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Sync Is there an analog of Target Collection and B key (Add to Target Collection) in any other version of LR?

A

atolkachev

Member
Joined
Mar 21, 2020
Messages
88
Lightroom Version Number
14.0.1
Operating System
  1. macOS 14 Sonoma
I will ask the question in two ways. One way to ask it is in the subject. The other is to describe my use case and (since I assume the answer is to the subject question is 'no') ask you for your lifehacks to achieve my purpose.

Let's say LR has identified 39,468 photos of my daughter that I have taken over the years. Let us say it's her 18th birthday, and I want to create a slideshow of a 1000 (give or take) photos of her growing up. Let us say that only a small fraction of the 39,468 photos has a star rating or a pick flag assigned. Let us say I created a smart collection in LR of all 39,468 photos of my daughter, and let us say it is not a chore to scroll through them over a few hours and pick 2.5% of the photos by clicking a selection key (what would be B in LrC) 1000 times.

You may ask why not sync the smart collection to LrC and use the B key. Two reasons. One, smart collections don't sync (to my knowledge), so the smart collection has to be dumbed down, synced, and then what will happen in LrC is that all but the most recent photos are on the external drives, there are no smart previews, and scrolling through 39,468 10+ year old photos will amount to long periods of waiting for the gray frames to populate with previews. Let us say I already tried this on a smaller subset.

Using LR Desktop, LR Web or LR Mobile (iPad), is there a one-click solution to adding photos to a collection?

I considered clearing all pick flags and using P (or is it Z in non-classic LR?) as well as clearing star ratings and using 4 to mark all photos I consider good enough in the slideshow. This is not ideal, because the 5 or so thousand photos that do have a pick flag or a star rating will lose that piece of metadata unnecessarily. I am literally looking for the B key or a lifehack to implement it.

Wouldn't it be funny if there actually is a target collection and a B key in non-classic LR. The answer should be very short and sweet then.

Maybe there is yet another way?

I considered applying the LR Web "Best photos" feature, but in the past it has been very ......... imprecise for my taste.
 
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Is there a reason you don't want to just do it in LrC? If the problem is that the daughter IMAGES ARE itdentified in LR using face detection and you don't have them identified in LrC then try this.....
  1. In Lr/Cloud select those 38,468 photos of your daughter
  2. In Lr/.Cloud create an album (let's call it Daughter) and drag those 38,468 images to it
  3. IN LrC, turn on Sync and wait for that album to sync down to LrC. Everyting in your Lr/Cloud will come down to LrC but those 38k images will also be in placed in a collection.
  4. In LrC open the newly arrived "daughter" collection (at this point you can un-sync that collection if desired)
  5. While you are here you may want to create a Keyword for your daughter and assgn all 38k images to that KW
  6. Either remove the unwanted images from the collection or use the "b" key to add the ones you want to the quick colleciton. Or, use any other method to get the number of keepers down to your target number.
 
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Very valid suggestion, here are a few reasons I don't want to do it (doesn't mean I won't do it):

1. LR has been unpleasantly sluggish during my recent infrequent visits. I am 90% LrC, 10% iPad (nightly culling sessions that are good at putting me to sleep), 5% Web (Proof Galleries), 1% LR. If that does not add up to 100%, I am okay with that. In the past, LR has been smooth, clean and pleasant to use, if underpowered. During the last few sessions, LR does things like open up to a view of Cloud albums all with 0 counts and many with missing cover image, which situation sloooooowly resolves itself and can sometimes be helped by a restart. Sync running forever and often unproductively, etc. With these minor annoyances not apparently caused by any of my actions, I am reluctant to drag and drop 38,468 images into a new album. I looked for a "Duplicate album" menu option and did not find it. And I did try selecting 38,468 images and right-cliking them. There is an "Add 38,468 Photos to Album", but it only allows selecting an existing album. And I did try pre-creating an empty album, and somehow it does not show up... until much later. I am a little bit down on LR UI, which I used to appreciate.

2. Sync in LrC is barely working after enormous and enormously frustrating blockages and errors, which I cleared up manually. Giving LrC a new album with 38,468 images to sync.... I don't know if it will get through the task.

