Collection Pain Again

[sizzlingbadger]

More trouble with collections today....

I was browsing a smart collection and decided to I wanted to delete a few images that I had taken to advertise my old drum kit online. You can't delete from collections despite the option being presented to you in the context menu :

There is a shortcut that usually works, Shift-Option-Command-Delete a useful undocumented feature that is required if you want to work in collections. I used the short cut and my photos remained exactly where they were. I tried again only to have my mac beep at me to tell me that it was now not possible to use this sequence of keys.

Then I noticed that the the photos all had ? in the top right corner, LR had deleted from the disk after all but had not updated itself. I decided this was probably a re-fresh issue so selected a different collection and then returned to my original. The photos had now gone - hooray !

Then I noticed the collection "count" was still unchanged, it was showing 55 photos but there were only 33 now. It appears that the catalog is now corrupted.

I have the usual safe guards in place to fix this but I had to vent this frustration as LR collections are becoming the bane of my life :'(

 

[erro]

You can't delete a photo from a smart collection since the "smart" means that you have some selection criteria that makes the photo part of that collection. If you want to remove the photo from the collection you have to remove/change that citeria in that photo. Example: if you have a smart collection where "rating equals five starts" you have to give the photo another rating ('-4).

 

[MarkNicholas]

I think he wants to delete the photo from LR and from his hard drive, whilst viewing from within the smart collection. I also find this preventative "feature" completely illogical and unnecessary. After all, if we can be "trusted" to delete photos when viewing from outside a smart collection then why not when we are within a smart collection. I suspect there is an explanation for it working like this and I would be interested to find out what it is...

 

[erro]

I run Windows XP and LR 3.2 and I can use the Ctrl-Shift-Alt-Delete method to delete photos from within a smart collection. Have never seen the problems that Nik mention. Maybe it's a Mac bug?

 

[sizzlingbadger]

Mark is correct, I just want to delete the image from LR and the hard disk while viewing it in the smart collection. If the shortcut works then why not just let me do it from the context menu ? LR is completely illogical in some places.

The shortcut usually works for me but this time It gave trouble, it seems fine again now though so must have a been a temporary glitch.

The reason I'm having a tidy up is I'm planning on moving my images into a more useful folder structure rather than just let LR manage it as a hierarchy of dates. I don't really want to manage my images this way, I would much rather use [smart] collections and keywords but this is proving too painful with external editors and stacks.