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Copying / Transferring Collection Assignments

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John Barrow

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Joined
Apr 17, 2017
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Hi,

I use collections extensively. Unfortunately, an image may appear in its original form in one collection and as a virtual copy in another collection. Sometimes both the original and the virtual copy appear in the same collection. I'm trying to simplify things and reduce confusion by making sure that only the most recent edit appears in all the collections, if necessary replacing older versions.

How do I do this effectively? Can I copy or transfer the collection assignments of one image to another image? With keywords, one can copy / cut the keywords attached to one image and paste them to another, but there does not seem to be anything similar for collections.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, and needless to say I'm being far more careful in any new assignments to collections!
 
Hi John, welcome to the forum!

You're right, it's a pain. The best solution I've come across is using the Sync-o-matic plug-in to copy collection metadata to all the photos with the same name/metadata. Syncomatic - Sync files with same name or time

Hi Victoria,

Thanks for your welcome and response. This seems a great piece of software. A possible problem is that it uses the file extension to differentiate source and destination files. In my case source and destination are all *.nef files. I've downloaded the trial and will have time later this afternoon or tomorrow to experiment with it and see whether there are other possibilities for distinguishing source and destination. If so, it will solve a lot of problems!
 
It'll sync across stacks as well, so works well for VC's and Masters.
 
"A possible problem is that it uses the file extension to differentiate source and destination files. In my case source and destination are all *.nef files."

Not really. It uses the file type, not the extension and has an option to handle cases like yours (as well as stacks). You have to tell it which collection contains the sourc files, and which contains the target files.
 
Thanks. I'll have time to tackle this tomorrow and to become familiar with its capabilities.
 
Not really. It uses the file type, not the extension and has an option to handle cases like yours (as well as stacks). You have to tell it which collection contains the sourc files, and which contains the target files.
Since you bring it up, I was playing with that today for a blog post in a few weeks time, but I couldn't get it to work. I'd put the duplicate photos in QC, selected them... but it wouldn't let me tell it which collection contains the source files, because it said they were all in one collection. You can tell me to go read the documentation... but what was I missing?
 
Ah, that may because you have to select both (or all) sources.

I've always been over-cautious syncing files of the same type, and for a long time the plugin only allowed it when the names differed. So when I added the source option, I didn't want to make it too easy to really mess up your catalogue ;)

John
 
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