3. Supposing it does, I did mention that 90% of the images are on external drives, and with no smart previews. My options will be either requesting 38,468 smart previews to be generated and going to make a cup of coffee or five, or scrolling through massive numbers of blank thumbnails, waiting for them to populate on demand. Either way, I am looking at greatly increasing the storage and database for smart previews, and I have been getting a feeling that LrC catalogs are somewhat fragile. I have been doing everything I can to remove data (previews and even images -- exporting them to special purpose catalogs and deleting them from the master).

4. The option to remove unwanted images from the duplicate collection rather than picking wanted images got me thinking that this can be accomplished in LR (Delete key will do that), but then again deleting 38,468-1,000 images is not the same as picking 1,000 images -- both physically and mentally.

I will attempt what you are proposing, but I really really wanted to stay away from LrC (because of previews). I know I posted my question in the LrC forum, but that is because I did not know which (if any) of cloud-based app would have the functionality I am looking for.
 
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When you upgraded to LrC/14.0.1 what version were you coming from ?

Ok, let's see what we can do without syncing down to LrC which has sufficient tools to do what you want.

So, for now, keep sync turned off in LrC. and try these steps in Lr/desktop (not sure tools are the same in the other Lr/Cloud apps)

  • Start by displaying your 38k daughter images

  • Set a filter for "Unflagged" and "Picked"

    1730944229350.png


  • As you go thru the images, for the ones you are certainl you don't want in the final 1000, click the "x" under the image to "reject" it which will hide it. Or click checkmark for those you definatly want setting a Pick flag. Leave onew your not certain about along for now
    1730944748961.png

  • after this first pass, un-select the "U" (unflagged") filter leaving only the "check" filter and see how you did on the count. If you're over your desired count, Reject some more. If you're over your desired count, add the "U" filter back to show the unflagged ones again and pick some more images.

  • When done selecting the desired 1000, do what you want with the "checked" images.

  • When completely done go back and clear all the flags (if desired)
 
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I have been working on a hybrid process between what you proposed and what I had in mind. It was very tedious (mainly because of the number of photos and the fact that about 5% of the photos are wrongly identified). But then almost by accident or out of the desire to not leave any stone unturned I found the functionality that I had inquired about in the first place, and which three of us agreed does not exist outside of LrC. It maybe a recent addition to LR, and I may have thought about it because I vaguely recalled reading about it.

You can set an album as a target album with a right-lick or ... in the upper right corner. Interestingly, sometimes this option is not available from the right-click menu or from the ... (especially when the ... is missing altogether -- I think it's missing until the first photo is added).
1730965291798.png


Having set it as Target Album, you can hit T to add a photo to it.

1730965576274.png

Unfortunately, for me, it takes about a minute for the photo to appear in the Target Album, other operations are delayed too -- creation of new albums, deletion of blocks of photos from an album, etc. Not sure if it has to do with the size of my cloud library (236K photos), a bug or something else. My hopeful theory is that it has to do with my not using LR enough, and LR being "rusty". It has to finish some busy housekeeping tasks under the hood before it becomes responsive. I will leave it run overnight and see what happens.
 
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atolkachev said:
I will ask the question in two ways. One way to ask it is in the subject. The other is to describe my use case and (since I assume the answer is to the subject question is 'no') ask you for your lifehacks to achieve my purpose.
Click to expand...
Your assumption would be wrong. The Lightroom Desktop app has the same option, although you first have to assign an album as the "target" (right-click on an album and choose "Set "album xxxx" as the Target Album), and the keyboard shortcut for adding images to the target album is "T", not "B".
 
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One difference in how T key works in LR is it does not remove the photo from the target collection f it's already there. I find this a welcome change. Even though I sometimes use B to toggle the photo in an out of the target collection in LrC, I find that in most situations I would prefer it to work as a Pick flag does: set it if not set, keep it if set. Which is how the T key works in LR Desktop.
 
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atolkachev said:
I think this feature is brand new, and I found that it was not obvious how to get to it. I missed it on the first go-around.
Click to expand...
I don't think it's brand new, but probably fairly recent.
 
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