Simplest way to determine which collections contain a specific photo

[DawMatt]

Hi,

I'm just starting out with Lightroom 2.' and am having trouble understanding how to easily show which collections contain a given photo. Apologies if this is a dumb question.

I've just converted my Photoshop Elements 6.' catalog to Lightroom 2.'. The PSE 6 catalog makes extensive use of Collections (a'la advice from The DAM Book) and I wanted to make sure everything came across OK. Unfortunately it has been really difficult to confirm the Collections came across OK with running up PSE and LR on separate monitors and scanning the collections to make sure they look similar. Not much fun with ~9''' photos in the catalog.

The best I've been able to do within the LR Library module is to right click on a photo, move down to the "Show in Collection" context menu item, and after a little while the list of Collections will be expanded. This may be OK for a couple of photos but not for the volume of photos I need ot deal with. All of the metadata related panels in the Library module don't seem to contain Collections info (though labels, keywords, folders, etc can all be found).

How else can I quickly get at the Collections information? I can't even find a way to indicate the photo is any collection at all withou utilising the steps above. Even PSE included an icon indicating the photo was part of a collection.

Thanks,
Matt

 

[johnbeardy]

You're doing the right thing by right clicking. Obviously this needs to be improved.

You could also interrogate the SQL if you know how.

John

 

[Brad Snyder]

Matt, your need is a fairly common, as yet unsatisfied, request.

Add your voice to the discussion and make a feature request, every vote counts.

Click on 'bug report' on the tool bar at the top of the forum. (The same form is used for both functions)

 

[DawMatt]

Thanks for the quick replies.

I was afraid that would be the answer. Might have to resort to the SQL option or even write some code myself. It just seems to be a rather strange oversight. Doesn't seem that Adobe "get" the whole Collections concept. PSE 6 (and earlier versions) also had similar, fundamental feature gaps.

Brad, I will raise the feature request and also report the grid view descending capture time sort issue again. I had given up on reporting these types of issues because getting a PSE product update (I've been a paying user of 4 of the 6 versions) seemed nigh impossible regardless of the problem severity. With LR 1 Adobe seemed much more responsive. Here is hoping that wasn't a temporary state of affairs because it was a version 1.' product!

Thanks,
Matt

 

[Autoxave]

Have you tried smart collections? You can use colours as labels denoting a particular subject, for instance....the colour red for your favourite landscape photoes. When browsing your folders in LR2 you can see which of your photoes that are marked red and thus belongs to a collection.

 

[johnbeardy]

"Doesn't seem that Adobe "get" the whole Collections concept. "

Believe me, I've been doing my best to help them!

One thing you might look into is Smart Collections, which allow you to specify collection names as criteria, so you could write an SC to look for "Collection name includes xyz". As an aside, I rarely use the Filter panel and use SCs extensively.

You've also got to give the LR development team some credit because I could easily point you to very many areas where the design directly reflects customer feedback. They've also introduced really handy little things that no one asked for, such as the Target collection (also look in the Painter tool). None of this solves the problem you raised, but I'd say it looks more a matter of patience than of convincing them.

John

 

[DawMatt]

"Doesn't seem that Adobe "get" the whole Collections concept. "

Believe me, I've been doing my best to help them!

Well hopefully we will finally get through to them! This half-hearted implementation of Collections, plus the inability to open multiple catalogs at the same time, are major contributors to DAM zealots (e.g. thedambook.com ) not getting behind LR wholeheatedly. They seem to prefer mixed Expression Media 2/LR2 (or CS3) workflows. A shame really.

One thing you might look into is Smart Collections, which allow you to specify collection names as criteria, so you could write an SC to look for "Collection name includes xyz". As an aside, I rarely use the Filter panel and use SCs extensively.

I've been a big fan of Smart Collections in PSE6, even though it was a little klunky, and the implementation in LR2 seems much better. It even allows you to implement Smart Collections that show all photos not in collections - a big improvement.

Unfortunately Smart Collections still can't help with my particular issue. Collections are a "top down" way to look at their constituents. I'm looking for a "bottom up" way to see which collections a given image is part of because many of my images are in multiple collections. This requirement is similar to that solved by an Excel pivot table - I want to turn the data on its side.

You've also got to give the LR development team some credit because I could easily point you to very many areas where the design directly reflects customer feedback. They've also introduced really handy little things that no one asked for, such as the Target collection (also look in the Painter tool). None of this solves the problem you raised, but I'd say it looks more a matter of patience than of convincing them.

The team releases updates to their product, which is more than could be said about the PSE team. So I have hope, and the base product is great. Just need to nudge them a little more in the DAM tool direction.

Thanks,
Matt

 

[johnbeardy]

There's an opensource ODBC driver for SQLite, so you could power an Excel pivot table by a query on the SQLite database.

John

 

[Mark Sirota]

They've also introduced really handy little things that no one asked for, such as the Target collection (also look in the Painter tool).

Those are there because people asked for them. I think Remco Muntz gets credit for the target collection (but I might be misremembering that), and I'll take partial credit for the idea of putting it into the painter tool (my proposal there was a bit more thorough, though.)

 

[johnbeardy]

Ah, I'll gladly concede if someone did ask for the Target collection, but I must take all the credit for getting it in the Painter exactly how you see it....