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Mass change copies to master?

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Linwood Ferguson

Linwood Ferguson
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Jan 18, 2009
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Fort Myers, FL
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9.2.1
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  1. Windows 10
Another thread about copy/master handling reminded me. I occasionally have a desire to change a bunch of copies to masters, and cannot find a way to do it other than one by one.

An example scenario that has come up recently -- I have a bunch of negatives where I inverted the tone curve by hand and yielded a positive. I then bought Negative Lab Pro, and wanted to go through and re-convert them all, BUT I want to retain my original effort to compare. In a few cases it may be better.

This is all trivial -- select all, copy; select only the copies and reset-all, do the prep work for NLP and then convert. Now I have nicely stacked pairs I can compare on the library 2-up compare screen. Easy, fast, great.

Now let's say I decide all (or almost all) of them copies are better. I want to convert the copy to the master and delete the original (which is then a copy).

You can actually appear to do that -- select them all and run the Set Copy as Master, but for me it only does the most-selected image. I have to do them one by one.

Is this a feature, bug?

Is there some way to do this en-mass?
 
I don't believe so.
 
It's not considered a bug because it's working the way it was designed, but I agree it could be designed better.
 
I wonder where we software engineers let things get away where bugs in design were called features. :confused:

I think you've both answered the main question which is there is no built-in way to do this en mass. Thank you.
 
I wonder where we software engineers let things get away where bugs in design were called features. :confused:

I think you've both answered the main question which is there is no built-in way to do this en mass. Thank you.
It's not a bug per se. It IS poor software design, based on an incomplete or flawed understanding of how ordinary users (as opposed to Lightroom software engineers) want to use Lightroom. I realize that this statement doesn't fix the problem, but I hope that it clarifies the issue here, Maybe you should submit a feature request on the Adobe LR forum.
 
It's not considered a bug because it's working the way it was designed, but I agree it could be designed better.
However, this Most Selected image only getting the change is at variance with how other multiple selections behave. There is a bug/feature request at Adobe that explains this problem in more detail. If I can find that, I'll post a link here
 
It's not a bug per se. It IS poor software design, based on an incomplete or flawed understanding of how ordinary users (as opposed to Lightroom software engineers) want to use Lightroom.
My lament was about software development culture.

When a software engineer designs something, and then implements it incorrectly in code, it is a bug.

When a software engineer does a poor design but codes it correctly, it's a feature.

My lament was it is sad that culturally we distinguish between these two, that somehow design is art and errors in design are not to be criticised in the same way as coding errors.

(This ignores the substantial number of software engineers who will defend coding bugs as correct as well of course -- I could tell stories... but I won't).

But that distinction is neither here nor there, thank you all for confirming there is no immediate solution.
 
No arguments here!!! I can only speak to internal coding of issues, but I completely agree that bad/incomplete design should be considered bugs. On the upside, the most recent engineering team seem much more inclined to take on some of the strange design decisions of previous teams.
 
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