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Most frequent asked question about Lightroom

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thommy

Active Member
Joined
Aug 27, 2011
Messages
248
Location
Sweden
Lightroom Experience
Advanced
Lightroom Version
Classic
Lightroom Version Number
Lightroom Classic version: 9.2.1
Operating System
  1. Windows 10
Hi

I'm running Lightroom courses in my photography club and other places occasionally.
And I'm curious and wonder what is the most frequent question/s you guys hear over and over again?

Like - Where are my photos, I thought they were imported into Lightroom - hence backed up by Lightroom :whistling:

Thommy
 
I don't think anyone has done an analysis here. But "My Photos are missing" from Windows users and a changed drive letter would be my pick. Followed by "My catalog is corrupt and I did not make a back up. How do I fix it?" being my second choice.
 
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I give private LR lessons and help and also teach LR workshops at our camera club. Your post got me thinking. It seems that they fall into two categories. People who are in trouble and those who are curious. The top "in trouble" problems are losing the catalog (corrupt, deleted, disk drive failure) with no backup. The second most is people deleting there image files/folders using Finder or File manager after importing to LR believing that the images are "in" LR so can be deleted form the disk drives. But, the most common "problem" is a chaotic file structure mixing date based and subject based structures with duplicates all other the place. Also on the list is users having dozens of "active" catalogs for different sets of images.

In terms of just "please talk about at our next workshop" kinds of topics - the ones that I recall coming around most often are: How do you organize Keywords, Keywords. vs collections on the Library side. And on the Develop side people seem most interested in the targeted adjustment tools such as radial and graduated filters and adjustment brush - especially range masking and Auto Mask. The level tool in the Cropping always gets a good reaction as does the HSL and B&W panel adjustments. another big hitter is the spot removal tool as used for cloning out tourists and telephone wires.

Hope that helps.

Dan
 
Califdan,

While collections are very useful in a Lightroom environment, I assume that they can't be applied outside Lightroom. Yes? No? is there any guiding principle for how keywords could be used to "replicate" a collections arrangement for photos that will be used outside of Lightroom?
 
Is there any guiding principle for how keywords could be used to "replicate" a collections arrangement for photos that will be used outside of Lightroom?
When i moved from Media Express to Lightroom i used special keywords for this. Media Express does have a similar thing as collections and they are also not-exportable. However, i wanted to preserve them. I just took the whole pathname (collectionset/collectionset/collection) into the keyword with an @prior to it like @holiday2000albumselects

In Lightroom i can find these keywords very easy and some of them i 'reconstructed' as collection.

However, Lightroom does have a much smarter tool, Smart Collection, not only for these 'helperkeywords' but in general. Most of my organization work i put now in my keywording so i can find them later based on criteria known at that time. I addition, Keywords are 'transferable' to other DAM's.
 
It may not be #1 but what I have seen over the years is confusion between the catalogue and the files. Some, including myself when I first started to use LR thought the files are the catalogue. I read about how people don't want to be bound by the catalogue but they are not. You can use any developer with the files and it won't effect LR edits. LR just needs to know where the files are which is a proper start at import and simple maintenance.
 
Collections are the main organizing tool on Lightroom. Collections are found in the Catalog and no where else. Only Derivative images should be used outside od Lightroom. Since Lightroom is a non destructive editor, you will need to create a derivative export anyhow and usually these are not managed by Lightroom
 
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