging the system (MacBook Pro) down. Now, six years later I'm at 3.5M images in 200 Smart Collections, on a MacPro with eight-cores, a 4TB SSD, and 128GB RAM, and although the performance of LR has generally improved with Mojave, the Smart Collections are still slow to update their image counts.
Sure, if you have 200 smart collections and 1.9M images, then Lightroom won't update this in a few seconds. I don't think you can expect anything else. After all, a smart collection is a saved search, so Lightroom needs to perform 200 searches on 1.9M images each to update them.
Hi John. It takes 20 - 30 minutes to parse the collections. I wasn't naïve enough to expect seconds, and the wait is tolerable if I'm not going to be working with the existing collections. The point is they are computationally intensive and the more one adds, the longer it takes. Therefore, collections are not the panacea you and Adobe make them out to be. They come with a price.
The question remains is when is Adobe going to have the performance catch up with the features it gloms onto LR? When will performance improvements take absolute precedence over feature-itis? I don't need GPS or facial recognition—I know where the images were taken because I was there when I snapped the shutter, and the facial recognition is a joke.
Now Adobe is talking about voice commands for LR. (This was in an opinion survey they sent me this morning.) Voice commands. Now there's a resource intensive feature that will really improve performance. NOT!
The survey also referred to online, collaborative photo editing. Another feature which on its face value sounds good, but what will the performance hit be?
LOL. Right! I do that several times...a session. After every large import (300+) or keywording session. After edits on enough images where I notice the performance is degrading.
To clarify, "Mark directory completed feature" as someone stated, is what I'm looking for. I think there was confusion on that. Thanks for all of the information that applied. Seems we got off track.
Responses
dmeephd
294 Messages
•
4.5K Points
2 years ago
I do...all the time.
I download my images from my cards to a 20TB G-Tech Thunderbolt drive which is categorized according to type of photography (e.g., Landscape, Nature, Glamour, Motorsports, etc.) These directories are further subdivided based on geography, type, or year.
For example, I was out photographing the transient Mexican Orca pod yesterday and today; the first time they've been spotted in the Los Angeles area in over 30 years.
The directory is like so:
Nature\North America\United States\California\2018-29-09 California Whale Watching
under this directory I have two subfolders:
\processed
\unprocessed
The directory structure is created automatically by a photography program called Light Blue, and their logic is simple. Download ALL images into the 'unprocessed' folder. Cull obvious goofups like no flash fired or an image of your foot or the clear blue sky when the boat was rocked by a wave. Go into Lightroom and perform the import with your import presets.
After keywording all of the images with high-level keywords, my next pass is to apply specific keywords; in this case female, male, calf, feeding, breeching, spy-glassing, etc. It is during this second round that I 'flag' the images I really hate and really like for either disposal or post-processing.
After post-processing in LR, DxO, PS, what have you, I move them into the 'processed' folder. Almost never will all of the images in the 'unprocessed' folder make it into the 'processed' folder, but I do find that from time to time I go back and revist some of the ones left in the 'unprocessed' folder.
This makes the 'processed' folder sort of a living folder, as its ranks may grow, and they might even shrink as I reflect upon a post-processed image and think it might not be so hot. Since photography is art, and artists usually believe that no work of art is ever truly finished, I'm not sure that marking a directory as complete would work for me. However, to each his or her own.
Besides, what would 'complete' mean? Does it mean that you have finished post-processing on all of your images? Or just on the ones you liked? And does that mean the images you thought were not worthy of post-processing were culled out? Or are they still co-mingled with the ones you processed?
For me, having the two separate directories leaves no doubt, or at least less doubt, as to whats what, and where what is. LOL.
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JohanElzenga
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Johan W. Elzenga,
http://www.johanfoto.com
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dmeephd
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4.5K Points
2 years ago
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carlos_cardona_4982447
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2 years ago
means Complete.
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dmeephd
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2 years ago
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lshoe
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carlos_cardona_4982447
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2 years ago
For me LR Mobile is the killer feature, editing anywhere and everywhere is better than sitting at your desk for hours on end! Until other editors can provide this feature, I’m sticking with Lightroom! Hope that helps!
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JohanElzenga
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2 years ago
This is why Adobe created collections and smart collections in Lightroom!
Johan W. Elzenga,
http://www.johanfoto.com
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valerie_hunter_d8tiutgl9gu2l
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90 Points
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reetesh_mukul
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744 Points
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