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Collections Idea

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pedz

Perry Smith
Premium Classic Member
Joined
Sep 23, 2014
Messages
179
Location
Leander, TX USA
Lightroom Experience
Intermediate
Lightroom Version
Lightroom Version Number
Lightroom Classic version: 11.4.1 [ 202206241800-b406ce4c ]
Operating System
  1. macOS 12 Monterey
Currently I take a trip (lets say) and I come home and I put all the photos in one collection and call it "Foo Trip". Then after some fiddling I might make a smart collection and call it "Best of Foo Trip". Or in a recent example I have a smart collection called "Birds of Foo Trip". But my current error is I have the Foo Trip in one place in my tree of collections and the other two off separate: one in the "Best of" collection set, and the other in "Smart Collections" collection set. Perhaps I'm the only one silly enough to do it this way.

I think I'm going to start making a Collection Set called "Foo Trip" and then within that set I can have collections such as "All" which would be all the photos, "Best of", "Birds of", ...
 
Why not use the Job field to record the trip and then add keywords? In other words, enter metadata to categorise and analyse the photos, and then create collections when you have a need to gather photos. The first is long term practice, the second is driven by ad hoc needs.

Remember that Job can be easily filtered as well as included in smart collections. So for instance you might have a continual need to find your best bird shots and would therefore maintain a smart collection for birds keyword > 3 star. But then you decide to repeat a trip, so you can then filter the smart collection on the Job / trip in the Library Filter, or switch to another Job / trip without cluttering the catalogue with collections that only interest you for a brief period.
 
Why not use the Job field to record the trip and then add keywords? In other words, enter metadata to categorise and analyse the photos, and then create collections when you have a need to gather photos. The first is long term practice, the second is driven by ad hoc needs.

Remember that Job can be easily filtered as well as included in smart collections. So for instance you might have a continual need to find your best bird shots and would therefore maintain a smart collection for birds keyword > 3 star. But then you decide to repeat a trip, so you can then filter the smart collection on the Job / trip in the Library Filter, or switch to another Job / trip without cluttering the catalogue with collections that only interest you for a brief period.
Well... this opened a bag of worms. . I like the idea so I started investigating how / where do I set "Job". I finally went to the "All Photographs" and then the top panel, Metadata tab, picked Job as the filter, and looked at my choices. I have many "Job" choices. I guess I have been entering that sometimes. It is the "Job Identifier" under IPTC (I'm sure I am not telling you anything that you don't already know.). But what is crazy is I have about 14 ultra weird "Jobs" such as "///rooting.monitors.eaten" with two images in it. And "///significance.hayloft.satin" with another two images in it. I guess either something glitched long long ago or something. Hmm... I wonder if ... yes. All of these whacko "Job" names are JPEGs which (I'm half guessing) were scanned at the professional film processing place I used. They must have added in the Job probably as part of their work flow to keep orders separate.

Anyhow... not that any of that matters. I like your idea. I think creating a nice present before I go on a trip which has a Job Identifier will become part of my routine. And I can look at adding Job Identifiers to my existing collections. The other feature of this is if / when I export the metadata, it will be in there as opposed to having collections which is purely a LR concept and doesn't port well to other apps should I ever need to do that.

I know I can pick images for a particular job via the top panel. Is there other ways to do it?
 
You can also use job as a smart collection criterion.

It's a very useful field as it's one of the few that is available to filters and smart collections. I've used it a lot over the years and quite flexibly, whatever makes sense to me, though not with the range of job titles that you've discovered!

Also, imagine that you edit a photo in Photoshop. If you've already entered the job, the new TIF/PSD will also contain the job and will then be picked up by any smart collections with that job criterion. With your original collection-based method, the TIF/PSD would only be added to the collection if you happened to be in the collection when you did edit with - not if you were in a folder or elsewhere. I think your comment about porting show that you already appreciate another advantage.

Job's a really underappreciated field. Rant over!
 
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